Robert Henderson and Melissa Kearney discuss the benefits for children of two-parent households and the hypocrisy of elite ideals.
Audio Transcript
Brian Anderson: Hello. Welcome back to the 10 Blocks Podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. This week’s special episode features audio from a recent Manhattan Institute event on marriage, family, and societal expectations. Rob Henderson and Melissa Kearney discuss the benefits for children of two-parent households and the hypocrisy of elite ideals. Rob Henderson’s weekly Substack newsletter on Human Nature, social class, and more is a must-read and reaches tens of thousands of subscribers. And we’ve been pleased to feature his writing on artificial intelligence, cancel culture, and other matters in City Journal. His work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and many other outlets. He’s the author of the recent book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.
Melissa Kearney is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. She’s the director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings. She’s the author of The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Hannah Meyers, the director of the Institute’s Policing and Public Safety initiative, moderates their conversation, and we hope you enjoy.
Hannah Meyers: I’m Hannah Meyers, director of our policing and public safety work here at MI, and I am so delighted to moderate tonight’s conversation with Rob Henderson and Melissa Kearney who have both written seminal books that have upended preconceived notions and contemporary attitudes surrounding marriage, family, and child outcomes. For generations, serious analysis towards the importance of marriage and intact households has given way to casual attitudes towards family structure and a cultural insistence on the narratives that marriage is an outdated institution with little bearing on socioeconomic mobility.
Over a 14-year period, Gallup polling revealed a 16-point decline in those who felt it was important for unmarried parents to marry. Other polls have revealed similar results, even as the data showing a link between married parents and better life outcomes has never been stronger. But as Rob has documented, many young people on college campuses who minimize marriage’s importance are the same ones who grew up in stable households and in all likelihood will end up marrying and creating the same upbringing that they once enjoyed themselves. This aversion to complex conclusions and an uncomfortable examination of single-parent households has come at the expense of children with fewer advantages, particularly young boys.
To help us make sense of all of this, we have two incredible authors who have come at these issues using a compelling mix of research and lived experience. Rob Henderson is author of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. Rob is an Air Force veteran who currently writes about a range of issues and popularized the use of the term luxury beliefs, which is a very popular term these days. Very useful to have in our bank. He holds degrees in psychology from Yale and a Ph.D. in psychology from Cambridge. Melissa Kearney is author of The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind and is the Neil Moskowitz professor of economics at the University of Maryland. Professor Kearney is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, holds a number of board positions, and her research focuses on domestic policy, especially social policy, poverty, and inequality. Please join me in welcoming both of these fantastic authors.
So I didn’t realize this, but this is the first time these two authors have met, even though there was clearly a lot of kismet in the timing of their books coming out. So I’m going to ask a few introductory questions specifically to each, and then hopefully have a conversation, and then we’ll open it up to Q&A. So Rob, to set the stage for our discussion, would you talk about your inspiration for sitting down and writing this memoir, and what response did you expect to receive?
Rob Henderson: Well, thanks, Hannah, and thanks all of you for being here. When I arrived at Yale, I started to interact with a lot of people who are from backgrounds that I had never encountered before. I kind of expected that there would be this kind of economic divide. Yale’s a pretty well-known university, and I cite some stats in my book: there are more students from families at Yale, from the top 1 percent of the income scale than the entire bottom 60 percent. Even though I didn’t know that figure when I entered, I sort of intuitively understood that that’s what it would be like. I was unprepared for the kind of sociocultural differences in terms of family background and life experiences and so on.
So I figured maybe someday in the future I would write about my own life experiences because when I would interact with the students and professors and administrators and grad students and other inhabitants of the university, they were often perplexed and sometimes horrified when I would tell them a little bit about my life and how I had grown up. And I recognized that maybe I could basically illuminate this segment of American society. But yes, some forces aligned and I ended up writing this book much earlier than I anticipated. I was a little nervous about writing a memoir at such a young age. I remember expressing these reservations to a professor at Cambridge and he was like, “This is an American tradition. Young people love writing memoirs. Americans love writing about themselves. You should just do it.”
Hannah Meyers: Very British.
