Raising Parents with Emily Oster - Ep 7: How Important is Marriage?

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

The share of children in America growing up in single-parent families has tripled since 1950—from 10 percent to 30 percent. Children in single-parent families are three times as likely to live below the poverty level and, on average, they have a higher likelihood of poor academic performance and higher dropout rates from high school. Those translate into lower earnings in adulthood. And although it is very difficult to separate correlation and causality in these data, and hard to say whether single parenthood matters beyond poverty, there is no question that the associations are very strong.  Today: What happened to marriage in America? How has the trend divided along class lines and contributed to the widening economic gap? Is having two parents actually better for kids than a single parent? What advantages does growing up in a married family actually confer upon kids? In the research world, these questions aren’t partisan. They’re questions that can be answered with data.  Resources from this episode:  Books/links: Melissa S. Kearney The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind (Bookshop) Melissa S. Kearney on Honestly Philip N. Cohen’s critique of Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege Abby M. McCloskey

Hi, everyone. Emily here, and you're listening to Raising Parents, my new podcast in partnership with the free press, where we interrogate all of the big and pressing and confusing questions facing parents today. Before we get to the show, I'm so excited to tell you that this season is in partnership with Airbnb. If you know anything about me, you know how much I love Airbnb. I think I'm currently holding like six Airbnb reservations

in my account. Airbnb has provided incredible experiences for me, my family and our friends across the country and the world time and time again. More on that and how you too can use Airbnb on your next family trip later in the episode. For now, onto the show. Hi listeners, Candice here, the executive producer of the show.

I hope you're enjoying the series so far, learning a lot and being introduced to ideas you haven't heard before. I hope it's sparking conversations with your friends. Maybe you're changing some things up in your own house and now introducing pureed leaks to the dinner table. And I'm sure you also have some outstanding questions. Good news. Emily, she has answers. We want you to write to us at parentingatthefp.com.

That's parenting at T-H-E-F-P.com with your most burning parenting questions. Maybe it's something we touched on in the show but didn't have a chance to fully flesh out. Maybe it's something we haven't covered entirely that you just have to know the answer to. Or maybe you just really, really need Emily to tell you why your kid is waking up at three in the morning. Whatever your question, we're going to do our best to answer them on the free press over the next few weeks. Again, that's parenting at thefp.com. And also make sure to subscribe to the free press

at the fp.com. That's T-H-E-F-P.com. So you don't miss the answers. Okay, now onto the show. Marriage. Marriage is what brings us together today. And in the end, Carrie Bradshaw married John James Preston in a labeless dress. I do.

I, Edward Cullen. I, Edward Cullen. Take you, Bella Swan. Take you, Bella Swan. We are gathered here today to celebrate the love between two people whose lives were ostensibly brought together by the fate and flap of a butterfly wing. When I was growing up, movies, books, childhood fairy tales that I loved, they all pushed the idea that happily ever after involves two people often overcoming great odds to find each other,

get married and raise children. And this was largely how America used to be. Once upon a time in this country, women were essentially forced into marriage because of money and stigma. And then, around the 1960s, that changed for a lot of reasons. No fault divorce, the pill, feminism.

All of this affected different classes and races differently. We could already see that back in 1965, or at least a certain senator from New York did. You say that 44% of the children in Harlem are illegitimate. Now, how do you know that? Those are statistics from the New York City Department of Health, sir. 10 health districts in central Harlem, the area with having

undergone a massive deterioration of the fabric of society and its institutions and right under our prosperous noses that happened. That hasn't existed for 50 years. That's happened in the last 15 years in this America. This is Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democratic senator from New York, speaking in 1965 with NBC, following his now infamous Moinahan Report. And we've been sitting around thinking things have been getting better and they haven't

been getting better for those children. I would hope certainly I'm willing to face the disapproval of a few white liberals from Boston who think I shouldn't raise the subject because it's impolite. We'll get into this pivotal moment in detail in today's episode, but the short of it is this. Senator Moynihan, who was working at the Department of Labor at the time, wrote a memo about the decline in marriage and the rise of single mother households among the black urban community. But when the press got a hold of the memo, he was smeared as a racist.

Here's a quotation, for example, from a recent article by William Ryan, a Harvard psychologist, who criticizes your report. Quote, the implicit point is that Negroes tolerate promiscuity, illegitimacy, one-parent families, welfare dependency, and everything else that is supposed to follow. Now, that's the criticism he makes of your report. Now, how do you answer those questions? I can't.

