Parental Guidance Suggested
22nd October 2023
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.