Rob Henderson: I was like, “Okay.” So this stodgy, old British professor said that. Okay, I’ll do that. And I didn’t know what to expect.
Hannah Meyers: It sounds like it started less as a catharsis and more as you felt like this was a narrative just missing and you needed people to know less for yourself, but for them.
Rob Henderson: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. I didn’t feel this intrinsic desire to start telling this story, no. It was more so to get other people to understand what sort of the texture of life is like in people who live at or near the bottom of society. I attempted to search for biographies and memoirs and stories of children or former foster kids. There aren’t that many of them. Most of the memoirs and autobiographies related to foster care are written by foster parents, not so much by children, for a lot of reasons. One being that only 3 percent of foster kids ever graduate from college, and most authors tend to be college graduates. So naturally, there aren’t going to be many authors with that kind of background, so I figured I’m in a position to do that. Yeah, the response has been probably overall better than I anticipated. I didn’t expect the book to be quite as popular, I suppose, as it has been. I thought it would do okay, but now it’s been more successful in some ways than I expected.
Hannah Meyers: I proposed in my book review some reasons why it’s resonated with so many people, but I’d love your thoughts about why has it resonated? Because it clearly has struck something very missing and really important to people.
Rob Henderson: Yeah. There’s been in the last few years, and Melissa writes a little bit about this in her book, this soft taboo, I think, about talking about the importance of family issues when it comes to economic policy and values and so on. I think my book manages in some ways to implicitly communicate that family is important, simply because I grew up without one or with various, I mean just so many different fleeting family structures and arrangements that it was as if I hadn’t really had one. So I note in the preface of the book that by now I’ve met quite a few, well-meaning upper and upper middle-class people who attempt to put themselves in the shoes of someone who grew up poor, what would it be like to grow up without money? They’ve tried to envision what that would be like, but I’ve never met anyone who has attempted to imagine what it would be like to grow up without a family and what a valuable asset that really is.
Hannah Meyers: Why is that? It’s funny because we read about orphans. Our favorite books are about Jane Eyre and Anne of Green Gables, our favorite books. But I’m assuming that why don’t we then imagine in the current time what it would be like for us?
Rob Henderson: Could just be the ... I mean, those are fictional stories.
Hannah Meyers: Right.
Rob Henderson: I know towards the end of my book that there are ... Comic books and fairy tales and so many of these child protagonists are parentless. But then in the real world, for people who exert a lot of control over the discourse and popular culture and media that they grew up with families, most of their friends grew up in families, or even if they themselves were, there are some people in upper and upper middle-class milieus who were raised by single mothers, but then they tend to be in neighborhoods where most of the families are intact. So it is still kind of all around them and they don’t really think too deeply about what it would be like without family.
Hannah Meyers: Yeah. Melissa, in what ways does your book introduce new findings or data sets that dovetail with other research that has shown the socioeconomic benefits of marriage?
Melissa Kearney: Well, first, let me say what an honor it is to be here with Rob. His story is so powerful and very poignant, and I feel sheepish I just have a lot of data and numbers and tables now in my paper.
Hannah Meyers: Those are misery for some people.
Melissa Kearney: No, no. I mean, to the point of new findings, I think really what I’m doing in my book is surfacing more things that those of us who study poverty and inequality and families in America know it’s buried in academic journals and it’s not part of the discourse. What’s such a gift to have Rob’s story come out at the same time is, it makes some of the data come to life and makes the imperative of it very real. So I think some of the things that I’m surfacing in my book that surprise a lot of people are just the extent of the challenge, as I say, and I do very deliberately and normatively call it a challenge of kids being raised outside two-parent homes. So 30 percent of U.S. kids are being raised outside of a two-parent home—more than in any other country, among the 130 countries for which there’s data. So I think a lot of people are just surprised by the extent to it.
The other thing I’m really calling attention to is the huge class-based divide in all of this, which of course is something that I think dovetails really nicely with Rob surfacing this very real idea of luxury beliefs. So in my experience, we don’t talk about this, or in the two decades of economic policy conversations that I’ve been involved with around inequality and class gaps and opportunity, we talk about schools and labor market initiatives, and those of us who study the data know family structure is a really big determinant of how kids do in life. But if you surface it, it’s either dismissed as out of bounds or not something we can do something about as policymakers or policy observers, so let’s go back to talking about schools and safety net programs and housing and criminal justice reform.