I'm not responsible for the fact that he can't read. And ever since then, no good liberal has wanted to go anywhere near the subject. Instead, the topic of home and family life in America remains staunchly in the domain of Republicans and social conservatives. The easiest way to stay out of poverty is to encourage marriage. Marriage is a fundamental building block of our civilization and certainly it's the ideal model from which we raise children. We need to make sure that we stand up for the least protected amongst us, those children whom statistics will tell you that have the best chance of growing up and being productive

citizens in a normal family with a mother and a father. And so the subject has suffered from neglect, though not of the benign sort. Here we are in 2024 and things have gotten way, way worse. Just look at the data. Over the last 50 years, the marriage rate in the U.S. has dropped dramatically by by nearly 60%. The share of children in America growing up in single parent families has tripled since 1950, from 10% to 30%.

And among black moms specifically, that number is about 63%. Children in single parent families are three times as likely to live below the poverty level, and on average, they have higher likelihood of poor academic performance and higher dropout rates from high school. Those translate into lower earnings in adulthood. It is very difficult to separate correlation and causality in these data and it's hard to say whether single parenthood matters beyond poverty. But there is no question that the associations

are very strong. So on today's episode, we're going there. We're gonna talk about what happened to marriage in America, how the trend divided along class lines and contributed to the widening economic gap. And we're also gonna talk without fear about whether having two parents is actually better for kids than a single parent. And what advantages growing up in a married

family actually confers upon kids. Because in the research world, these questions aren't partisan. They're questions that can be answered with data. I'm Emily Oster, and from the Free Press, this is Raising Parents. Emily Oster, an economist by trade, has gathered the data, crunched the numbers, and is now debunking some of the most controversial myths about parenthood. I think what everyone is most interested in, like pregnant women, they're like, can I drink? You know, you shouldn't have like a lot. Where is this data coming from?

The fundamental answer is we get data on people by asking people about their behaviors and what they do and by collecting information on how their kids do. Oster doesn't shy away from other charged topics. People are using your database as an example as to why schools should reopen. What kind of reaction did you get to that? I imagine that was a little controversial.

It was a little controversial, yes. You're an economist. You're not a doctor. I mean, what do you think people are going to take away from what you've written in this book? All that I'm trying to do here is really show women, here is what the evidence is, and why don't you think about some of these decisions for yourself?

Episode 7, How Important Is Marriage? Episode 7, How Important Is Marriage? Having our first child made the idea of a wedding or being officially married or not, I'll feel pretty insignificant. I feel like the most important thing for a kid is not if their parents are formally married or not, it's the kind of love that they grow up with. There are a lot of different ways people choose to raise children. I had my daughter while I was married. We'd been married for about two years.

She was born, and we were together for another two and a half years after that, and then decided to split up. Parents who were deciding whether to stay in a relationship or not. I was in a long-term relationship and I was doing the thing where I was like should I stay in the relationship because I want to have a kid and try and make it work. Single parents. Sometimes I call myself a single parent and that feels

wrong and sometimes I call myself a solo parent to be more respectful to actual single parents and then I'm like that doesn't feel really right because I do co-parent and so we like do all the things that regular parents do. We're just not married and we don't live together. Some by choice. And so I remember being in the midst of that, having this just sort of quiet thought of like, I could be a single mom by choice.

And for the first time that didn't sound like this like tragedy. It didn't sound like this horrible outcome. It was like, oh, that's actually a really beautiful option. Others, not so much. I don't think I would have ever tried to be a mom on my own. It never once crossed my mind. I was just looking for the romantic relationship that would end in marriage and then eventually have children.

This is not ideal. I would not have chosen it. Parents who decided to have kids before they got married. I didn't really feel like getting formally married was high on our list of what we needed to do. We were getting our life together. We were getting older. And so we decided we wanted to have kids.

We were ready for that, and we wanted to leap right into that. Our role as parents hasn't changed, and our relationship to parenting and each other hasn't necessarily changed, but the definition of your family sort of changes. And eventually we part ways and I found a donor and within a

couple tries I was pregnant and have a beautiful amazing little toddler and my life is a bajillion times better and I'm so happy. I mean Sophia from the moment she was born, has been in a family with two loving parents. We might be crazy and, you know, all the ups and downs of domestic life, but I don't think it was ever an immediate question for her.

Like, what was my parents' marital status for the first two years of my life? It is clear from these and a million other voices that there are a lot of ways to raise happy, healthy, productive, kind kids. One parent, two parents, four parents, an extended family. The question for today is less about these individual choices and more about the impacts of marriage on average. This is a question for today is less about these individual choices and more about the impacts of marriage on average. This is a question for data.

