Nicholas Kristof: The one privilege liberals ignore
Sep 13, 2023 Updated 17 hrs ago

American liberals have led the campaign to reduce child poverty since
Franklin Roosevelt, and it’s a proud legacy. But we have long had a
blind spot.

We are often reluctant to acknowledge one of the significant drivers of
child poverty — the widespread breakdown of family — for fear that to do
so would be patronizing or racist. It’s an issue largely for
working-class whites, Blacks and Hispanics, albeit most prevalent among
African Americans. But just as you can’t have a serious conversation
about poverty without discussing race, you also can’t engage unless you
consider single-parent households. After all:

Families headed by single mothers are five times as likely to live in
poverty as married-couple families.

Children in single-mother homes are less likely to graduate from high
school or earn a college degree. They are more likely to become single
parents themselves, perpetuating the cycle.

Almost 30% of American children now live with a single parent or with no
parent at all. One reason for the sensitivities is large racial
disparities: Single parenting is less common in white and Asian
households, but only 38% of Black children live with married parents.

“The data present some uncomfortable realities,” writes Melissa Kearney,
an economist at the University of Maryland, in an important book on this
topic to be published next week. “Two-parent families are beneficial for
children,” she adds. “Places that have more two-parent families have
higher rates of upward mobility. Not talking about these facts is
counterproductive.”

We liberals often perceive the world through prisms of privilege, but we
rarely discuss one of the most important privileges of all — and it’s
the title of Kearney’s book, “The Two-Parent Privilege.”

Let me interrupt this column with a shower of caveats. Many children
raised in part by single moms do extraordinarily well; one was a
two-term president in the 1990s, and another served two terms until
2017. And I think the big driver for the rise in single-parent
households is bad decisions by policymakers that led to mass
incarceration and a collapse of earnings for working-class men.

Yet this is still so wrenching to discuss.

That goes back to 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a prescient
report about the decline of marriage among Black Americans. Moynihan,
who himself had been raised mostly in poverty by a single mother, warned
that family breakdown would exacerbate social problems, but he was
denounced by liberals for racism and victim-blaming.

Scholars ran for cover. It helped greatly that eminent African American
sociologist William Julius Wilson of Harvard later conducted research in
this area and praised Moynihan’s work as “prophetic.” But even today,
there is a deep discomfort in liberal circles about acknowledging these
realities.

A scholarly organization in the field published a call in 2021 to
“dismantle family privilege” (such as championing two-parent families),
which it warned was embedded in “white supremacist society.” And while
91% of college-educated conservatives agree that “children are better
off if they have married parents,” only 30% of college-educated liberals
agree, according to a report to be released next week by the Institute
for Family Studies.

In fact, children simply do better on average in school and typically
earn more in adulthood if they have married parents, and this is
particularly true of boys. It doesn’t seem to matter if the two parents
are a mom and dad or a same-sex couple.

One advantage of a two-parent family is simply a function of arithmetic:
Two parents can earn two incomes, meaning less poverty.

Two-parent households seem to benefit not just their own kids but the
neighborhood as well. Harvard’s Opportunity Insights group found that
upward mobility was more likely for Black boys in neighborhoods with a
higher share of Black dads living with their children.

One stunning and depressing gauge of racial inequity in the United
States: The study found that 62% of white children live in low-poverty
areas with fathers present in most homes, while only 4% of Black
children do.

The collapse of marriage has happened mostly among less-educated
Americans, including those who are white, Black or Hispanic. While many
college graduates in theory embrace all kinds of family relationships,
they remain traditional in their personal behaviors, mostly having
children after marriage and raising their own kids in two-parent
households. Brad Wilcox, a sociologist and family expert at the
University of Virginia, calls this “talk left, walk right.”

The United States is an outlier in family breakdown. A Pew study of 130
countries found that American children were more likely to live with a
single parent than those of any other nation. Conservatives sometimes
argue that increases in welfare benefits undermined marriage, but this
appears not to be a major factor — partly because European countries
have both stronger social welfare programs and more two-parent
families.The proposed solutions from conservatives, such as marriage
promotion efforts tried under the George W. Bush administration,
likewise have had little impact. What does appear to strengthen marriage
is lifting earnings of low-education men. This makes them more
“marriageable,” researchers find.Lifting earnings is where liberals have
the solutions: strengthened labor unions, community college support,
skills-training initiatives such as high school career academies and
groups that provide technical training, like Per Scholas.

The breakdown of family primarily among low-income Americans may be
uncomfortable to talk about, but it is part of the apparatus of
inequality in the United States. It doesn’t help when we avert our eyes,
ignore the data and deny the existence of two-parent privilege.

..

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Nicholas Kristof joined The New York Times in 1984 and has been a
columnist since 2001. He writes about human rights, women’s rights,
health and global affairs.

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