Editor’s Note: Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and author of the book “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.” Follow her on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely her own. View more opinion on CNN.
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A new book by economist Melissa Kearney makes a readily apparent but still-provocative argument: Children raised by two married parents do better than children raised by single parents. The difference, Kearney argues, isn’t just financial (although the money matters a lot); the “two-parent privilege,” as her book calls it, is also about parental time investment and familial stability. The problem with the point she makes — and with the firestorm of discussion it’s touched off on the left and the right — is that there are many things that are statistically better for us, but if those things are not available or accessible, knowing that they’re better is, at best, a moot point.
Kearney bills herself as a moderate, but her argument is being taken up by a great many conservatives who argue that her findings, which are robustly supported by the data, demonstrate that liberal mores around family formation have destroyed the nuclear family and left children worse off. The answer, they say, is for liberals to own up to their wrongdoing and for all of us to start promoting marriage.
A closer look at the facts on the ground, though, shows that the problem isn’t a cultural rejection of marriage, or a nationwide feminist rejection of the nuclear family (I wish). Most people want to get married. The problem is that decades of largely conservative policy-making have fueled inequality, gutted the working class, left a generation of men isolated and under-employed and unmoored, impoverished families and made it harder for women to both control their own fertility and find suitable partners.
Our cultural respect for marriage hasn’t receded. What’s changed is that Americans feel like we should be adults before we get married: that we should be financially stable, that we should marry someone we love and who is also a force for stability and support. And for too many people — heterosexual women especially — that very basic standard isn’t being met by the men around them. And the GOP is at least partly to blame.
The decline of marriage in the United States crosses class lines, but is far more pronounced among Americans without college degrees. College-educated Americans, though on average more politically progressive, continue to form their families in traditional ways: first marriage, then babies. They get married later than their working-class peers, and they have children later, and they are more likely to stay married. Among poor American adults age 18 to 55, just 26% are married, compared to more than half of middle- and upper-class adults, according to a 2017 research brief.
Having a child outside of marriage has taken a similar course: more common across classes than it was a few decades ago, but much more common among poorer Americans and those with the lowest levels of education. One Johns Hopkins sociologist found that, between 2017 and 2018, 24.5% of college-educated women were unmarried when they birthed their first child, a radical increase from 1996, when just 4% were unmarried.
But among Americans with less education, the results are even more startling: Between 2017 and 2018, 86.5% of women without a high school degree gave birth while unmarried, as did more than 60% of those with a high school diploma. The numbers also reflect stark inequities among racial lines: Close to three-quarters of Black mothers have a child outside of marriage, compared with 66% of American Indian and Native Alaskans, 53% of Hispanics, 29% of Whites and 17% of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
Extramarital births are also generally more common in the conservative states that also ban abortion, pay a low minimum wage and have high rates of child poverty, uninsured children and maternal and infant mortality. The women who are living the feminist dream, on the other hand — who graduate from college, who wait to find love before getting married, who delay childbearing and focus on their careers and who largely vote for Democrats — have lower rates of single parenthood and higher rates of marriage (they also have fewer children and have them later, but their children wind up better off).
In other words, this doesn’t seem to be about liberal or feminist ideals, but conservative policies.
At the heart of the marriage gap between socioeconomic classes: men. In the highly-educated communities where men are more likely to be gainfully employed and living independently (and where they are more progressive than their working-class counterparts) and less likely to be incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, or hobbled by substance abuse and mental health disorders, adults are more likely to get married, and to have children after marriage. In lower-income and working-class communities, men have been decimated by deaths of despair, under-employment and mass incarceration. Mass incarceration disproportionately affects Black men far more than White men, but research shows that across racial lines, incarceration sets people up for far lower earnings and dimmer employment prospects, keeping them poor or making them even poorer.
Women, on the other hand, have been doing better: Women are now more likely to be employed than ever; they are making more money, and are more financially independent. Occupational segregation and stark gender pay gaps persist, but far fewer women than ever need to attach themselves to a man in order to make rent and feed their families. In struggling communities, there are simply not enough marriageable men to go around — not enough men who are gainfully employed, living independently and willing to pull their own weight around the home.
A lot of women understand they may never get married but may not want to give up the prospect of being a mother. And many may want to delay childbearing until marriage, but find themselves off course when they become accidentally pregnant — and then, when they do what anti-abortion Republicans want and have their babies, find themselves unsupported and stigmatized by those same conservatives.
There is no easy solution to the surge in births outside of marriage, nor to the fact that children of single parents are on average worse off than children in two-parent households. But there are certainly many policy solutions that could shrink this gap.
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An expanded child tax credit, for example, cut child poverty in America by nearly half — but then Republican lawmakers refused to extend it, and child poverty rates surged back up. Easily accessible, affordable and legal abortion and contraception would allow women to plan their families; Republicans, though, are on an abortion-ban tear. A universal child care scheme would help single parents to work, which would in turn raise their household incomes; Republicans oppose it. A higher minimum wage would put more money in the pockets of families who need it; Republican-led states are less likely than Democratic ones to raise it, and Republicans in Congress broadly oppose a federal increase.
As unions currently fight for workers’ rights and better treatment, the most prominent Democrats are standing in solidarity with them; Republicans have spent decades gutting union power. Democrats have tried valiantly to increase the number of kids who are insured and can get health care; Republicans have opposed them.
Lecturing women to get married before they have babies and then shaming single moms isn’t working. What does work to help kids and families: Giving women and men alike the ability to marry into mutually stable, supportive, and financially viable relationships, while also supporting all children, regardless of who their parents are. In America, we don’t do that — not because of liberals and feminists, but because of self-styled “pro-family” conservatives and their home in the Republican Party.
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