Is marriage, on average, beneficial for children? If so, why? Is it just resources, or is there something more? This matters precisely because of the trends we talked about. As marriage rates have rapidly declined, is this hurting kids? Is it affecting some class and racial groups more than others? And finally, what is the right policy? Should government policy step into these very personal choices, or should it focus only

on the resource question? Should we, both as a society and on a policy level, encourage marriage or stay out of it? And to answer those questions, I turn to, of course, another economist. What has happened over the past four decades is about a decrease in marriage among adults and a decrease in marriage among adults who have kids together. This is Melissa Carney. She's an economics professor at the University of Maryland and the author of The Two-Parent Privilege, in which she suggests that while marriage might be seen as an outdated ideal by some, the presence of two married parents provides

children with more resources and stability, which leads to better educational and economic outcomes. So when I talk about the decrease in marriage, it's really among adults without a college degree. It's important to keep that in mind because the way we did not get here is through an increase in divorce. Divorce is actually down among people who are married. And we didn't get here through an increase in births to groups of women who have traditionally or historically had high rates of single parenthood. It's actually quite remarkable when

you look at the increase in non-marital birth share and the overall reduction in births. So this is a surprise. This has happened really despite the fact that teen childbearing is way down, over 70% from the mid 90s, basically births to all demographic groups under the age of 30 or down.

Trying to project out from the 90s what would have happened to share of kids living with single moms or being born outside marriage. If you just told me what was gonna happen to birth rates, I would have predicted a decrease in the share of or being born outside marriage. If you just told me what was gonna happen to birth rates, I would have predicted a decrease in the share of kids being born outside marriage. But what happened was, despite the fall in births, despite the fall in divorce,

there was a huge decrease in marriage. And essentially what happened is a decoupling of being married from having and raising kids. To me, the last thing Melissa mentioned is the most interesting, a decoupling of being married from having and raising kids. It's an intriguing piece of the puzzle to observe the rise in single parent households,

especially as traditional factors, such as divorce rates and teen pregnancies are actually on the decline. I think a really big surprise here is what has happened to the group that I categorize as the middle education group. So let's put moms in three buckets, those with a four-year college degree, those with a high school degree or some college, and those with less than high school. So what's happened over time is we've gone from like 11% of moms having a four-year college

degree to about 30%, right? But despite the fact that that group has become so much bigger and so much more varied, rates of non-marital childbearing or single parenthood is still quite low among that group. But the middle group, where the majority of moms are moms with a high school degree or some college, basically the likelihood that they now have kids outside of marriage, that they now are single moms raising kids in an unpartnered setting, that has basically converged down to the least advantaged, the least educated, the lowest resource moms. I think that's the big story here.

This combination of facts is surprising. More moms now have four-year degrees. And for that group, the rate of having kids outside of marriage has barely increased. What's happened is this middle education group, moms with a high school degree or some college, they've seen a big change. They're now just as likely as the least educated moms to have kids outside of marriage or raise them as single parents.

This shift shows this big change in family patterns across different education levels. So among that middle group, now 52% of their births are outside marriage. The share of their kids being raised in a married parent home has fallen from 83% in 1980 to 60% in the more recent years. So that's where the large story is. And sort of the, let's think of them as the middle class, right? The middle group, the largest group of moms in terms of

education category. That's what's really driving this. So it's really interesting to realize the share of non-marital childbearing, the share of single motherhood has gone up despite the fact that moms are much older and more educated than in the past. And again, the reason why is because marriage has decreased and there's been a decoupling from marriage and having kids. Melissa also says that these educational differences are further complicated by significant racial and ethnic factors. So in the 60s and 70s, there was sort of decline in, you know, well observed and documented

at this point, decline in marriage and rise in single motherhood among black families. Those shares have increased. So now 70% of children born to moms who identify in the records as black are born outside of marriage. Only 38% of kids, again, whose moms identify in the census as black are living in married parent homes. Now, within black families, there is this college divide I'm talking about. So among those children, if their mom has a four-year college degree, 60% of them live

in married parent homes as compared to closer to 30 among the other two education groups. The only group for whom there's not this, there really hasn't been a large increase over time in the share of births outside marriage or single parenthood and there's really not much of an education divide is among children whose moms identify in the US census as ethnically Asian. Their rates of marriage are still pretty, you know, staying high and share of non-marital births is less than 20%. So that group stands apart as a bit of an exception

to the trends that I'm otherwise describing. So you really want to think of this as a major change among middle-educated groups and among whites, blacks, and Hispanics alike, but with higher levels of non-marital childbearing and single parent households among black and Hispanic households as compared to whites and Asians. So you talk about this declining marriage rates as driving a lot of economic problems.

