In the realm of uncomfortable truths, there’s one that many people — especially, it would seem, liberals — don’t want to talk about, even though statistics inarguably prove its substance: Children do best when raised in two-parent homes.
Specifically, two-parent homes where the adults are married.
This taboo topic is the focus of a freshly published book presently causing all manner of punditry, pontificating and cultural hand-wringing.
Written by Melissa S. Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, the book argues that, when it comes to children’s welfare, there’s simply no better familial structure than a household with a mother and a father — or (statistics prove it’s true) two mothers or two fathers — who are present and able to bring all the benefits a parental dyad has to offer, especially when it comes to the avoidance of poverty.
“Two-parent families are beneficial for children,” Kearney writes in The Two-Parent Privilege. “Places that have more two-parent families have higher rates of upward mobility. Not talking about these facts is counterproductive.”
The stress of raising kids in single-parent homes is not only financial, it’s emotional, as the unpartnered parent hustles to be all things to their children, with no help or support from a companion.
The data supporting Kearney’s premise is stark: Studies show families headed by single moms are five times as likely to live in poverty as married-couple families. Children in single-mother homes are less likely to graduate from high school or go to college.
Single-parent homes (and, yes, statistically most involve a single mother, not a father) also bode ill for the children’s future, as such offspring are more likely to become single parents themselves, perpetuating the pain.
We’re talking about a huge chunk of the nation’s children, about one-third of whom live with a single parent, a ratio that is vastly higher than in decades past.
More than 1 in 5 U.S. children now live with an unpartnered mother.
The numbers are even starker in Bexar County, a place plagued by child poverty (20.1% in 2022, about 4 percentage points higher than the national rate) and where almost 36% of kids live in single-parent homes, higher than the national average.
The ramifications of so many fatherless kids in San Antonio is hard to precisely quantify, but they certainly shouldn’t be ignored.
Too many folks on the left would rather avoid this subject, and for understandable reasons: Single-parent homes are far more common among working-class whites, Hispanics and especially African Americans; only 38% of Black children live with married parents.
To talk about the prevalence and negative consequences of single-mother homes among these demographic groups is to risk opening oneself to charges of being racist or elitist.
As an unrepentant liberal, I totally get that. But this is a dialogue America needs to have.
My own experience growing up in a single-parent household gives me a window into the issue, and has opened my eyes to a host of possible policy solutions to alleviate some of the burden single parenthood places on our communities.
The conversation actually began back in 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan penned a prophetic report about the decline of marriage and the breakdown of the family among Black Americans. For his trouble, he was pilloried by those on the political left, who accused him of paternalism and victim-blaming.
That mindset continues today, and it benefits no one, especially the children of single parents who start out life behind the eight ball and too often never recover.
Again, the bias is ideological: While 91% of college-educated conservatives agree that “children are better off if they have married parents,” only 30% of college-educated liberals agree, according to a report by the Institute for Family Studies.
Ironically, college-educated liberals, while reluctant to criticize or even question the issue of single-parenting, are far more likely to raise their own kids in two-parent homes — a pretty clear-cut case of “Do as I say, not as I do.”
One study found that 62% of white children live in low-poverty neighborhoods with fathers present in most homes, while only 4% of Black children do.
The cost of single-parent homes weighs particularly heavy on boys, who too often go on to lives of less education, lower earnings, higher levels of incarceration and a host of other struggles.
But many girls don’t escape scot-free, as my own story illustrates.
My father was a talented artist with an anger problem, which he sometimes took out on my mother’s face. They split up when I was 6. I don’t remember multiple scenes of physical and verbal abuse — my older sister has sharper memories — but I remember some. And that is too much.
After my parents divorced, I never saw or spoke to my father again, until my older sister got reacquainted with him through an art teacher at San Antonio College. In an attempt at rapprochement, I agreed to meet him. I was around 20 years old.
After that, my father (by then a full-blown alcoholic) and I got drunk together a handful of times in a series of seedy bars, until I realized he was a broken, unsavory man who I didn’t want in my life.
Other than letting him meet his toddler grandson Sam once, I never saw Jack Fletcher again, and he died alone.
I don’t remember missing my father as a child (given his violent temperament, his absence was no doubt a mixed blessing) but a part of Fletcher family lore holds that on my first day of first grade, the first words out of my mouth to the teacher were, “We have a mommy at home, but we don’t have a daddy.”
My mother, a department store advertising manager, did her best to raise three young daughters on her own, but it was stressful and hard, and she and I developed a tempestuous relationship.
I started going rogue in seventh grade, where I aligned myself with the pot-smoking and drinking crowd. (As a clique, it was the easiest to join; all you had to do was like to get high and break rules.)
My proclivities broadened into experimentation with hard drugs in high school, where I caused my poor mother a world of hurt by regularly skipping out, getting suspended, breaking curfew, running away from home and engaging or participating in all other manner of juvenile delinquency.
A positive shift came when I (barely) made it to college, where I discovered to my surprise that learning was actually kind of fun, that I was actually sort of good at it and that a nascent love of writing might possibly provide a ticket for me to a brighter future. (It did.)
The question is: Would I have endured such a rocky adolescence if there had been a loving and nurturing father at home? Would I have been somehow protected? Isn’t that what good fathers do?
By some miracle, my two sisters and I turned out fine. We all somehow ended up marrying loving, stable family men, all three of them the exact inverse of my father. My son has benefitted from all advantages of a two-parent home.
But I consider the outcome of my and my sisters’ childhoods a lucky twist of fate, an unexpected gift from a benevolent universe, and not some child-rearing template I would recommend to anyone.
Which brings me to some important caveats: Plenty of people who grow up in single-parent homes go on to do well in life. And plenty of people are raised in two-parent homes that are dysfunctional as hell, with all the agony that entails. (I’ve known some.)
Obviously, deal-breakers like unaddressed addiction or (as in my mother’s case) domestic violence should never be allowed to continue — and if you or someone you know needs help, there are numerous services locally and nationally, including the National Domestic Violence Hotline.
With that said, I’d argue that we desperately need to have a cultural conversation about how more couples, absent those deal-breakers, can be encouraged to both get married and stay married — especially if children are involved.
This is going to entail looking at deeply entrenched policies and political decisions that experts say have played a major role in the collapse of the family, particularly among at-risk populations.
One of them is the growth of mass incarceration, especially of Black men, which experts say is a big driver of single-parent homes. Another is the stagnation of the earning power of working-class men, making them less “marriageable” to working-class women.
Yet another is the so-called “marriage penalty” featured in various government welfare programs, where to marry is to trigger serious financial hits for families.
The female liberation movement, which has broadened women’s options and allowed them not to hitch their domestic wagons to men with pathologies or dim prospects, has been wonderful in so many ways.
But let’s just state it: The consequence of removing fathers from the picture has been an unmitigated disaster.
Cultural efforts to “promote marriage,” such as the campaign tried under President George W. Bush, have proved unsuccessful.
So perhaps it’s time to try more brass-tacks programs to target the underlying problem — raising working-class wages, promoting education, job-training and relationship skills in schools, finding ways to uplift the legions of U.S. males who seemingly have been set adrift.
One thing is for sure: We need to stop looking the other way or couching our thoughts in euphemism when it comes to the cost of single-parent homes.
Our children, our communities and our nation deserve a big dose of compassion, some new ideas and straight talk around this issue.
