Shownotes
Why do affluent suburbs in Boston and Houston vote completely differently, yet share one surprising thing in common? Economist Melissa Kearney, author of The Two-Parent Privilege, reveals that one of America's most consequential divides isn't about red states versus blue states. It's about whether you're raising kids with a partner, and the economic advantages are stark and surprising.
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Transcripts
There are lots of ways this country is divided.
Kara Miller:People talk about those divisions as creating two parallel realities.
Kara Miller:But one of the most consequential divisions has nothing to do with blue states or red states.
Kara Miller:It has nothing to do with your position on the issues.
Kara Miller:It has to do with whether or not you're married.
Kara Miller:Welcome to It Turns Out.
Kara Miller:I'm Kara Miller.
Kara Miller:My guest today is Melissa Kearney.
Kara Miller:She's professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, and she's the author of the two parent privilege from University of Chicago Press.
Kara Miller:Melissa, thanks for being here.
Kara Miller:Thanks for having me.
Kara Miller:So, you know, just to pick up on that point of sort of division, the suburbs if you think about, like, the affluent suburbs around Houston, Montgomery County, and then you think about the affluent suburbs around around Boston, Middlesex County, let's say.
Kara Miller:These are places that when it comes to voting, they vote very differently.
Kara Miller:But they are kind of united on this idea of being married.
Kara Miller:And I wonder why do you think they're divided in certain ways but united in others?
Melissa Kearney:The the attachment to marriage, and in particular, raising kids in married parent homes, is really quite universal across the college educated class in this country.
Melissa Kearney:Even as even as that class finds themselves divided over politics or political ideas and other things, there's a very strong commitment to to this institution that's very beneficial and also very beneficial very beneficial to kids.
Melissa Kearney:And we just really as everything else seems to be changing in society in the past four decades, the attachment to marriage and two paired family for kids has held very strong across the college educated segment of our society.
Kara Miller:Has that surprised you that people could think I mean, in some ways, I think a lot of these people vilify other peep right?
Kara Miller:They think, like, what is wrong with these people?
Kara Miller:What but they're un as you, you know, as you say, they are united on this one thing, the educated classes.
Kara Miller:Does that surprise you that they are united on it?
Melissa Kearney:So you might see differences when when you you know, you said some of these suburbs, these wealthy suburbs, they vote differently.
Melissa Kearney:And so my guess is if asked, they would answer differently about how important is it for other people to be married or raise their kids in two parent homes.
Melissa Kearney:So you're more likely to find people who identify as Republicans saying, yes.
Melissa Kearney:It's very important to others.
Melissa Kearney:It's very important to society.
Melissa Kearney:But for themselves, they all feel like it's very important.
Melissa Kearney:Or, you know, another way I think about this is it is a beneficial arrangement to have somebody else that you're paired with for all sorts of reasons.
Melissa Kearney:You know, I'm an economist, so I focus on the economic reasons.
Melissa Kearney:It's very beneficial.
Melissa Kearney:It's also something that has become a bit of a capstone event, meaning people feel like things in their life have to be sort of all put together, and you're gonna find that more commonly among the college educated class.
Melissa Kearney:So for themselves and for their children, you know, it doesn't surprise me that they all recognize, oh, this is really beneficial.
Melissa Kearney:And again, that's just because it's the economic reality of it.
Melissa Kearney:And then when it comes to the value part of it, they might express different values about what they think for others in society.
Kara Miller:You know, I I'm sure you followed this, but when you when I listened to political rhetoric, it does feel like pretty recently, marriage and having kids maybe as an issue has arisen on the right, as something that people really do talk about in public and want to encourage.
Kara Miller:I wonder what you make of that development.
Melissa Kearney:Yeah.
Melissa Kearney:Very interesting.
Melissa Kearney:And I also experienced this personally having put out this book called the two parent privilege.
Melissa Kearney:Let me backtrack and say I came to this topic, and I came to write this book as somebody who studied inequality and poverty and social mobility in this country.
Melissa Kearney:And I looked at all the usual things that economists tend to look at.
Melissa Kearney:Policymakers have tended to focus on the generosity of the social safety net, neighborhood characteristics.
Melissa Kearney:But in the academic literature, it's very, very clear that family structure is incredibly predictive of kids' outcomes both at an individual level and at a neighborhood level.
Melissa Kearney:Mhmm.
Melissa Kearney:And so I came to this topic as somebody who's been in the higher education sector, who's been in the think tank sector, not who's generally spent my career around social conservatives.
Melissa Kearney:And it felt like to me and all of the conversations that I've been part of in the past twenty years on inequality and mobility, this issue got short shrift for obvious reasons.
Melissa Kearney:Right?
Melissa Kearney:It's hard to talk about.
Melissa Kearney:It's value laden.
Melissa Kearney:And so my goal was, let's take it out of the culture worse, and and let's talk about it like a policy challenge.
Melissa Kearney:So that's what I did.
Melissa Kearney:The reaction to my book speaks to what you're talking about, which is that all of a sudden, I was invited to give my book talk at, like, universities in red states.
Melissa Kearney:Right.
Melissa Kearney:Notre Dame, BYU, they loved my talk.
Melissa Kearney:Large schools in the South, they loved my book.
Melissa Kearney:And it was actually though I came to it as a scholar, it was a it was both striking and disappointing how much, like, gosh, this really is something my book has no, you know, values or culture promotion kind of, like, lesson in it.
Melissa Kearney:I'm not saying one kind of family.
Melissa Kearney:Like, you have to be this particular model of a family.
Melissa Kearney:I am highlighting that a two parent family in particular is very beneficial.
Melissa Kearney:Nonetheless, the message of the book resonated more with folks on the political right, social conservatives.
Melissa Kearney:What's I think disappointing about that is progressives who really care about kids and inequality and social mobility, in my view, need to figure out a way to talk about this and accept it as a policy challenge.
Melissa Kearney:Because if we don't do something about this, we're going to cement class gaps.