Can you talk a little bit about that link? Why would we care about this? It means that kids are more likely to grow up in poverty. I mean, if we just take the basic descriptive facts, kids who are growing up with a single mom are five times more likely to live in poverty than kids growing up with married parents. Kids growing up with a single dad

are three times as likely to grow up in poverty as kids living with two parents. So poverty rates are higher, but if you just look at median household income, it's about half as high. That all matters. It affects the neighborhoods kids can live in, the kinds of extracurricular, educational, enriching events they can participate in, their parents can pay for. It affects their health outcomes. In all the work that really tries hard to uncover a causal effect of family structure, like how do those kids' outcomes differ?

Of course, it's really hard. We can't randomly assign kids to be in different family structure, but the careful work that people have done to sort of control for all of the obvious observable things we can see about households, the age at which the mom initiated childbearing, how many kids are in the household, where they live, the race ethnicity. You just see over and over again in dozens of studies kids who grow up in two-parent homes are less likely to have behavioral challenges, they're less likely to get in trouble in school, they're more likely to graduate high

school, they're more likely to graduate college, they're more likely to graduate high school, they're more likely to graduate college, they're more likely to be married and have higher household earnings as adults. I mean, those descriptive differences really are quite irrefutable. And then I think that raises the question of like, what are the mechanisms? Why? For me, it raises the question of, are those mechanisms places where other policies could also matter. Right? So the pitch of like, well, it's good people have enough money and resources and time. Well, why don't we give them more resources? We're sort of abandoning people and telling them

the only way to achieve this is to marry somebody, even if you don't want to, because that's the only way to have resources when we could imagine a better social safety net. Some people want to say, well, it's like the difference is obviously income. So let's give these households more income. Emily, for like 20 years, I've been advocating for a stronger safety net. So I'm all for it.

And eventually it gets to the point where like, wait, let's be a little bit honest about the fact that all of us who want stronger safety nets for kids who want better support systems in schools. A lot of what we're doing is advocating for policies that are aimed at making up for deficits that kids experience in their home life. I think it's long past time that we actually also, also, not either or, but also say, how can we help more families achieve resource rich, stable, healthy family arrangements rather than just continuing to talk about ways that schools and the government can help make up for those deficits?

Even if you close those income gaps, you're still going to have differences. Why? Because parents do more than just spend money on their kids, right? They spend time with them, they supervise them, they engage with them in all sorts of ways that are productive to their development. My conversation with Melissa didn't delve into data on same-sex parents or if her research all goes out the window, if these parents are in a stable relationship but not legally married. Advocating marriage as the universal solution gets complicated. It prompts us to think about the people who might be overlooked, as well as the extent of government involvement in our personal lives.

Moreover, can we really say that simply marrying off parents will guarantee every child's success? More after the break. We'll be right back. More after the break. We'll be right back. If you're a parent, you know that traveling with kids is very often a total pain in the butt. Between the plane ride and the time changes and the schlepping of all the gear and the packing of all the food, the list goes on and on. But really, on top of it all, it's really expensive to travel with kids. But it doesn't have to be that way. That's why I love staying not at a hotel, but at an Airbnb. In fact, there's one Airbnb we stayed at many times over the years through

many child ages, and every time they made it work for us. A crib, a high chair, a booster seat as the kids grew. Plus, at an Airbnb, you get to avoid that awkward elevator ride where you have to bring your breast milk baggies down to the concierge and ask if they can please just put it in the kitchen freezer. And here's the really cool thing. While you're away, your home could also be an Airbnb.

And yes, that means you can actually make cash while you're on vacation. It's really a no-brainer. Or, maybe your in-laws made you build that back house when the baby was born, but now that your cute little newborn is an angsty, stinky teen they only visit three times a year? Definitely consider hosting on Airbnb. Your home might be worth more than you think.

Find out how much at airbnb.com slash host. Now back to the show. Talking about family structure and marriage is a sensitive topic. And we're just now really being able to talk about it in a more free and academic sense. In 1991, we had a national commission on children. It was created by Congress.

Members are appointed by the president to say, what's the status of children and parents in our country? This is Abby McCloskey. She's a policy advisor and has researched family policy for the last 15 years. I think one question many people have in thinking about this correlation, this sort of what Melissa Carney would call the two-parent privilege,

is how much of that is in fact a two-parent privilege and how much of it is the flip side, is that we're not being supportive of families. In a sense, it's not marriage, it's the social safety net, it's all of the other things. And so we're focusing on marriage and saying, oh, let's get everybody married, which can feel judgmental, but also may feel like actually it's focusing on making it the person's problem when in fact it should be the government that is

being supportive of any structure of family that one chooses. I'm not exactly sure that we should have a federal government that is being supportive of any structure of family that one chooses. I'm not exactly sure that we should have a federal government that is preferential to certain types of family structures. But one thing that everyone can agree to is that the government shouldn't be discouraging marriage, especially when it comes through so clearly in the data when children are involved

as the biggest factor for upward mobility. And the government used to discourage marriage in pretty egregious ways, like only having welfare benefits go to single mothers if there was no man in the household. We don't do that anymore. And yet throughout our tax and we call it transfer programs, but government benefit programs, there government benefit programs, there are disincentives to marry. This is true all across the income spectrum.