So what I’m really trying to do is say, with a lot of data and evidence and appeal to research in an accessible way, the class divide in family structure, the fact that kids born to college-educated parents are almost all being raised with the advantages of two-parent homes and increasingly kids born to parents who don’t have four-year college degrees are not, is a very clear mechanical contributor to class gaps in our society in terms of the way kids are being raised, the opportunities they have, and ultimately their likelihood of graduating college and achieving these markers of success. And if we don’t break that, we are resigning ourselves to these entrenched class and racial and ethnic gaps. So it’s more, I think the novelty a little bit of my book is coming at it as an economist. I’m not a cultural commentator. I come in as economist. It’s objective, evidence-based, but it makes a very clear normative stand that this has not been good for kids, it’s widened inequality, and it needs to be on the policy agenda.
Hannah Meyers: So you sort of get to sidestep the cultural by having it—
Melissa Kearney: It turns out I couldn’t sidestep the cultural, but that was part of the idea.
Hannah Meyers: Right. Well, in a way, it forced the other side into this.
Melissa Kearney: Yeah.
Hannah Meyers: I’m curious now, since it wasn’t really a catharsis so much as feeling that this was missing, because you described a little in the book about how you were getting the hush of not having to talk about this, was it something that you . . . or was it more that this is important, no one else is doing it, I have to do it?
Melissa Kearney: This is exactly what it was. It was like, this is so important and those of us who look at the data, we know it’s important, and there’s such a reluctance to sort of have it be part of the public conversation about these challenges as a policy matter. I think mostly well-intentioned, mostly well-intentioned because it comes across as sounding judgy or, in my world, socially conservative, which is itself a challenge.
Hannah Meyers: Worse.
Melissa Kearney: Right? Right, right, right. So you don’t want to do that in an academic or economic policy conversation, but also because we don’t really know what to do about it, right? Again, it’s hard to pull a policy lever and make families stronger. So it got to the point where I was like, no, no, we have to figure this out. I mean, for 50 years we’ve been talking about how to improve K through 12 schooling and we still have failing schools, but we still talk about it and try. And we’ve never seriously tried, hey, how do we help people build stronger families? And why don’t we talk about that in the same way we talk about people with college degrees do better in the labor market, they have lower rates of unemployment?
How do we help more people go to college and how do we make college more accessible? And yet, how do we help people who don’t have college degrees achieve economic security? Why don’t we have that same conversation? Hey, we know two-parent families are really helpful to parents, to kids. We know they’re good for society. How do we help more people achieve that? And then how do we help those kids and parents who don’t have access to that advantageous institution, how do we help them do better? That’s the policy conversation I felt like we needed to be having. So yeah, I felt like nobody else is going to write this book, I should just write it.
Hannah Meyers: Oh, we’re very glad that you did.
Melissa Kearney: Thank you.
Hannah Meyers: I’m curious, and then I’ll have some conversation, when you started, did you know what policy recommendations you were going to make at the end of the book, or were you first laying out all the data and then as you thought about it, was it a process for you to come up with recommendations because it’s hard to fix?
Melissa Kearney: Yeah, that’s actually a really interesting question. My book is published by an academic press, but my proposal had six chapters on challenges and three on solutions or policy levers. I mean, this is something I’ve been thinking about for a very long time. And they were like, “No, no, no.” Now I know this is a formula. “No, no, no, your job in this book is to convince America there’s a problem, then you could go write your policy papers separately.” So there’s actually very little, the book might feel unsatisfying in the sense that I have a final chapter on where do we go from here, but they’re not really fleshed out. And I do plan to do more on that.
