‘The Two-Parent Privilege’ by Melissa S Kearney – a Review. # 173. 24/09/2024.
Out of Many, One People
Welcome, to a book review that is at first sight not primarily concerned about race, but which I hope shows that it is an issue that is central to real concern for social and racial justice.
‘The Two-Parent Privilege’ by Melissa S Kearney – a Review.
Set against the tendency to be solely pre-occupied by ‘race’, there has been a growing and correct emphasis that race is only one of many factors that shape peoples’ lives, and often not the most important. The concept of ‘intersectionality’ was developed by Kimberle Crenshaw and others to focus also on gender as a cross-cutting factor in peoples’ experiences, initially in terms of their (usually negative) experience of the justice system. So too, class, disability (including neuro-divergence) and sexuality have been added to the list. But, shaped by an assumed leftist intellectual framework, all these factors have had an implicit power dimension – in various ways they function around the disparity between the strong and the weak, the privileged and under-privileged.
This perspective, whilst useful, has serious limitations; for example, its predictive competence is undermined by the fact that as regards both the black population in the USA and the African-Caribbean population in Britain, women record a whole range of better outcomes than men, despite being supposedly doubly disadvantaged. Consequently, the range of factors in play needs to be widened beyond the familiar ‘power’ differences. The concept of ‘superdiversity’ therefore brings into play a wider range of differential factors, such as specific areas of origin, reasons for migration, and – pertinent to this review – family structure. An important issue in the furore over the Sewell Report was its refusal to take race as the sole determinative factor in outcomes, instead including issues such as social class and geographical region as well as family formation in the mix of quite varied issues that create disparities.
Melissa Kearney’s book refers to race only in passing, rather its central focus is the massive impact on eventual outcomes of whether or not a child has the privilege of being brought up by two parents. At no point does she set up her book for comparison with ‘White Privilege’, but inevitably her book invites the discussion of the comparative importance of ‘whiteness’ and ‘two parents’ in generating positive outcomes in life.
Kearney’s first chapter is entitled ‘The Elephant in the Room’. The focus of her book is on the way considerations of parenting and marriage have been bracketed out of discussions of poverty, inequality and social mobility, when there is overwhelming evidence that those who grow up in homes without two parents most usually suffer lifelong disadvantage. As the title of her final chapter says: ‘Family Matters’; and it opens with the critical argument that (Church of England please note): ‘The conventional mores in the United States today are to treat matters of family and family formation with a dedicated agnosticism, avoiding any suggestion that one type of family might be somehow preferable to another family type’ (p168).
Melissa Kearney is a highly respected Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, and also the married mother of three children. The hard statistical evidence of her book is softened by the lived experience that bringing up children is demanding and exhausting as well as delightful. The result is that she is both professionally concerned to drill down upon the economic consequences of single parenting, and yet has a humane and sensitive awareness of the dilemmas parents face and is concerned not to appear moralistic.
At the heart of her analysis is that ‘A key factor that turns out to be relevant in a study of the economics of family today is the growing gap in family structure between the children of college-educated and non-college-educated adults’ (pp 5,6), as indicated by the statistics that 84% of children of college educated mothers lived with married parents (down by 6% in 1980), whereas for children of non-college educated mothers the figure was 60% (down by 23% since 1980). Such changes reflected economic changes over the same period: ‘Income inequality grew. Americans with four-year college degrees did extremely well. Others, not as much’ (p75). The outcome ‘to put it in stark (cold-hearted) terms: the economic attractiveness of non-college educated men has been diminished’ (pp 64-5). Women see less need to get married, since a man’s contribution to the family has become less significant, especially as the wages of non-graduate women have increased. But the consequences of such choices are serious – because of relying on one income such families are five times more likely to live in poverty, whilst time and emotional resources (or ‘bandwidth’) for children are diminished, with consequential outcomes further down the line: less likely educational and employment progress, and greater risks of future marital instability, crime and incarceration, drug use and early death. Further, ‘The employment and incarceration outcomes of young Black men were particularly affected by growing up with a single mother’ (p 55). In short, the elephant in the room is severely damaging children’s life chances, creating unequal outcomes and undermining social mobility.
In arguing this thesis Kearney also removes several related arguments. The decline of marriage has not been caused by the rise of ‘successful’ independent women (a media stereotype in this country); single mothers are overwhelmingly poor. There is no evidence that safety-net welfare programmes generate single-parenthood. Cohabitation does not function as a non-official equivalent of marriage (possibly unlike in Europe), as in the USA cohabitation partnerships are usually short-lived. Nor does commitment to work undermine marriage – typically parents who work long hours also devote more time to being with their children.
