Falling behind

Americans are having fewer children overall.And when we do have kids, more of us are not getting married.In fact, roughly half of all children born in this country today don't have two parents in the home.University of Maryland Economics Professor Melissa Kearney said in a recent Bloomberg interview that we're in a crisis.“I have been studying U.S. income inequality and poverty and social mobility for over 20 years, and I've been in countless at this point policy conversations and academic conversations about these issues,” said Kearney. “And it has become abundantly clear to me that what's happened to families in the U.S., and in particular the rise in the share of kids living with one-parent households, how this has primarily happened outside the college-educated class, these trends are really important to what we're seeing with child poverty, inequality, undermining social mobility.”Her new book, Two-Parent Privilege, How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, features dozens of data points that show that marriage improves our lives economically and socially.And a long tale of this lasts deep into our adulthoods.She says there's a dramatic impact on kids, no matter how much money you make.Higher income, higher educated parents are more likely to be married.But even adjusting for that and comparing kids who are in otherwise similar situations, but for this difference in whether they have two parents or one parent in the home, we see that kids with two parents, they're more likely to go to college, they're more likely to graduate college. They're more likely to have higher earnings and be married themselves as adults.“This is why this is an issue we really need to care about because this is yet another way that the college-educated class is pulling away from everyone else, setting their kids up in much better circumstances to graduate college, to achieve higher earnings, and we're perpetuating advantage and disadvantage across generations by allowing this class divergence to persist and not trying to break this cycle.What do you think of this idea in Melissa's perspective?Why children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other wayThe economist Melissa Kearney has been both vilified and praised for her new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind.In the book, released last month, Kearney points out a rather obvious fact: Children raised by two parents have a much higher chance of success than those raised by one. Yet she goes even further to argue that whether parents are married or not impacts their children's success.https://www.npr.org/2023/10/22/1207322878/single-parent-married-good-for-children-inequality