Melissa Kearney:So through an equity lens, we would like as a society for more families who are who are not college educated, who are not white or Asian.
Melissa Kearney:We would like them to be able to achieve this.
Melissa Kearney:So that has been interesting to me.
Melissa Kearney:It actually is not unrelated to why I moved from the University of Maryland to Notre Dame this summer because Notre Dame is, you know, committed to putting a whole bunch of of, you know, resources behind this research agenda of, okay, how do we strengthen families for more people?
Melissa Kearney:So I think it's very, very unfortunate and counterproductive for the country that the political and ideological lines on this topic have only seemed to harden in the in the past few years.
Kara Miller:You know, since so much is a binary, like, there should be gun control, shouldn't be gun control, there is climate change, there isn't climate change, I wonder if you worry that this will become like that, where people will see this as like an issue that Republicans care about, and Democrats will be not listen to it because, like, it's some people that they don't agree with on the the other things that I just mentioned.
Melissa Kearney:Yeah.
Melissa Kearney:It's you know, it's funny because I've been called in the past, like, in essays or press, you know, some liberal person who always wants to spend more money on poor families.
Melissa Kearney:And now all of a sudden, it was like, she's a right wing propagandist.
Melissa Kearney:I'm like, make up your mind.
Melissa Kearney:But it's like, this shouldn't be an ideological issue.
Melissa Kearney:It really shouldn't.
Melissa Kearney:I I'm a bit more sanguine in the fact that okay.
Melissa Kearney:In the sense, we know that the dominant rhetoric on almost all issues in the public sphere and the policymakers, you just hear so much noise from the extremes, where in most issues, most Americans seem to be somewhere in the middle.
Melissa Kearney:Right.
Melissa Kearney:I think that's the same when it comes to marriage and fertility and how we raise kids in this country.
Melissa Kearney:There are, you know, there are right wing, socially conservative, loud politicians who are going to bemoan the economic independence of women and say we need to get back to a leave it to Beaver style family.
Melissa Kearney:There are loud, you know, progressives on the other side who are going to say that I have second wave feminists rolling in their grave by suggesting that a woman would benefit from having a man to raise her children.
Melissa Kearney:The majority of Americans, I'm pretty sure, understand it's very hard to raise children.
Melissa Kearney:Mhmm.
Melissa Kearney:It's harder to raise children by yourself than with another committed partner, that certain communities have been decimated by what's happened to the breakdown of the family.
Melissa Kearney:Like, we're not fooling anybody.
Melissa Kearney:And so even all of the emails and messages I've received from teachers and pediatricians who say, yes, I've this is what I've been seeing for twenty years in my classroom and my practice.
Melissa Kearney:We have to do something about this.
Melissa Kearney:Bolsters my optimism that most Americans are are prepared and even eager to take on this issue for the social economic challenge it is without getting mired.
Melissa Kearney:It's just, like everything else, so unfortunate that so many of the loud dominant voices are really on one extreme or the other.
Kara Miller:So take me back in history a little bit because, you know, we started by talking about how wealthy people of all political persuasions and stripes in this country tend to be wealthy educated people often tend to be the the sort of group that's the most married.
Kara Miller:But if we were having this conversation, I don't know, seventy years ago, that would not be as true.
Kara Miller:So just draw out the contours of this a little bit.
Kara Miller:How did richer people and poorer people, used to be, and how are they now?
Melissa Kearney:Yeah.
Melissa Kearney:Good.
Melissa Kearney:This, think, is, a lot of people don't appreciate this, that the attachment and the high prevalence of marriage, and in particular, married parent families for kids, that was common across the entire country, all demographic groups, not very long ago.
Melissa Kearney:So if you just look back to, let's start, you know, pre social cultural revolution of the sixties, seventies, there really weren't large gaps in marriage in the forties and the fifties.
Melissa Kearney:And then in the sixties and seventies, what we see is, you know, lots of social, cultural, legal, institutional changes that predictably and unsurprisingly, and in many cases, beneficially, led to a reduction in marriage for all groups.
Melissa Kearney:Right?
Melissa Kearney:It was women gained a lot of financial independence.
Melissa Kearney:It was easier to for people to get out of abusive relationships.
Melissa Kearney:All of these things were, I think, positive developments in the sixties and seventies.
Melissa Kearney:Of course, access to modern contraception.
Melissa Kearney:So you just saw a decrease in marriage across all education groups almost equally.
Melissa Kearney:At the same time in the sort of sixties and seventies, you started to see a divergence between white and black families in this country.
Melissa Kearney:And there's, you know, sort of a an active debate as to what caused that, the extent to which government programs or welfare, which basically required women not to have a man in the house, not to have a husband in order to collect cash welfare, the extent to which that contributed to that growing divide.
Melissa Kearney:You know, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously called attention to this issue in the late nineteen sixties.
Melissa Kearney:Then William Julius Wilson in the nineteen eighties, prominent sociologist, called attention again to the growing black white divide.
Melissa Kearney:But all of that really didn't happen until the sixties and seventies.
Melissa Kearney:Going back to the issue in particular of class gaps or education class gaps, the way I read the data and what happened, was everyone sort of went into the eighties with a new set of social cultural norms that made it sort of less imperative to be married, more socially acceptable to have a child outside of marriage.
Melissa Kearney:And and it was like, it was as if the higher educated groups had worked through all of those social cultural changes, and their rates of marriage stabilized.
Melissa Kearney:Outside the college educated class, marriage continued to plummet.
Melissa Kearney:So for them, you just see this straight line down from the sixties to basically the February.
Melissa Kearney:I think what happened, again, based on the data and lots of evidence, is that the new social paradigm came into the eighties, nineties, February, where we had a whole bunch of economic changes that benefited highly skilled, highly educated groups.
Melissa Kearney:Think about automation.
Melissa Kearney:Think about increased import competition.
Melissa Kearney:Those workers continued to do well.
Melissa Kearney:The economic value proposition of marriage was very much maintained.
Melissa Kearney:And so we didn't see any further declines in marriage.
