Marriage is, writes University of Maryland economics professor Melissa S. Kearney, with clarifying bluntness, “the most reliable institution for delivering a high level of resources and long-term stability to children.” She marshals the voluminous evidence in her new book, “The Two-Parent Privilege.”
There is no viable alternative. Cohabitation tends to be less stable in the United States than in Europe. Policymakers in this country won’t enact a universal basic income for children to close the financial gap between single-parent households and those of married couples. No government program can give children access to more adult time, energy and devotion.
What Kearney calls the “marriage premium” manifests in many ways. Kids whose parents are married are more likely to graduate from college and high school, no matter their parents’ level of education.
They are less likely to be poor, to be incarcerated as young adults, or to become unmarried parents themselves.
But marriage rates fell almost everywhere in the United States between 1999 and 2021. This was despite efforts during the George W. Bush administration to preach the value of marriage. A rare exception to the trend: the District of Columbia, which has long had the most educated population in the country.
During this same period, divorce rates declined.
That didn’t lead to more married-parent households. It just reflected the new paths to single parenthood.
During these decades, public policy targeted personal decision-making rather than structural barriers to getting hitched. Phrases such as “small but significant” pepper the research on efforts including relationship education for high school students and expectant couples.
By contrast, a number of European countries have established significant marriage benefits in their tax codes. The United States has moved to address marriage tax penalties for all but the highest earners. But lawmakers have left those penalties in many welfare programs.
Too often, politicians focus on individual choices. Recall in 2008 then-Sen. Barack Obama’s critique of fathers who “abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men.” Or Vice President Dan Quayle lecturing single mothers that, “A welfare check is not a husband. The state is not a father.”
So how should lawmakers help expand access to marriage?
Ending the penalties in many welfare programs would be a start. Limits on combined incomes can deter couples from marrying. Bradford Wilcox, a sociology professor who directs the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, told me of a family where “the mom was on the Virginia Medicaid plan; it would have been — on his modest salary — just a devastating financial penalty to marry.”
Another possible target: improving the supply of “marriageable” men. Kearney argues, and demonstrates, that marriage is in part a rational calculation. And women in the United States lack for partners who can bring something tangible to the relationship. Fixing that might mean revitalizing traditionally male-dominated fields such as manufacturing.
Efforts to improve the criminal justice system, reentry processes and employment prospects matter, too. Mass incarceration takes Black men out of the labor and dating markets in huge and hugely disproportionate numbers.
Of course, men need to want to marry. One data point that might persuade the marriage-averse: Harvard University graduate researcher Ohjae Gowen recently showed that men who live with their children experience long-term, persistent wage gains. Men who live apart from their children do not.
There are even ways the government could help couples put off by inflated expectations for weddings. Commentator Matthew Yglesias floated the possibility of “a fun, low-cost ‘public option’ for weddings” somewhere between a blowout and a bureaucratic formality. The authors of the 2022 State of Our Unions report called on wedding planners and venues to offer some pro-bono services.
Plenty of these solutions ought to be able to garner bipartisan support. One of the tragedies of more than a half-century of marriage promotion is that the same ideas have been floated again and again, only to be swamped by the language of shame and blame.
Take Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 Labor Department report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” It is better remembered as an attack on Black mothers than for Moynihan’s focus on addressing racial inequities in unemployment. Quayle’s so-called Murphy Brown speech is famous for its jab at the television character’s decision to have a child out of wedlock. His two calls for an end to marriage penalties in welfare programs? Not so much.
Improving access to marriage won’t reverse more than 50 years of marriage and child-rearing drifting apart. And even shifting that norm can’t give every American the combination of good luck and good sense that is essential to making a lasting marriage.
But parents and policymakers alike owe children their best efforts.
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