I mean, I have ideas, but really my takeaway or my policy view on this is, it needs to be multipronged, it needs to be about both economic changes, making men more economically attractive as marriage partners. It needs to be about changing social norms. Economics isn’t enough. I’ve research that led me to that conclusion. It also needs to be about expanding and scaling and studying programs aimed at strengthening families. There’s a dearth of evidence on how to do that because it’s never been a policy research priority. But I’m still grappling with what specifically can we do about it? Because now I do get asked more, now there are people reaching out to me like, “Okay, this is a problem. What do we do specifically?” And I wish I could point more to here, have this program in every city and things will be better. But there’s nothing like that, but there’s an agenda that needs to be worked up. So that’s where I am on that.
Hannah Meyers: Yeah. And really what a gift, because you’re not coming from the right or the left in the book in these arguments. So you’re really putting it on the table for policymakers and researchers to have that conversation about what specifically to do.
Well, you’ve both expressed particular concern, borne out in the data, for boys growing up without fathers and the ramifications down the line. It’s certainly something I see working on criminal justice policy. You betcha. So what trends and outcomes do you find the most startling as they specifically relate to young men? And is there anything that makes you optimistic about the direction things are going in?
Melissa Kearney: Do you want to go first or you want me—
Rob Henderson: Yeah. I highly recommend getting Melissa’s book. It’s just extremely data-driven, very straightforward, and clear that there’s . . .Yeah, I mean, I just found it fascinating, reading your book and then reading some other research papers on this question of how boys seem to be uniquely sensitive to family inputs relative to girls. In sort of more plain English, just boys in intact families, they seem to benefit more from intact families than girls do. When I read these, of course, I sort of have this natural inclination to connect it back to some of my own experiences and some of the people that I grew up around, went to high school with. So when I was in high school, I had five close friends growing up, and of the six of us, none of us were raised by two-parent families. I’m the only one who went off to college, and that was only through a very winding, indirect path. I very easily could have not gone to college, had a few things been different in my life.
But I knew that the girls at my high school grew up in similar circumstances, but quite a few of them actually did go to college. They were raised by single moms or in various sort of fragmented families, but they were far more studious than the boys were and more conscientious and just more interested in the work in a way that the boys weren’t. So yeah, it just seems very clear to me. And my understanding is that, and you may have mentioned this in your book, that the gap between boys and girls in terms of likelihood of graduating from college, it magnifies the lower . . .You go on the socioeconomic ladder, so boys raised in . . . Correct me, I’m forgetting.
Melissa Kearney: Yeah. So the finding from some economic studies is the gender gap in educational outcomes that now favors girls. So girls are more likely to graduate high school, they’re more likely to go to college. That gender gap is larger for kids growing up in single-parent, almost always mother-only homes, which says that basically boys on these metrics, criminal justice involvement, getting in trouble in school, dropping out of school, they’re more disadvantaged from being in a single-parent home than girls.
Rob Henderson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. So sort of in the top income decile or the top of the socioeconomic ladder, girls are slightly more likely, I think, to graduate from college than boys. But then among low-income families, girls are far more likely to graduate than boys for high school and for college. In terms of sources for optimism, I don’t know. I mean, people will ask me about this idea of a national service.
In my book, I do talk about some of the benefits of the military and how that really helped me. I am just reluctant to endorse it. Ideally, I would like to speak . . . I think the problem starts way earlier. The kid went through 18 years of disorder and chaos, and now we’re just going to ship them off into the military and straighten them out. It just seems uniquely sort of unfair to me. I made the choice. I didn’t exactly know what I was getting into, but it was still me who signed that line and made that choice. I just feel uneasy about coercing young people into doing something like that. But that is an option and that is sort of a continual perpetual question that people ask me. So maybe, yeah.
Melissa Kearney: Rather than optimism or pessimism, I feel a real urgency about the need to help young men.
Hannah Meyers: Yeah.
Rob Henderson: Mm-hmm.
Melissa Kearney: Right? The reason is, we know boys are, they are more disadvantaged. I want to be careful. This isn’t to say that girls aren’t harmed in any way by only having one parent in their household. But on the things that we can see in data, not like internalized sadness or whatever, but the things we see about your markers that put you towards educational economic success, we see boys are more disadvantaged. Okay, this is happening at the same time that we know part of the reason why there are more kids growing up with single parent, and again, almost always single mother homes, is because men have, they’ve been struggling both in an absolute sense and relative to women over the ‘80s, ‘90s, 2000s.
