The Marriage Cure

A new book argues that single parenthood drives child poverty. Is marriage really the solution?

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

Are single mothers bad for kids?

In what is not exactly news, a new book by economics professor Melissa S. Kearney argues what many of us have likely already gleaned: That children raised in two-parent families tend to do better than children raised by single parents. Kids in two-parent homes are raised with more resources, are more likely to go to college, have fewer behavioral problems, and are less likely to wind up living in poverty themselves.

This is being presented as something liberals don’t want to discuss, which seems disproven by the fact that tons of liberals are discussing it. And it’s also being presented as a kind of conservative victory — a moment where traditionalists can say, “see, we were right, and liberals screwed up society with their libertine ideas.”

Spoiler: it’s not that conservative traditionalists were right all along. It’s that a series of factors, some economic and many the result of right-wing policy-making, keep struggling Americans from marrying, and then punish kids for their parents’ perceived insufficiencies.

It’s not liberals and feminists who are doing this. And it is conservative “pro-marriage” advocates who seem far less concerned with implementing the kinds of policies that are shown to incentivize and stabilize marriages, and much more concerned with finger-wagging at single moms and insisting women prioritize being wives

That college-educated Americans (who are more likely to be politically liberal) get and stay married at rates higher than non-college Americans (who are more likely to be conservative) is waived away as hypocrisy: Elite liberals are pushing a “do as I say, not as I do” lifestyle, normalizing single motherhood while making much more traditional family formation decisions for themselves. How the supposed mores and politics of these elite liberals radically changed the marital behavior of, say, working-class Trump voters goes largely unexplained; liberals apparently have some serious mind-control powers when it comes to things like separating marriage from childbearing in the working classes, but those powers aren’t at all effective when it comes to regulating guns or supporting a system of one-person-one-vote or enshrining fundamental rights for women or doing literally anything else. It’s a curious theory.

In any event, the current discourse on this admittedly radical shift away from marriage and toward single parenthood, which crosses class lines but is particularly concentrated lower down the socioeconomic ladder, has a single theme: These liberal norms, which include a devaluation of marriage and the nuclear family, have come at the expense of children’s wellbeing. And won’t somebody think of the children?

So it’s interesting, then, to see the same center- and center-right commentators who are very worried about how single-parent households leave children struggling say comparatively little about the end of the Child Tax Credit, which plunged millions of American kids back into poverty, and the demise of abortion rights across the United States, which has created a national map in which women in the most misogynist, anti-child states in the nation are legally forced into parenthood — and most often into single motherhood.

It’s also like this conversation is less about doing right by kids and more about demanding that women return to our traditional roles as wives and mothers (and not one without the other).

We know that there are huge gaps between how kids with married parents fare compared to kids raised in single-parent households. The question is what to do about it. For conservatives, it’s easy: Everyone should just get married. But also everyone should have babies if they get pregnant, regardless of life circumstances. But also single mothers are ruining their kids’ lives and should be ashamed. So the answer is for women to never have sex outside of the confines of marriage, and then marry young, and then prioritize caring for their children over their work. Or, if they do get pregnant, marry the guy — regardless of who he is, what his problems might be, whether he wants to marry, and whether either of these two people even like each other.

For liberals, it’s more complicated. I would love to make marriage more common among people who want to be married, not because I think marriage is a magic bullet or should be the universal basis of family-building, but because a lot of people who want to get married don’t feel like they can get married because of a generalized lack of financial stability and decent, self-sufficient men. But I also don’t think that marriage is the solution to American poverty and instability. And to find solutions to the gaps between kids of single parents and kids of married ones, we have to understand where those gaps come from and why they persist.

Money.

A big part of the gap between children in two-parent versus one-parent households is financial: Two incomes in a household = more money. Even if one partner (usually, in heterosexual couples, the female one) doesn’t work, she’s still doing at-home labor that would otherwise have to be outsourced and perhaps paid. Plus, she can work if the financial going gets tough, and many mothers who exit the workforce when their children are small worked before those children were born and return to work when their children are a big older — all of which helps to shore up a family’s financial stability.

Financial stability also helps to create other forms of stability. It means less parental stress, which may mean lower rates of child and partner abuse. It means less stress on kids, who inevitably pick up their parents’ anxieties — it’s hard to concentrate in math class, for example, if you’re worried that your mom can’t make rent this month and you may wind up losing your home. It also often means healthier relationships. If you compare two couples of equal income levels, the one that lives together has a higher household income than the one that lives apart. That’s not a big deal among people who make a decent wage, but among those who are struggling, it can be the difference between a relationship bolstered by financial security and one undone by financial stress. And we know that poverty and deprivation basically short-circuit our brains: When we are in constant stress mode and constant it’s-not-enough mode, we see our abilities to plan ahead and make rational decisions recede. Of course children raised in those settings do worse than children raised in households where everyone has enough.