Melissa Kearney:Where outside the college educated class, you had non college educated men doing very poorly, both in an absolute sense and relative to women at their same education level.
Melissa Kearney:So the economic value proposition of marriage was declining at the same time as it was now more acceptable to not be married or have kids outside marriage.
Melissa Kearney:Got And so I think you get that interaction of new social paradigm and economic changes.
Melissa Kearney:And that really led to this divergence, what I call a college gap in marriage, that happened entirely, almost entirely between the nineteen eighties and the two thousands.
Melissa Kearney:That's when we got this huge education gap.
Melissa Kearney:And I mean, part of what you're
Kara Miller:saying we're still living with the legacy of, right, people think about steel plant shutting down or manufacturing shutting down.
Kara Miller:And and what I mean, we can get to it later, but like part of what the Trump administration has sought to do is reassure some of that manufacturing.
Kara Miller:But it it it is just to say that there was a time when people could get decent paying jobs in those steel plants or in those manufacturing plants, and then obviously, that changed.
Kara Miller:And those were mostly men, I
Melissa Kearney:should say.
Melissa Kearney:Right?
Melissa Kearney:No.
Melissa Kearney:A 100%.
Melissa Kearney:So those were real shocks that really hurt particular groups of people, men without college degrees Mhmm.
Melissa Kearney:In in in particular areas of the country that were exposed to these shocks.
Melissa Kearney:Now, I am compelled as an economist to say, I think the way to address those shocks and the lasting legacy is not protectionist trade barriers that make all of us worse off, but I appreciate the recognition that there were a lot of communities that were really negatively affected and that the economic challenges of those affected groups have have spilled over to the social sphere with really bad consequences.
Melissa Kearney:Right?
Melissa Kearney:So we know there's academic literature, evidence drawing a straight causal line from communities where jobs were lost and there were no longer really these, you know, well paying middle class lifestyle, like, family supporting jobs available to men without college degrees, We saw a decrease in marriage.
Melissa Kearney:We saw an increase in the share of kids living with a single mom.
Melissa Kearney:We saw an increase in child and maternal poverty.
Melissa Kearney:Right?
Melissa Kearney:So that is a real challenge.
Melissa Kearney:It's not the only challenge, but it's a contributing factor.
Melissa Kearney:The problem is now that that sort of is almost baked in, it's actually harder to reverse it.
Melissa Kearney:So let me be very specific why I say that.
Melissa Kearney:Ten years ago, I was much more sanguine about what it would take to turn this around.
Melissa Kearney:And I would say, if we were having this interview ten years ago Mhmm.
Melissa Kearney:What we need to do is bring back jobs.
Melissa Kearney:Bring back, you know, job I should be careful in my language.
Melissa Kearney:I don't literally mean bring back the factory jobs.
Melissa Kearney:Those are not the jobs we should be training and bringing back.
Melissa Kearney:I mean, expand economic opportunity to men in particular, only because they've really suffered economically more than women at you know, without college degrees.
Melissa Kearney:But just expand economic opportunity, and once there's more economic opportunity, economic stability for non college educated workers, we'll see a reversal of these trends.
Melissa Kearney:And then I did a research study with my collaborator, Riley Wilson, and I've had to update my views on that.
Melissa Kearney:What we looked at was what happened in the early two thousands when a bunch of communities had access to fracking.
Melissa Kearney:So that actually fracking forgot about South Dakota, North Dakota, where it was like a lot of migrants.
Melissa Kearney:We don't look there.
Melissa Kearney:But think about Texas and, you know Mhmm.
Melissa Kearney:Mhmm.
Melissa Kearney:Oklahoma, places where there just all of a sudden, there was a local economic boom.
Melissa Kearney:And we can see that that increased wages and employment for men in both an absolute sense and relative to women.
Melissa Kearney:Unfortunately, which was not what you know, and and against what I hypothesized, that did not lead to a reduction in the share of births born outside marriage.
Melissa Kearney:It did lead to an increase in births.
Melissa Kearney:People had more money.
Melissa Kearney:And one of the things people do when they get more money is they have kids, but it didn't affect marriage.
Melissa Kearney:And Interesting.
Melissa Kearney:And it was like the same effect for people whether they were married or not.
Melissa Kearney:Interestingly and tellingly, we then looked at what happened.
Melissa Kearney:We went back and looked at what happened in the seventies and eighties during the coal boom in very similar areas.
Melissa Kearney:And there, when you saw coal prices went up, male wages went up in coal producing counties, you saw an increase in marriage and a reduction in the nonmarital birth share.
Melissa Kearney:That contrast is potentially really revealing because it means a very similar economic shock in two very different social contexts.
Melissa Kearney:In the seventies when there was still, like, marriage and having kids was much highly much more highly coupled than in the two thousands, you got a different response.
Melissa Kearney:And so this this leads me to the view that improving the economic security and opportunities for adults without college degrees is probably necessary to bringing about an increase in marriage and two parent homes in that segment of the population, but it's not sufficient.
Melissa Kearney:There also has to be sort of increased recognition that this is beneficial.
Melissa Kearney:This is challenging because I'm certainly not suggesting we go back to, like, the fifties or forties where single moms and their kids were ostracized.
Melissa Kearney:But rather, I do think an a a more widespread honesty and less of an agnosticism about family structure is probably necessary to turn things around.
Melissa Kearney:I mean, we know that peer affects matter.
Melissa Kearney:And so if you're in a community where almost everyone else is married Yeah.
Melissa Kearney:The social costs of not being married are larger than if you're in a community where most people are not married.
Kara Miller:Right?
Kara Miller:I was gonna say culture matters so much.
Kara Miller:I mean, it matters to something as silly as, like, what should I wear when I go outside my house?
Kara Miller:Yep.
Kara Miller:Mean, I take a lot of cues from what other people not that I'm, like, actively studying it, but just passively, I kind of notice what seems acceptable, what seems maybe a little too fancy, a little too ragged, whatever, and I find something.