It's especially true for low income moms. It's hard to imagine people thinking of the tax implications of their decisions to get married or not, but the numbers that they come up with, the Federal Reserve in this study is that they think it discourages marriage among low-income mothers by 14%, which is, you know, we can do the math. That's tens of thousands of marriages that are discouraged just because of how we've decided to structure our tax and government programs. That's pretty significant.

I actually think the government program's part of this is quite important. So we talk about the marriage penalty, which hits across all parts of the income spectrum on the tax side. So, you know, I mean, not literally all the way to the top, I think, but like very far up in the income distribution, your taxes are affected by your choice to get married. However, I do suspect that people are right that if you are a person earning $200,000, who's thinking about getting married to someone else earning $200,000, probably your marriage decision is only very marginally determined by taxes.

But the transfer program aspect of this, which hits for a very large share of households, much larger than many people expect, is very visible. So they're like, if we get married, I lose this SNAP benefit. Or if we get married, I lose Medicaid. If we get married, I lose my TANF. These are very large transfer programs, which you don't have to wait till the end of tax season to see those. When you lose your Medicaid, you lose your Medicaid.

And I think that's really visible. That's right. To me, Emily, what this is symbolic of is this is an example of our tax code and benefit program set to scourge marriage. When you zoom out, so many of our structures in society seem to actively work against family formation. We can see it in the data, a quarter of women after they have a baby going back to work within two weeks.

We see things like women who earn under $30,000 a year, half of them will go on public support after they have a kid. And once you're on public support, there's a whole other kind of thicket of things as we just talked about to get on or off. A vast majority take on personal debt and it doesn't have to be this way. Paid parental leave in particular of all of the problems that families face is a relatively inexpensive one to fix with tremendous benefits, not only economic, but the health and attachment benefits of parents and kids being able to be together in the early part of life.

Paid parental leave feels like a gimme. Like it's bizarre and it's appalling, but it's just difficult to understand how we don't have this. I am always tempted to blame the GOP to be honest, but maybe it's just Congress in general. Like what is your sense of why this has not gotten over the line when I do think it's pretty widely popular.

It is extremely widely popular in the polling. It's popular across political parties. To some extent, both sides have had some grandstanding on it. So I agree that paid perennially feels like the single most important and widely supported change that we could make that would dramatically change the reality facing families in this country. When I was writing about it at a more conservative leaning institution a decade ago, and still the response from conservatives can be something along the lines of the Wall Street Journal editorial board or think of

a conservative talking head of being like, it's going to be a gigantic new entitlement. It starts off small now, like we've seen this show before. We're never going to be able to roll it back, et cetera. So there's kind of grandstanding against don't give an inch because if you do, then all of a sudden we're into socialism or communism, whatever term they're going to use. But then on the political left, there has been a bit of grandstanding too, which is to say, why would we just give paid leave

to new parents? We should give paid leave for elder care. You should have paid leave if you have a relative who's not part of your primary family. We need medical leave. In addition to sick leave, medical leave, long-term medical illnesses, and all this, and you do get to a really

large government investment with the potential for dramatic interruptions to work in the economy. And so both sides, it's kind of been this all or nothing standoff. I think that's beginning to break first and foremost, we should be in the business of eradicating marriage penalties we should be in the business of eradicating marriage penalties in our tax and transfer programs and make government neutral to marriage because we're not there. Right now our programs actively discourage it. The idea that the way to get children more resources is to increase marriage has no basis in policy reality. It's never worked anywhere ever. This is Philip Cohen. He's a worked anywhere ever. This is Philip Cohen.

He's a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on the demography of families and inequality. It turns around the direction of history, which is the decline of marriage, the delay in marriage and decline of marriage. I do think it's great that women have the option of having children without being married, that we have some semblance of a welfare state that can make that possible, that women can get jobs, and that they have legitimate alternatives. In the 1950s, you had 90 some percent of women married before age 25. That's essentially not a voluntary marriage system.