I tell a story in my book about the economic shocks that had a lot of non-college-educated men that made their economic position weakened, both in an absolute sense, but certainly relative to women, this is non-college educated men, that made the attractiveness is marriage as an economic institution weaker. So you see in the communities hit by these economic shocks that led men without college degrees to lose jobs, lose earnings. You see more kids growing up in single-mother homes. And then we know that boys are at a particular disadvantage, and this cycle is going to repeat.
So we’ve got this challenge where, again, outside the college educated class, there’s been a decoupling of marriage from having kids. Men are less likely to view themselves as reliable breadwinners or providers. Women are less likely to view them that way. There’s of course ancillary challenges when there’s unemployment. There are other challenges that make someone a less emotionally available partner. If we don’t break the cycle, men are just going to be continuously on the sidelines of family life, the economy, society. So some people, they don’t like my book because how dare I suggest that women can’t raise kids on their own just as well? And of course, that’s not what I’m saying.
Hannah Meyers: It’s gold.
Melissa Kearney: Yeah, that’s not what I’m saying. We all know none of this is to take away from any of the heroic efforts that mothers are going to. In some sense, it’s to call attention to the fact that, why are there millions of economically vulnerable women who are doing this by themselves? And how are we going to improve this situation if we don’t improve the lives of boys and their trajectory?
Hannah Meyers: Yeah.
Rob Henderson: I think there’s also a longer term issue here. So there’ve been quite a few articles and essays and attention paid recently to people, called the fertility crisis or this decline in birth rates. And I recently read a really interesting article in The Economist. They ran an analysis which found that when they broke down the fertility rate by women’s level of education or mother’s level of education, they found that among college-educated women, the fertility rate actually hasn’t changed that much in the past 30 years. So college-educated women are having children later in life, but the overall number of children they have remains roughly the same. But for non-college-educated women, that is responsible for the bulk of the fertility collapse. So young, uneducated women are having fewer kids than they used to, many cases not having children at all.
So I am reading this, and I think back, so I lived in two homes when I was growing up, two different homes with teenage mothers. These two young women, they got pregnant at 16 and then again at 18 and then again in their 20s, different fathers. And interestingly, they had only daughters. So those girls grew up. Still Facebook friends and stuff. And these girls are now in their 20s and none of them have kids. So they’ve sort of broken this pattern of teenage pregnancy, which is great, but on the other hand, they may go their whole lives without having kids. That seems to be where things are headed. I’m reading this and I’m thinking to myself if maybe part of the fertility crisis is in fact a marriage crisis, that as fewer and fewer people get married and pair up and form partnerships, they’re just naturally not going to have as many children. When you look at survey data, the vast majority of people would prefer to get married before raising kids, before forming families.
I think a generation ago, maybe two generations ago, it was very common for women in low-income areas to, as the norms around marriage dissolve, they would think they would have a child with a guy, they weren’t married, but they would think, “Well, we have a kid and we’ll see where this goes. We’ll cohabitate, and maybe this will kind of naturally progress towards marriage.” That very seldom happened, as you document in your book, that most cohabitating relationships end up dissolving. So those kids grew up in those circumstances and saw what that looks like, and then perhaps maybe learned a lesson and said, “Well, I’m just not going to have kids. If marriage isn’t in the cards, then what’s the point?” And I think that’s actually perhaps what’s happening in a lot of these areas. A lot of people aren’t aware that teenage pregnancy has collapsed since the ‘90s.
Melissa Kearney: Which by the way makes the fact that there are so many kids, such a high share of kids being raised outside two-parent homes even more surprising.
Hannah Meyers: Yes, absolutely.
Melissa Kearney: So teen childbearing is down over 70 percent from mid ‘90s, which is amazing.
Hannah Meyers: It’s amazing.