Kara Miller:And I think what people to the right and left of you are doing kinda matters, right, to you?
Melissa Kearney:Completely.
Melissa Kearney:Completely.
Melissa Kearney:If you're the only single mom at the, you know, back to school night, and everyone else is married, that feels a lot different than if you're in a school where more than half the kids have a single mom.
Melissa Kearney:Like, the whole the whole social milieu is different in ways that, you know, again, we know social norms matter.
Melissa Kearney:My my best guess is that this this is all interacting with the economics of it.
Melissa Kearney:Right.
Melissa Kearney:And by the way, the reason why this matters so much is because the the economic insecurity for people without a college degree is both a cause and a consequence of the decline in marriage, where for college educated workers, the economic stability and security offered by marriage might be bringing people to that marriage.
Melissa Kearney:And then they stay together because, basically, the economic costs and social costs of splitting up are really high.
Melissa Kearney:And then they just have lots of economic resources to shower on their kids.
Melissa Kearney:So you've got this really pernicious cycle that's cementing these class gaps in in the way people live.
Melissa Kearney:And then let's go back to your initial opening example of the wealthy suburbs.
Melissa Kearney:There are very few households in those wealthy suburbs headed by single parents because it's really freaking expensive to get there.
Melissa Kearney:Right.
Melissa Kearney:And those people who get there have the benefit of two adults.
Melissa Kearney:Now, again, this isn't even necessarily I mean, in many of these, in the majority of these, you have two adult workers because the majority of moms do work now.
Melissa Kearney:But even if that mom's not working, she's providing a lot of resources to the family, right, that then allows her partner or vice versa, who allows her partner to put in long hours, and she's doing all this home production, driving the kids around, investing in the kids.
Melissa Kearney:So so let's think about resources broadly defined.
Melissa Kearney:It's like high resource households that are able to give their kids access to the best neighborhoods and the best schools.
Melissa Kearney:Again, that's why that's why this matters so much from an inequality, social mobility, equity perspective.
Melissa Kearney:I mean, I'd love you to
Kara Miller:talk a little bit about you talked a little bit about kids with these high income dual earning families.
Kara Miller:Talk a little bit about kids without that.
Kara Miller:And it it also strikes me that another piece of this, I mean, you touch on this in in your book, is that apart from just sort of the, you know, after school things you can send your kids to, or the summer camps, or whatever, good schools tend to be in expensive neighborhoods, and the only way to get a ticket into that school is to buy a house in that neighborhood.
Kara Miller:So just like right there from, you know, the beginning of the day of, like, going to school, forget, like, what you can you know, the gymnastics lessons or the math tutoring you can pay for after school.
Kara Miller:Where are they going to school?
Kara Miller:So but draw out some of those differences a little bit, especially with regard to kids in single parent families.
Melissa Kearney:Yeah.
Melissa Kearney:That's exactly right.
Melissa Kearney:So let me just say on the point about where you can live in particular, there's a great new study that came out by my my University of Maryland colleague Nolan Pope and and collaborators looking at very, very detailed census data.
Melissa Kearney:And what they show is that when kids' parents get divorced, one of the first things that happens is the kids have to move, and they move to lower quality neighborhoods.
Melissa Kearney:Because the divorce basically splits the household income, and the, you know, one remaining parent, even if now they have two homes, they can't most of them can't afford to stay in their very high quality, expensive neighborhood.
Melissa Kearney:Right.
Melissa Kearney:And so you they show very clearly that when a child is exposed to divorce, there's a a negative effect on their trajectory in terms of educational outcomes and all these other outcomes we would, you know, be concerned about, and one of the key drivers is them having to move to lower quality neighborhoods.
Melissa Kearney:I I I emphasize that study because I think it's really illustrative of this important mechanism, But I do wanna be clear that the rise in single parent households has happened entirely because of an increase in never marriage.
Melissa Kearney:So do it's not actually because divorce is increasing.
Melissa Kearney:It's because more parents, more adults who have kids together are not getting married in the first place.
Melissa Kearney:Again, especially outside the college educated class.
Melissa Kearney:So if you look at adults without a college degree, a majority, a small majority, but more than half of births are now outside marriage.
Melissa Kearney:And and those parents
Kara Miller:Adults without a college degree, a small majority of births are outside marriage.
Kara Miller:Yeah.
Kara Miller:Right?
Kara Miller:Okay.
Melissa Kearney:Yeah.
Melissa Kearney:Okay.
Melissa Kearney:Yeah.
Melissa Kearney:And and then very few of them will actually go on to get married.
Melissa Kearney:Okay.
Melissa Kearney:Get married.
Melissa Kearney:Even though in, again, surveys of, like, fragile families, when they interview low income unmarried couples at the time of their birth, they're very optimistic about their relationship.
Melissa Kearney:Mhmm.
Melissa Kearney:Very few of them stay together, and even a smaller share actually get married.
Melissa Kearney:So so those kids are just more likely never married parents, in some sense, that's the most disadvantaged situation for kids, because they're more likely to spend their childhood in a home with only one parent without additional resources, financial or emotional, otherwise coming in from the second parent.
Melissa Kearney:And so that's what we see.
Melissa Kearney:We see kids who, in the data, who are living outside a two parent home, which generally means outside a married parent home.
Melissa Kearney:Because even though in theory, people don't have to be married to stay together, in this country, very few couples who are not married actually stay together for the length of their child's childhood.
Melissa Kearney:Those kids have higher rates of childhood poverty, higher rates of criminal justice environment involvement, higher rates of early nonmarital childbearing, lower rates, substantially lower rates of college attainment, and then lower adult earnings and a lower likelihood of being married in adulthood.
Melissa Kearney:So there's a real lifetime intergenerational persistence to the resource disadvantages that kids experiencing from being in a single parent home.
Melissa Kearney:Okay.
Melissa Kearney:Now, of course, there are lots of children who thrive with single moms.
Kara Miller:Mhmm.
