REVIEW: ‘The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind’
Children "require a lot of work and a lot of resources," writes the economist Melissa S. Kearney. And "having two parents in the household generally means having more resources to devote to the task of raising a family." This includes working for pay, supervising kids, and much else.
That is the simplest argument for, as the title of Kearney’s book phrases it, a "two-parent privilege": an advantage to growing up in an intact family. The privilege is denied to a large number of American children, disproportionately those who already face other disadvantages. As of 2019, 84 percent of kids whose moms had four years of college, but only 60 percent of kids whose moms had a high school degree or some college, lived with married parents. The racial gaps are even starker: Even among kids whose moms have a high-school education or less, about two-thirds of white kids, but only about one-third of black kids, have married parents.
Kearney lays out the evidence that having a second parent around is good for kids and offers suggestions as to what might be done, with the endnotes commencing before page 200. The Two-Parent Privilege is impressively concise and well-argued, yet sure to start as many debates as it ends, regarding both the damage done by single parenthood and what policy reforms are in order.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Washington Free Beacon
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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