And over 90% of the teenage mothers in 1950s were married, most of them, between the pregnancy and the birth. That was a terrible system. You had a lot of people getting married who did not wanna be married. So the question is, what's the right level? In other words, if it was really voluntary,

if people really had the choices, including the choice of partners, you know, what would they do? In 1950, if you got pregnant as a single teenager, you know, who was 18, the social pressure would be get married and try to build a life with them, even though perhaps that isn't really

what you would have chosen in a fully unconstrained way. And now that would not generally be the expectation. You know, single-parented feels like a choice there in a way that it was not in the past. And so one way to structure some of Melissa's argument expectation, you know, single parent feels like a choice there in a way that it was not in the past. And so one way to structure some of Melissa's argument is to say the existence of that pressure was in some ways good, that it had good elements because it encouraged family formation and not every one of those families survived, but some of them survived and for kids for some period of time

they were living in a two parent household that was stable. And like we should have more of that norms and religious people have more of those norms and that's better in various ways. No, I don't think so. I mean, if you look at the generation of people who got more than 90% got married before age 25, that didn't reproduce itself for even one generation. The children of those marriages did not reproduce that childhood that we supposedly

think was so great for their own children. It completely collapsed. It was a one generation phenomenon. You don't think that would benefit kids? Let's put aside the people who are getting married. You think it would benefit their kids? The kids themselves, the only time we've seen that in history, the kids themselves

opted out of it at extremely high rates. You mean the sort of 1970s children of those kids or whatever? Yeah. When did divorce start rocketing up was in the 70s. That's the children of the people who were forced to get married when they were 19 in 1955. It didn't work. Nobody wanted it.

Look, we used to live in a world 50 years ago where women had essentially no choice. Melissa Carney again. Financial choice, social choice, but to be married if they wanted to have kids and stay married to really terrible partners. And obviously, it is wonderful that that is no longer the case, that women can be financially independent, they don't have to stay in relationships just to have, you know, a man take care of them. I am all for that.

I celebrate that. We can hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The financial independence of women, the destigmatization of single moms and their kids has been a good thing. The fact that in so many communities, the prospect or possibility or premise of forming healthy, strong, lasting marital relationships, even among adults who have kids together,

that that has eroded, has not been a good thing, in particular for kids, but frankly, also for the many single parents who find themselves in the very hard position of raising kids by themselves. So I think there is a huge middle ground here between both legal and social structures that essentially made it impossible for someone to leave an unhealthy marriage or being a single parent and complete agnosticism about how people

raise their kids and a lack of willingness to acknowledge that two parents bear responsibility for kids and two parents owe each other a responsibility. Generally, this doesn't make it much into the national conversation. I'm curious

whether you think that's because there isn't a place for the government in our I'm curious whether you think that's because there isn't a place for the government in our marriage bedrooms or whether you think it's because of some other sort of resistance to this idea. I think the greater reluctance to talk about family structure is perhaps a bit of a lingering reaction to what happened to Daniel Patrick Moynihan when he brought this up in the late 60s. For those listeners who don't know the Daniel Patrick Moynihan episode, he, this was the late senator from New York, lifelong Democrat, in the late 60s, he was working at the Department

of Labor, wrote a memo about the decline in marriage and the rise of single mother households among the black urban community. He sort of emphasized the need to improve job opportunities for black men in cities in order to sort of restore the family. At the time he was writing about a quarter of births to black families were outside marriage. As I said that's now 70%. At the time he was writing fewer than 5% of white births were outside marriage. That's up to closer to 30%. But his memo got leaked and he was branded a racist. And basically this followed him his career and this became

a very loaded charged discussion. I think there's no question it hurt our ability to responsibly have just a civil conversation about what to do about this challenge. This is Ian Rowe. He's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and also the founder and CEO of Vertex Partnership Academies, a virtues-based international baccalaureate public charter high school in the Bronx. For some people, when you're talking, for example, about issues related to poverty or

racial discrimination or bad educational outcomes or high incarceration rates, any of those, and you introduce the topic, well, what role did family structure, single parenthood play in contributing to those outcomes? For some people, it's an immediate shutoff. You're blaming the very people that you're seeking to help. Rather, we need to keep our eyes focused on the real problem, systemic discrimination, racial barriers. And it's not that neither one of these causal factors are not true. There's truth to both. But I think it has tended to silence conversation.