Melissa Kearney:And, of course, like, we let's give the benefit of the doubt and and be very clear that these single moms, you know, most of them are doing heroic jobs in all they can.
Melissa Kearney:Yeah.
Melissa Kearney:Right?
Melissa Kearney:And so so my point is not to say these single moms aren't doing a great job parenting.
Melissa Kearney:My point is to say that the absence of a second adult contributing earnings, time, emotional bandwidth to the house is really costly both for I keep saying the mom, but there are single dads.
Melissa Kearney:Right?
Melissa Kearney:It's just that the majority of one parent households are moms.
Melissa Kearney:That imposes real costs, financial costs, time costs, emotional costs on the parent who is doing everything they can to parent alone.
Melissa Kearney:And and so it's again, once you think about it in these terms, it's silly to deny the the resource disadvantage that families in that in that situation are experiencing.
Melissa Kearney:Can I comment on this, by the way?
Melissa Kearney:Yeah.
Melissa Kearney:This is why I titled my book, The Two Parent Privilege, instead of what the book publisher wanted me to title it, which was The One Parent problem.
Melissa Kearney:They were like, no.
Melissa Kearney:No.
Melissa Kearney:No.
Melissa Kearney:Americans are much more likely to buy a book if it elevates a problem.
Melissa Kearney:I was like, absolutely not.
Melissa Kearney:Because the one parent is not the problem.
Melissa Kearney:Right?
Melissa Kearney:That one parent is usually, like, the kid's greatest asset.
Kara Miller:No question.
Kara Miller:No question.
Melissa Kearney:Problem is, like, the absent parent, but I actually don't even wanna, like, stigmatize the absent parent or the non custodial parent, because many of those parents are also trying to do the best they can.
Melissa Kearney:And they've sort of like, a lot of them have a lot of barriers to being the kind of partner or or parent that they would like to be.
Melissa Kearney:Many of them will have themselves grown up in a disadvantaged family setting.
Melissa Kearney:Mhmm.
Melissa Kearney:And so so I I was very deliberate about instead framing this as, let's be honest and recognize the tremendous privilege and resource advantage that two parent households have, both for parents and for kids.
Melissa Kearney:And and then let's make it aspirational and agree that we should want more people being able to achieve and establish that kind of beneficial privileged setting, just like we have all sorts of initiatives to try and help more people gain higher levels of education or stable employment.
Melissa Kearney:Like, this is just a very advantaged situation.
Kara Miller:One of the graphs you have in your book, which is, like, tricky to wade into, but I think I think interesting to bring up and and to talk about is differences among different groups, different subgroups.
Kara Miller:So you talk about if you look at people with just less than a high school education across different groups, so only this is only moms with less than a high school education.
Kara Miller:When you look at, you know, Asian families where where kids are have them a mom with less than a high school education, I think more than 80% of them live in a household where the parents are married.
Kara Miller:But for black kids who have a same thing, mom less than high school education, it's like 30%.
Kara Miller:So upwards of 80%.
Kara Miller:It's something like that.
Kara Miller:And it's just so striking.
Melissa Kearney:It's it's incredible.
Melissa Kearney:And, super counterproductive, not to be honest and upfront about this.
Melissa Kearney:88% of children in the census who identified as ethnically Asian, 88% of them live in married parent homes.
Kara Miller:Okay.
Melissa Kearney:Versus 38% of black children.
Melissa Kearney:Okay?
Melissa Kearney:And and it's 77% for white kids, and, like, 64% for Hispanics.
Kara Miller:Okay.
Melissa Kearney:I mean, we talk in the public at length about racial disparities in educational outcomes.
Melissa Kearney:And always we impugn, we being the public conversation, the schools.
Melissa Kearney:Mhmm.
Melissa Kearney:If you have 88% of Asian children growing up in a household with the resources, supervision, attention, dedication of two parents versus 38% of Black children, of course, there are going to be differences.
Melissa Kearney:Now here's something Ian Roe will point out, which is that the National Center for Education Statistics won't even put out educational scores in this country for kids by family structure.
Melissa Kearney:Right?
Melissa Kearney:So they put it out by race and education, and a lot is made of that and a lot of pressure put on schools to close those racial gaps.
Melissa Kearney:But let's be clear that a driver, not the only one, but an important driver of those gaps is just is differences in household resources.
Melissa Kearney:And it's not just income either.
Melissa Kearney:We know that these gaps in kids outcomes between those in married parent households for single family households, a large part of it is driven by income.
Melissa Kearney:Right?
Melissa Kearney:To to our earlier conversation, they can live in different neighborhoods, attend different schools, but even conditional on income, large gaps remain.
Melissa Kearney:Again, if you think of what parents do, they do more than just pay for stuff.
Melissa Kearney:They're also supervising.
Melissa Kearney:They're helping you with your homework.
Melissa Kearney:They're, like, nurturing you.
Melissa Kearney:They're doing all these things.
Melissa Kearney:So those gaps are super important to racial and ethnic gaps in all sorts of outcomes.
Melissa Kearney:The other thing I will say, sometimes it is claimed that, oh, well, this two parent family structure, it's a myth or it's, you know, a normative it's it's a normative position that celebrates white families, and it actually doesn't benefit children from black families.
Melissa Kearney:That is unequivocally untrue.
Melissa Kearney:So if you look at the data, the poverty rates among black children growing up in a married parent home versus a single parent home, if even if you just look at kids whose moms don't have a college degree.
Melissa Kearney:So we're looking within education group.
Kara Miller:Okay.
Kara Miller:Okay.
Melissa Kearney:Okay.
Melissa Kearney:Within education group, black kids who are growing up either with an unpartnered mother or a married parent, poverty rates are three times higher for for those growing up with an unpartnered mother.
Melissa Kearney:Right?
Melissa Kearney:Now that's not to say that, like, all of those unpartnered mothers would benefit or their poverty rates would be lower if they married whoever the father of their child is.
Melissa Kearney:Presumably, some of those fathers are not working, etcetera.
