“But where do they expect me to get one?”
In her new book, “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind,” economist Melissa S. Kearney makes a straightforward, data-heavy argument that children fare significantly better in two-parent families than in single-parent ones, and that the rise in nonmarital childbearing and unpartnered motherhood has exacerbated inequality. Marriage should be recognized as “the most reliable institution for delivering a high level of resources and long-term stability to children,” Kearney declares. And experts should admit that not saying so is counterproductive.
Kearney’s work has struck the discourse on family and relationships like a bolt of lightning: that is to say, powerfully but with chaotic results. Most pundits discussing the book have focused on the least important part of her argument — that liberal elites don’t talk enough about the benefits of marriage — while ignoring its most crucial element.
Which is the following: Most women still want marriage, and the vast majority would prefer to marry before having a child. Single mothers do understand that a two-parent household would probably be better-resourced to raise a child.
Their problem is that in real life, plausible marriage partners for heterosexual women are thin on the ground. All the elite infighting in the world won’t change the fact that a good man is increasingly hard to find.
Marcia C. Inhorn’s “Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs,” published this year, highlights the truths she learned from interviews with 150 women who have frozen their eggs in hopes of one day having a child. Contrary to stereotype, these potential mothers haven’t powered through their careers and forgotten to marry; they just haven’t been able to find suitable men to partner with. The men they believe would make good fathers — “eligible, educated and equal” — are nowhere to be found.
Egg-freezing is a phenomenon mainly among high earners, but the underlying problem — a lack of suitable men — affects women all the way down the economic ladder. Kearney traces the problem to the economic insecurity of working-class men, which has made them less desirable partners. Their “marriageability,” a term Kearney uses to describe the resources (financial and otherwise) that they might bring to a union, has taken a nose dive. Middle- and working-class women aren’t having children out of wedlock because liberals forgot to tell them marriage is good, but because they aren’t finding partners who make marriage a rational calculation.
Single parenthood will persist unless better spouses appear. Can the chattering classes help with that?
Pundits and policymakers tend to be solutions-focused. There’s a high level of discomfort — and limited benefit — in naming a problem for which we have no clear answer. For political partisans, there is a temptation to misdirect toward proposals that align with one’s broader priorities: On the left, it’s “press the government to give people more money” and, on the right, “press the government to promote traditional social norms.” Neither side confronts the problem at hand: the perhaps impossible task of re-forming a generation or more of men hit by a wave of social and economic change and who, for reasons defensible and less so, now seem unmarriageable.
It’s easier to point fingers at “picky” women than to admit that the mating gap has no easy fix. It’s easier to castigate “pro-marriage propaganda” than to acknowledge the unfortunate truth that, though unpartnered parents are doing the best they can, their situation is often suboptimal.
My single-mother friend is already aware that two stable parents would be better than one. For her, the most helpful discussion would focus on how she might find the second.
Credit: Source link