Here's Philip Cohen again. There's a continuous supply of this argument that is really unbroken. Kearney made the argument that, you know, the Moynihan Report killed research on marriage because it's because it made research afraid of being called racist. That's completely not true. The research never stopped. And the marriage promotion never stopped. And as marriage rates have fallen and fallen and fallen, rather than everybody stopping and saying, oh, wait a minute, you know, five generations of this pontificating hasn't done anything to change the situation, maybe we should try something

different. Instead, they just keep saying, oh, this problem is still going on, but we need more marriage. It's a legacy of unreflectiveness that is very perplexing to me. Ian explained to me how he is trying something different when it comes to marriage and building healthy relationships at his school in the Bronx, which serves predominantly low income black and Hispanic

communities. So someone like me who runs schools, the way I try to navigate this is to say, well, what is it that we should be teaching young people who now have very different attitudes towards marriage and family formation? What is it we need to be teaching young people about? What is the likelihood of success? A few years ago before I launched the high school that I'm leading now, I was visiting some really high performing public high schools across the country. And it was around the time that we were introducing a topic in our schools around family formation. And I was getting a lot of pushback on it.

And I'll say to you what I said to this class of ninth graders in New Orleans, very low income district, this entire class, almost all in New Orleans, very low income district, this entire class, almost all black, Hispanic, some Asian kids, but almost all low income students. And I said, you know, I'm visiting from New York and I'd really love your advice. If you knew that there was data that says that 97% of the time that young people just like you made a series of decisions in their life after following that series of decisions, 97 percent of the time they avoided poverty.

Would you want to know what those decisions are? And the students looked at me and they're like, yeah, of course, why wouldn't I want to know? And I said, well, there's some grownups who think that I shouldn't tell you that because you're from backgrounds that maybe these decisions that I'm about to share with you didn't really follow what you may have experienced in your own life, you might feel shamed in some way or embarrassed. So better not to tell you at all.

And these kids looked at me like I was crazy. Like, what are you talking about? You let us know. You tell us so that we can decide what is the right thing to do. So, I then proceeded to tell them about data associated with something called the success sequence. But the success sequence basically says, among millennials, if you make a series of decisions, finish at least a high school degree, then get a full-time job of any kind so you learn the dignity and discipline of work. And then if you have children, if you get married first, 97% of millennials who follow that series of decisions, education, work, marriage, then children,

avoid poverty, and the vast majority enter the middle class or beyond. Now it's not 100%, it's not a guarantee, but we believe this is really crucial information. Our young people, particularly those who may not be seeing this as the norm in their communities, should learn. I get a lot of pushback in our schools from so-called elites or what I call the gatekeepers who say you can't teach this to kids but whenever we talk to parents, particularly parents who didn't follow the success sequence in their own lives, they say to me as a school leader, thank God someone is teaching our kids this because

I wish we had taught those things in our school, you know, when they were growing up. So we have a class in our high school called Pathways to Power, and it's all about not only teaching the success sequence, but healthy relationships, how you build trust. I think one of the pieces of pushback is when, particularly when it comes to marriage, we can say, you know, well, kids whose parents are married do better in the success sequence. But then the sort of second piece of that as well, but actually the solution to this should be

to give people more resources, not to suggest that they get married because that's forcing people into something that maybe they don't want. And it would be be better in fact that really the key is that marriage provides resources and it would be better to just provide those resources more directly so people could make whatever choice they wanted and not have to get married if that's not the choice they want. So for those people who say, well, no, let's just give people more resources, I would say, let's remove the barriers that make it hard, particularly for low-income kids, to be able

to get a high-quality education, get a strong full-time job, which, by the way, then puts them in a much different category in terms of marriageability, you know, meeting the kinds of people that they'd want to get married to and then have kids. In 2018, a group of researchers at Harvard, led by economist Raj Chetty, published something called the Opportunity Atlas. The Opportunity Atlas is a tool. It's a map that lets you look at which regions in America are providing the most upward mobility for kids. Practically, what it does is look at which areas have kids born into poverty, rising

into the upper tier of the income distribution as adults. So what you can see is that some areas in America are very good at turning kids in poverty into adults that are on the upper part of the income distribution. Once the researchers have that, they're then able to look at what are the characteristics of the area that are most strongly associated with that positive upward mobility. And what they found when they look at these areas that turn poor kids into richer adults is the most strongly associated characteristic is the share of households in the area with two parents. Really importantly, it's not just that

kids are influenced by their own access to two parents, but having other families with two parents in the area that matters for kids upward mobility. A natural conclusion from research like this, combined with the fact that over the past 50 years, the share of two-parent households in America has declined, it could be that the government should be doing more to encourage or subsidize two-parent households. That we should be thinking about marriage, or at least cohabitation in a consistent way with another person, as something that is desirable for kids and for families, and that maybe we should make it easier for people to do that.

I asked Philip his thoughts on this study. So the Chetty data is big data with little mechanisms, right? We don't know how it's working. We know that somehow mobility is better 20 years later if they lived in a neighborhood with these characteristics. There's just a lot of steps in between. And the characteristics you're talking about are associated with lots of different kinds of privilege.