Melissa Kearney:But but to suggest that the married parent family wouldn't benefit black kids, you're basically just asserting that no black dads really are worth that much, which is like really, is that what people want to assert who are concerned about racial equity?
Melissa Kearney:Of course not.
Melissa Kearney:And so so we do see that marriage is very productive economically and beneficial for kids outcomes across race ethnic groups.
Melissa Kearney:At the same time, what we need to be doing is figuring out why or what what it would take to help more people in, you know, different race ethnic groups, like education groups, establish this.
Melissa Kearney:Like, what are the barriers to stable, healthy marriage?
Melissa Kearney:And one of those things that, like I said, is going to be improving the economic position of men.
Melissa Kearney:So I'm not in any way downplaying the fact that there are real barriers, but I am elevating the evidence and the data showing that this is a beneficial family structure for all groups.
Kara Miller:So if you were queen of the world Yeah.
Kara Miller:What I'm sure you've thought about what policy levers you would pull, and I'll just throw in there something we kinda touched on, which is we saw during the Biden administration that there was a real effort to do a lot of infrastructure type projects.
Kara Miller:Presumably, these are probably jobs that skew towards men.
Kara Miller:And then during the second Trump administration, there's been this reshoring effort.
Kara Miller:You know, he has famously talked about wanting to build iPhones in The US.
Kara Miller:And and a lot of this, again, would create presumably jobs for men.
Kara Miller:So I wonder what you think of those policy efforts.
Kara Miller:And then, again, if you were running the show, how do you change things here?
Kara Miller:Because this is a this is a big problem involving a lot of people.
Kara Miller:What would you do?
Melissa Kearney:Yeah.
Melissa Kearney:So I I first, I wish I had a magic wand, and I wish I knew what to do with it.
Melissa Kearney:So I'm going to do the annoying academic thing of giving my caveat first, and then I'll answer.
Melissa Kearney:K.
Melissa Kearney:The annoying academic answer is we don't have very much evidence on things that work, but I think that is a result of the fact that we have not prioritized this issue as either a research, philanthropic, or policy priority.
Melissa Kearney:So so some skeptics, like an NPR producer said to me, look, the Bush administration in 2001, you know, put forward a $100,000,000 in marriage promotion programs, and it didn't work.
Melissa Kearney:And then, like, they froze funding, and we haven't done anything because, like, a ten week program telling people about the benefits of marriage didn't lead to increased marriage rates.
Melissa Kearney:Do you have any idea how many education interventions, training interventions we've run that don't work?
Melissa Kearney:And what do we do?
Melissa Kearney:We don't give up on schools or training programs.
Melissa Kearney:We keep trying to find the ones that work.
Melissa Kearney:Right.
Melissa Kearney:We need that same sort of commitment to finding the programs and the policies that will really help strengthen families.
Melissa Kearney:So so that's my first thing.
Melissa Kearney:Having said that, yes, I do think improving the economic position and opportunities for non college educated workers is critical.
Melissa Kearney:The problem with both the Biden shovel ready projects and, you know, the Trump's idea that we're gonna make iPhones here, those are basically jobs for high skilled engineers and a few of them.
Melissa Kearney:And so that's that's not the answer.
Melissa Kearney:I do think the answer is a lot of skill building, in particular connected with the modern, quickly evolving labor market.
Melissa Kearney:I'm really bullish on leveraging community colleges and and regional universities.
Melissa Kearney:These tend to be underfunded colleges and universities, but they're the ones that basically serve the majority of low income students.
Melissa Kearney:They're widely accessible.
Melissa Kearney:They're they're widely accessible both from a geographic standpoint and a financial standpoint.
Melissa Kearney:So building up the capacities of those institutions to provide more labor market training, you know, a lot of them have great programs in conjunction with local employers.
Melissa Kearney:That kind of thing, I think, could really help improve the economic position of vulnerable populations in ways that make people sort of in a better position to be stable marriage partners and parents.
Melissa Kearney:So that's one thing.
Melissa Kearney:I do think we again, if we take strengthening families and stable marriages as a policy goal, we would design a lot of policies and programs differently.
Melissa Kearney:Even though like, a lot of tax policy, a lot of benefit programs, they discourage or they financially penalize marriage.
Melissa Kearney:Mhmm.
Melissa Kearney:So I'll give you an example of one that's very salient to to folks, you know, in the low income in low income populations, Medicaid.
Melissa Kearney:If you're a single mom with kids and you receive Medicaid and you marry someone who's working full time, you're likely to lose your government health insurance.
Melissa Kearney:I mean, that's a that's a high cost.
Melissa Kearney:Mhmm.
Melissa Kearney:And so I again, I don't wanna overstate.
Melissa Kearney:I don't think people are not getting married in large numbers because of tax policy and transfer policy, but all those things matter.
Melissa Kearney:And so so thinking about that and revising programs to not penalize or financially discourage marriage, I think would be important.
Melissa Kearney:And then I also think we need to do a lot to recognize where families are and help strengthen them whether or not they're married.
Melissa Kearney:And so, again, like, much more commitment in terms of philanthropic efforts, funding, research and evaluation of programs that help people co parent in healthy ways, achieve stable relationships.
Melissa Kearney:If you look at the ethnographic work by, there's a sociologist at Wisconsin.
Melissa Kearney:She's she's coined the terms social poverty.
Melissa Kearney:And and what she did, she interviewed it's a small sample about low income couples, unmarried couples who availed themselves of these healthy marriage programs, almost all of them were raised outside of a married parent home.
Melissa Kearney:And of course, they want what, you know, like very fortunate high income people have.
Melissa Kearney:Of course, who wouldn't want a stable, emotionally supportive partner?
Melissa Kearney:And so I think that's encouraging that people want that, and then finding programs that help them achieve that and scaling them.
Melissa Kearney:That's something we should be doing.
Melissa Kearney:Another thing I think we should be doing, and again, I don't have specific recommendations because I don't think we have good evidence about what would help, But seriously revisiting divorce, child custody, child protective services, revisiting those regimes and institutions with an eye towards family stability as the end goal, would they look different if if they were prioritizing children's well-being and family stability?