Melissa Kearney: But in the mid ‘90s, you ask me or anyone else really who studied this to say, given the trends in teen childbearing and the decline in fertility really for every age group under the age of 30, given the decline in fertility among young women, teen women in particular, what’s going to happen to the nonmarital birth share? I would’ve predicted the nonmarital births are going to go way down. But in fact, the nonmarital births are, it’s now 40 percent of births in the U.S. are nonmarital. What’s happened is, the prevalence of nonmarital childbearing has moved sort up the education and age distribution. So the big change is, women with a high school degree, women in their 20s, they now have really high rates of nonmarital childbearing and raising single-parent homes.
Rob Henderson: Oh, interesting.
Melissa Kearney: So if you just look at kids born to moms with a high school degree, that’s the majority of moms, actually it’s majority of moms, since 1980, the share of those kids living in married parent homes has fallen from 86 percent to 60 percent. Basically, their rates of non-marital childbearing and marriage look like the most disadvantaged groups did 40 years ago. There was no reason why there had to be sort of a convergence down in terms of marriage or non-marital childbearing, but that’s actually what happened, which is why it’s very surprising. The fact that moms are older and more educated, and yet still we have such a high share of kids living outside a two-parent home, is very surprising.
Hannah Meyers: Very surprising. I think that’s one thing in your book in particular that I’d imagine a lot of people were really shocked by and forced to reconsider everything they think is going on around them, even in the people they know. I read an incredible Washington Post review of your book with them, where the review—
Melissa Kearney: Incredible bad. She didn’t like it.
Hannah Meyers: Incredibly bad. Yeah, incredibly bad. She’s dripping and constant—
Melissa Kearney: No, I meant incredible in how much she said my book was bad. Let me be clear.
Hannah Meyers: Both. The review is bad because, among other things, she says that Melissa’s just relying on her moral priors, which if you read the book is so bananas. And also, she says the proof that these ideas are not really creative is that unless it doesn’t suggest that kids be raised in communal homes, which would really be some really forward-thinking improvement to children’s lives. So I’m curious about a bunch of things about the feedback. One is, if you’ve gotten either of you any really evidence-based theories pushback that has given you pause.
Rob Henderson: I mean, I saw this paper a few years ago, or it was published a few years ago. I saw it. Brad Wilcox is one of the authors. Essentially, he and his coauthors found that if you wanted to equalize outcomes for children raised in single-parent homes versus two-parent homes, this would require an income transfer to single-parent homes of roughly $59,000 a year. And this was to equalize the educational and occupational outcomes of the kids. I’m reading this, I don’t imagine any government program is just going to decide to send 60 grand a year to single-parent homes anytime soon. And then of course, the other thought that came to mind was some of the things that I write about in my book, which was that money alone isn’t going to solve this issue. There’s a lot that a parent brings to the table above and beyond material resources alone. And as a simple thought experiment, you could imagine just asking a child who has two parents, “We’re going to take one of your parents away from you, but we’re going to give you $59,000 a year.” I don’t think many kids would take that deal.
Melissa Kearney: Yeah. So the pushback in the Washington Post piece, she says I’m trapped in convention. So she finds my book boring. And in some sense, the book is boring by design. It’s not a hot-take book. It’s like, “Guys, this is boring. Here’s a lot of data and it’s sort of irrefutable.” So I’ve not gotten pushback on the evidence. This is a big relief as a social scientist. Nobody’s like, “No, no, you missed this whole body of evidence showing that actually this isn’t the case.” So we can all sort of agree that this is the case. We have mounds of data that kids who grow up in two-parent homes, they have higher-resourced homes in terms of income, spending, but also parental time investment, maternal and paternal bandwidth, all the things that development psychologists tells us are beneficial for kids. Kids being raised in two-parent, which in the U.S. generally means married-parent homes, have more of that. And we know that that leads to better kids’ outcomes. Okay, irrefutable.
And then we know that there’s been this huge class divide. Nobody tells you that I actually did my tabulations wrong. We know that. The data, we know college-educated families are much more likely to have this beneficial structure. So then the pushback is, what do we do with this information? You can say I’m trapped in the convention of two-parent homes are good for kids, and why not these alternatives? Okay, I remain waiting for somebody or some society to show us a better way of raising kids. There’s not one, right? What we know is, what has happened in the past 40 years with this massive experiment where now 30 percent of kids are raised outside of a two-parent home has not been good for kids or society. So there’s that.