So I would not presume to say what is actually causing these correlations. There's certainly all kinds of evidence that marriage is highly correlated with all kinds of privileges. And I don't mean that in the negative sense of like unjustified privileges. It's just things work out better for married people in all kinds of ways.

And it could just be that people are really good at maybe, maybe the trick, the secret trick that the public has is that they're actually incredibly good at figuring out which marriages are beneficial much better than we are. So, so that wherever we go, we see that married people are doing better. And it might just be that those are the people who have it figured out. And we're just not measuring those variables, because we're not even trying to measure those variables. Philip might be on to something. Perhaps there's an intangible quality in marriage that gives those couples and their kids an edge, something our society tends to overlook.

Would you argue that marriage is a moral obligation to children? I think so. This is Robert Woodson, a renowned civil rights activist, community development leader, and founder and president of the Woodson Center, a nonprofit dedicated to revitalizing

low-income communities. It's practical as well as moral. I'm a practitioner. What is the practical benefit? Not an ethereal benefit, but what is the practical benefit? As someone growing up without a dad in my home, I had to find fathering in the homes of my close friends. And so, yes, I think that as a practical matter,

kids need, I know these gang members that I've had them live in my house, and my family and I have ministered to them, but we minister to them by witnessing things, not preaching to them. So they go out to dinner with me and my wife and my children and my grandchildren. So, because many of these young men have never seen anybody married, have never been to a wedding. But if you help young people to address the issue of character and their responsibility to others, marriage will be a byproduct of that without going out preaching marriage. I've had some ministries that we support where they take the worst drug addicts and help them get restored.

And it's amazing the number of marriages that come out of that. Once people see they have an obligation not just to themselves, but to someone else, that takes expression sometimes in marriage. I think there is a moral obligation to lead a quality life. Ian Rowe again. Like if you're an adult, the first thing, are you operating in a way that benefits yourself, your family, your friends, your neighbors, your work partners? And so I think you have a moral obligation to be an upstanding citizen first. Usually what that means, if you're doing that, then you connect with another person who's

also sort of morally driven. And the way it typically tends to work is that you find a mate, you find someone that you want to live out this life with because doing all these things, having a moral obligation, you know, doing well at work or doing well at any of the things that you enjoy is just better when you have a life partner. Do you think that marriage is a moral obligation to children? I mean, that's a loaded one. Again, Melissa Carmi. I don't have a moral bone to pick here, but I think no is a little bit too strong because I do think parents owe their kids a lot. And I think we should be okay and comfortable saying we have a moral problem with one parent

just deciding they don't like this relationship and so they're walking away from the family. And so I don't think it has to be marriage, but I do think there's, you know, I'm, ultimately I do think there's some, that kids have a moral claim on parental nurturing, responsibility and care. ["Jingle Bells"] So where does this leave us? How important is marriage when it comes to raising kids? So where does this leave us?

How important is marriage when it comes to raising kids? Looking at the data, as Melissa Carney explains, it's clear that marriage is highly correlated with better outcomes for kids, that it generally provides children with more stability and more resources. But it's complicated. Marriage is beneficial until it isn't, until the partnership upsets the household's stability, until there's abuse or violence. And when you get close to the poverty line, as we talked about with Abbey McCloskey, tax

and welfare policies actually mean that marriage might give people less resources, not more. And none of these discussions account for the benefits of multi-generational living that you see in cultures outside the US, or the idea that it really does take a village to successfully raise a child. Trying to make policy out of these practical considerations is close to impossible. It is optimistic, overly optimistic, to expect government policy to align with changing definitions of a traditional family. Policies tend to be either too rigid, too strict, leading to exclusions or too loose, resulting in easy exploitation through things like tax loopholes.

Still, despite all of this, we have a responsibility to kids, and that's where some of these cultural norms come in. In my view, the word privilege, as Melissa Carney uses it, is not a judgment that some families are intrinsically better or worse than others. It's not a word meant to guilt or shame a group of people, quite the opposite. It's an aspirational word. It's meant to inspire policies, programs, changes, and social norms to even the playing field so we can do better for all of our children, and so that every child in America has the best possible chance for flourishing.

Because that is what every child in this country deserves. Thanks for listening. Raising Parents is a production in partnership with the Free Press. It was produced by Liz Smith and Sabine Jansen. Thanks as well to producer Tamar Avishai. The executive producer is Candace Kahn. Last, thanks to my guest today, Melissa Carney, whose book The Two-Parent Privilege, How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, is out now. And to Abby McCloskey, Philip Cohen, Ian Rowe, and Robert Woodson.

I'm Emily Oster. See you next time on Raising Parrots.