Kara Miller:I wonder if you worry that the gap in terms of what people spend on their children is sort of ever widening.
Kara Miller:There was a great book I remember reading a few years ago called Love Money and Parenting, I think by a couple of economists.
Kara Miller:Right?
Kara Miller:And it really just looked at how high income parents don't just move to which they do.
Kara Miller:They don't just move to nice suburbs with good good schools.
Kara Miller:But increasingly, they feel like they need you know, it's it's very hard to get into good colleges, so people are paying for tutors, and they're they're doing sports leagues.
Kara Miller:And the like, my sense and let let me know if this is your sense.
Kara Miller:The amount of money per child people are spending has really risen in the last few decades on the on the on the upper end.
Melissa Kearney:A 100%.
Melissa Kearney:I do have a graph on this in the book just in spending, and you see the top 10% has just pulled away.
Melissa Kearney:And again, it's really two parents that are putting themselves in that upper part of the income distribution.
Melissa Kearney:The amount of money and time going into kids has just gone through the roof, in particular for college educated couples.
Melissa Kearney:I worry about this for all sorts of reasons.
Melissa Kearney:Right?
Melissa Kearney:I do too.
Melissa Kearney:Worry about this for the cementing of gaps.
Melissa Kearney:But we've also made parenting sort of insane in this country, which I do think is contributing to why people are not having kids or delaying having kids and having fewer kids.
Melissa Kearney:I also you're right.
Melissa Kearney:There's no reason to think that this is actually producing healthier, happier children or parents.
Melissa Kearney:Right?
Melissa Kearney:So I worry about this for lots of reasons.
Melissa Kearney:One thing that's really sad, I mean, if you just look at the data on kids participation and extracurriculars, like, there's there's huge and growing gaps.
Melissa Kearney:So so let's just be very specific.
Melissa Kearney:Those of us who grew up in the eighties, basically, every kid in town could play in your little league or softball team, and it wasn't that big of a deal.
Melissa Kearney:And and now it's like, no, the kids who are good at age nine, they go off to their travel leagues.
Melissa Kearney:Yep.
Melissa Kearney:So the local rec team no longer exists.
Melissa Kearney:And so I even say this as as a mom who at 11 had to pull my son from travel team because I was like, you know, either mom or dad has to quit our job, and we have to send your sister to live with your grandparents.
Melissa Kearney:But, like, this doesn't work for us because it's not just an absurd amount of money.
Melissa Kearney:It's also an absurd amount of time.
Kara Miller:That's
Melissa Kearney:right.
Melissa Kearney:And if you are a single parent, you cannot you cannot do that.
Melissa Kearney:And so it is I do think it's, you know, it is contributing to differences and just opportunities that kids have to, you know, to participate in these really, I think, what could be very beneficial extracurricular activities.
Melissa Kearney:And so so we could do a whole conversation on that separately, but it's that is definitely a contributor, and I think it has more negative consequences than just than just the ones we're focusing on in this conversation.
Kara Miller:I wonder if other countries have this gap between wealthier March kid people being married and poor.
Kara Miller:Is that yes?
Melissa Kearney:I'm glad you asked this.
Melissa Kearney:This is something that I really did a deep dive into when I was doing the research for my book.
Melissa Kearney:So let me start with just the the level differences.
Melissa Kearney:The US has the unfortunate distinction of having a larger share of children growing up outside a married parent home than any other country for which there is data.
Melissa Kearney:Of all 130 countries that have been surveyed on this, The US has the highest share of kids outside of a two parent home.
Melissa Kearney:Wow.
Melissa Kearney:And then as we've discussed, it's almost entirely driven by by kids whose parents don't have a four year college degree.
Melissa Kearney:If you look at what's happening in other countries and, know, other high income countries Yes.
Melissa Kearney:There has been an an increase in the past twenty years in the share of kids living outside a married parent home, and then there has been a growing gap by education level.
Melissa Kearney:So in these other countries, it is also the case that there's been an increase in non marriage among parents, and it's been substantially larger for parents without college degrees.
Melissa Kearney:This was super interesting to me when I looked at the data, in part because I was presenting my research around to academics at European universities and European countries.
Melissa Kearney:And they it was really interesting.
Melissa Kearney:They were like, I can't believe you're saying this.
Melissa Kearney:This is so anti feminist, or, you know, it sounds so antiquated.
Melissa Kearney:And I and I said, listen, you guys are ahead of us in having a collapse in the fertility rate and all of the negative consequences of that.
Melissa Kearney:We are ahead of you in the share of kids living outside a two parent home and the negative consequences for kids.
Melissa Kearney:You should not be sanguine about what's happening.
Melissa Kearney:Like, this is going to have negative So so we do see I mean, the short answer is we do see this happening in other countries in a similar way.
Melissa Kearney:It's just still at a a lower rate than in The US.
Kara Miller:It's amazing, especially considering how wealthy we are as a country, that of all of the countries in the world, we're number one in terms of kids living in single parent families.
Kara Miller:That's incredible to me.
Melissa Kearney:And this is why it's so important to recognize that it is not the highly advantaged women who are leading this charge.
Melissa Kearney:Because if you just saw the if I just saw the data, like, not having any familiarity with this issue, and I saw, oh, The US has the highest rates of single mother households, my first reaction would be like, well, makes sense because American women, you know, have have higher education and earnings, so they're more likely to be able to afford this than women in other countries.
Melissa Kearney:But then you look inside what's happening in The US, and it's absolutely not those women who are doing this on their own in high numbers.
Melissa Kearney:It's more of a reflection of the fact that The US has high levels of inequality.
Melissa Kearney:And outside the college educated class, there are a whole bunch of economic and social challenges affecting, you know, people in The US in less in less advantaged positions in The US, and this is one of them.
Kara Miller:Finally, I just wanna come back to the question of, culture.