Of particular interest are the two groups most affected by single-parenthood. ‘Family disadvantage disproportionately damages the early life development of boys’ (pp 134-5). More widespread is the damage to black children. Using a four-fold ethnic categorisation, the percentage of children living with their parents runs at: Asian 88%, white (non-Hispanic) 77%, Hispanic 62%, Black 38%. The combination of the two disadvantages means that ‘Black boys were more affected than other groups of boys by the absence of one parent and the tendency towards behaviour problems in school’ (pp 137-8), including faring less well than black girls in suspension rates and subsequently achieving college degrees.
Kearney surveys some approaches that can rectify the situation, and offers a list of do’s and don’t’s in her conclusion, notably to improve the economic position of non-graduate men to make them more reliable marriage partners. But overall , as an economist, she is understandably daunted by future prospects, concluding simply with the anxious concern: ‘There has been a massive widening of the family gap, such that a two parent family has become yet another advantage in life, enjoyed disproportionately by the college educated class. The decline in the two-parent family among parents without a four-year college degree is a demographic trend that should concern in anyone who cares about the well-being of children, and about widespread economic opportunity, inequality, and social mobility in America’ (p 183).
Some Reflections.
Asian exceptionalism.
Time and again Kearney notes that Asians, in distinction from other ethnic groups, retain high levels of marriage. There is an intriguing parallel with Britain where the same phenomenon can be noted, such that Harrow, a not exceptionally wealthy area, has marriage rates as high as the really affluent exurbic areas, largely because of its high Asian population. Yet in the USA ‘Asian’ tends to be shorthand for East Asian whilst in the UK it is shorthand for South Asian. So how is it that whilst, say, Taiwanese and Telugus have historically had very little cultural interaction with each other, yet they show similarly exceptional patterns as migrants? One possible explanation is that both East and South Asian cultures have not suffered the dichotomy between body and mind that has permeated western culture, and those societies that have been deeply impacted by it. So that whilst the west holds to the illusion that patterns of family and sexual behaviour happen on a different plane to economic activity and so have no impact, other cultures know full well that the elephant really is part of the room and so shapes what happens there. Both know that maintaining sexual and marital stability lead to economic stability and upward social mobility.
The need for a ‘new social paradigm’.
Professor Kearney is commendably restrained in keeping within her economics lane and not veering into the domains of sociology or cultural studies. Nonetheless several social factors press into the discussion and need recognition. In line with her overall thesis, Kearney notes that during times of economic depression as wages stagnate or decline, so do marriage rates. However, the reverse is no longer true. Local economic booms, for instance generated by the advent of fracking, have boosted wages but not marriage rates; unlike earlier booms in the 1970s and 80s which did lead to an increase in marriages. ‘Now that nonmarital childbearing has become fairly common, we are likely in a new social paradigm. Reversing recent trends in family structure will likely require both economic and social changes’ (p 96). Restoring marriage will require much more deep-seated and elusive cultural changes beyond simply increasing wages. Towards the end she recognises the formative role of the media ‘in the complicated sphere of family formation’ (p 173). Her first on the list of ‘Do’s’ is a task well beyond any pure economist, and requires massive cultural change, if not reversal: ‘Work to restore and foster a norm of two-parent homes for children’ (p 170).
And the Church?
References to religion and faith are absent from the book and its index. Yet if ultimately Kearney had to point beyond her area of expertise in economics and on to social factors, so the role of faith in forming society needs inclusion. Her book gives some helpful practical pointers – the value of mentoring boys without fathers, or programmes to support men taking more pro-active fathering roles, which churches can, and to some extent do take forward. But a more substantial need is for the church (notably the Church of England) to face head on the elephant in the room, and awake from the socially progressive misperception that patterns of parenting and marital formation carry no moral weight and are all equally valid, and instead argue robustly that two-parent families are, as Kearney has demonstrated, vital for just outcomes for children. (In 2016 the Black poverty rate was 22%, the white poverty rate 11%; but for married Black families it was7.5%). In particular our concern for racial justice will be ineffective until we see that just as some ethnic groups prosper through a culture of marital stability, the children of other groups – notably working class whites and African Caribbeans – will continue to struggle without having the privilege of growing up in two-parent families.
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Add on.
Grenfell and the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
I don’t wish to discuss at length this tragedy but simply to note some parallels with the murder of Stephen Lawrence:
- The lack of care, with words like ‘casual’ and ‘complacency’ being used of officialdom in both cases.
- Disrespect for minority ethnic people, with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea accused of ‘failing to treat people with humanity and care’.
- Uncertainty whether real change will happen or guilt be punished. As regards the Stephen Lawrence enquiry, it seems much change is still needed in the Metropolitan Police.
BUT there has been a strong rebuke to the establishment from an establishment figure - here Sir Martin Moore-Beck, then Sir William Macpherson. They weren’t marking their own homework.