Kara Miller:And, you know, we won't we are not gonna talk about it this hour, but you've done super, super interesting work, as you alluded to, on the declining birth rate in this country, but and also in other countries too.
Kara Miller:And one of the things that's been so striking to me looking at at that research and and that you've done and that others have done is that when you look at policies to try to address it, whether they come from like, Scandinavian countries that are a little more, like, a little bit more have little more socialism, like, very supportive in terms of all sorts of wraparound services with education and health care and stuff, or you look at, like, countries like Hungary or, you know, that are much more authoritarian and, like, super different.
Kara Miller:Or Japan or South Korea.
Kara Miller:Nothing has really seemed, I think, right, to turn around the birth rate if people are like, it's at 1.5.
Kara Miller:I want it to be a 2.5.
Kara Miller:Like, that nobody's doing that.
Kara Miller:So do you worry it's that this, that the issue of kids living in single parent families is like a a culture, you know, I don't know, ocean liner that's can't be turned around.
Melissa Kearney:Well, it's I I I think it would be hard to turn around.
Melissa Kearney:I don't think it can't be turned around.
Melissa Kearney:In the sense that okay.
Melissa Kearney:Let me let me first say this.
Melissa Kearney:The issue of kids, the increasing share of kids living in single parent households, it's happened despite the fact that birth rates are down, in particular among young people and groups that traditionally had higher shares of single parent households.
Melissa Kearney:So there's an interesting relationship there between the two issues, which is that the decrease in kids living in married parent homes is basically, you know, it's it reflects a decrease in marriage Mhmm.
Melissa Kearney:And has happened despite a decrease in birth rates.
Melissa Kearney:Okay?
Melissa Kearney:So I now I the the broader question of can we turn around marriage rates, just like can we turn around the decline in fertility rates, where fundamentally economic tweaks just are not having effects.
Melissa Kearney:Economic policy tweaks, we're just seeing very, very limited effects.
Melissa Kearney:So I agree with your suggestion that largely this is going to take culture to turn it around.
Melissa Kearney:But when you think about cultural movements, I'm always surprised by just how quickly they can happen.
Melissa Kearney:Yeah.
Melissa Kearney:I mean, think about the massive social cultural changes in the sixties.
Melissa Kearney:Think about how quickly, all of a sudden, views in America towards single sex marriage changed.
Melissa Kearney:Mhmm.
Melissa Kearney:There are real examples that cultural norms can change pretty quickly.
Melissa Kearney:And so if there's widespread recognition that the decline in marriage basically has not been good for adults or children alike, I don't find it impossible to think that there wouldn't be a widespread change in views that led more people to to basically approach the institution differently.
Melissa Kearney:Make it feel less like a, maybe I'll do that if everything else is in in in line, and more of a now I could see why people have been raising kids in this way and forming their adult lives in this way for so long because it is so economically protective, emotionally protective, and and more of a commitment to the institution.
Melissa Kearney:I think that's possible.
Kara Miller:Actually, I have one more for you.
Kara Miller:If I could have talked to you when you were, like, getting your doctorate and said, you know Yeah.
Kara Miller:Twenty years hence or whatever, you're gonna be focusing on promoting marriage.
Kara Miller:Would you have been like, that totally makes sense?
Kara Miller:Or would you have said, that's a little surprising to me?
Melissa Kearney:I okay.
Melissa Kearney:I I still bristle.
Melissa Kearney:I'm like, well,
Kara Miller:I'm not
Melissa Kearney:really promoting marriage.
Melissa Kearney:I'm just showing you the evidence that it's real beneficial.
Melissa Kearney:But point taken.
Melissa Kearney:I would have been surprised, but but, you know, a lot of my career has surprised me.
Melissa Kearney:But what's interesting, if you told me that, I'd be like, well, how the heck is that going to happen?
Melissa Kearney:And there was two things that might have made me think, oh, I guess I could see how that might happen.
Melissa Kearney:One is when I was an undergraduate at Princeton, I took a sociology of poverty class with Sarah McClanahan, who, very famously started the fragile families survey.
Melissa Kearney:In her sociology of poverty class, we read books she wrote about the importance of family structure.
Melissa Kearney:And so that was an interesting, compliment to all of the economics work I was doing, but in a way that I think sort of turned me on to the importance of this issue that I might have otherwise missed Mhmm.
Melissa Kearney:In twenty years of studying inequality as an economist.
Melissa Kearney:But I did have that training from Sarah McClanahan at, like, the very early stages of my career.
Melissa Kearney:The second thing that happened was I spent a summer working at a welfare to work center in Bridgeport, Connecticut, which was like, I was teaching math and career training and word processing to moms who were my age, because I was, like, 20, who were on welfare.
Melissa Kearney:And and that just sort of cemented my interest in, gosh, what are the economic policy factors that are leading these women who are my age living in such different conditions, and what can we do about that?
Melissa Kearney:So so those two seeds would have made it feel like a plausible thing that might happen to my career.
Kara Miller:Melissa Kearney is a professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame.
Kara Miller:She is the author of the two parent privilege.
Kara Miller:Super interesting reading.
Kara Miller:Melissa, it's always a great pleasure to speak with you.
Melissa Kearney:Thanks so much for having me, Kara.
Kara Miller:At our website, it turns out show.com, we're gonna have a link to Melissa's book, The Two Parent Privilege.
Kara Miller:It's published by the University of Chicago Press.
Kara Miller:Also at our website, you can sign up for our weekly email.
Kara Miller:I write it myself.
Kara Miller:It's short, and it'll let you know what researcher is coming up and why the research is compelling.
Kara Miller:Again, that's at it turnsoutshow.com.
Kara Miller:Please subscribe to It Turns Out on YouTube if you wanna see us or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Kara Miller:Our producer is Matt Purdy.
Kara Miller:Thanks very much to the Alfred P.
Kara Miller:Sloan Foundation for their generous support.
Kara Miller:Thanks to you for listening.
Kara Miller:Talk to you next time.