The other pushback that was quite fierce and immediate, which frankly surprised me a bit, was the sort of loudest, most condensed criticism I’ve gotten are really from feminist gender reporters, writers who say I have a second-wave feminist-bowling-in-their-graves at this suggestion that women can’t do this by themselves. This is actually really interesting, when I’ve discussed my work over in Europe, they’re surprised by me as an American saying this, like we would never say this, this is a feminist movement now. But I’m like, “Okay—”
Hannah Meyers: They would never say?
Melissa Kearney: What I would say. They wouldn’t call attention to the rise of single mother households as being a bad thing. I was like, “Well, that’s because you’re way behind us in Europe actually,” for everyone thinks Europe’s more progressive. But in the U.S., it’s 30 percent of kids; in Europe, it’s an average of 13 percent of kids are in a one-parent house. So I was like, “Pay attention. This isn’t going to be good.” So I pushed back on that, not in the book because I didn’t anticipate it so strongly, but make no mistake about it, this is not a feminist success story. The women who have benefited the most from the doors that feminism has opened to us in terms of achieving high levels of education, professional success, we are still almost all raising our kids in married-parent homes with the help of a committed co-parent. So this isn’t a feminist success story. From an equity position, it should bother us that so many economically vulnerable women find themselves in the positions of doing this by themselves. So that’s somewhat surprising pushback I’ve gotten from that.
Hannah Meyers: I’m curious if there’s an age breakout in the feminist pushing back on you. I feel like there’s a cohort who grew up, and this was their motivating mission, was to show that women could do it alone. And I’m curious whether younger women who pushed back also have adopted that.
Melissa Kearney: I think I’m going to call on luxury beliefs. The single moms who have written articles calling me cold, they’re sent me nasty emails, they’re older, they have been MBA, they have a lot of money. I’m like, “Actually, you’re the exception to the trends here.” And the groups that I’ve spoken with and the single moms that I’ve spoken with who are less advantaged, the sort of typical reaction I’ve gotten from those women is, they feel validated and seen in my data. Of course, it’s hard. And I feel like an idiot showing them, “Oh look, national data says you have less time to spend with your kids than married moms,” like they needed some college professors to tell them that, right? And they’re like, “Yes, I know because I’m the only one paying the bills and mowing the lawn and cooking and driving my kid.”
Hannah Meyers: But it must feel so good for them to have other people see it who don’t know it.
Melissa Kearney: That’s actually been very validating, but also a bit sad in how many people send me emails and just want to have their stories heard and told, which is again why Rob’s book is such a gift. But as you were saying, Rob, most people who grow up in those circumstances aren’t in a position to write a book. One, I wish I had better answers for a lot of the email increase I’m getting, like, “What resources can I do?” or, “I’m a single dad, I don’t know what to do now that my daughter’s 12,” or, “I’m a grandma and it’s really hard and I’m helping my daughter. And what do you think we should do?”
I don’t know the answers, but it’s made me more convinced that we actually need more programs that are focused on strengthening families as opposed to trying to make up for the deficits of families, stay with more school counselors, or head start programs or childcare. I mean, I’m for all of those things, I’ve written in favor of all of those things. But actually, parents are kids’ greatest assets. And how do we help more parents, co-parent both be involved, be the kinds of parents they want to be for their kids?
Hannah Meyers: Yeah.
Rob Henderson: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Hannah Meyers: Related, and I see this a lot in criminal justice discussions, people are very uncomfortable now judging behavior, even radically antisocial behavior, that they would rather see all of our safety and interpersonal trust erode than appear to be judging. It feels that uncomfortable. Are people more afraid to seem judgy? I mean, they’re claiming you’re judgy about family structure than they used to be. And what does that come from?
Melissa Kearney: Look, I think I’m inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt. I think it’s generally well-meaning. But for me, again, I come with this as a researcher, when I see fields and academic journals expressly say things like it’s outside of our values to suggest that one type of family structure is better than another, that is so antithetical to what researchers and scholars should be doing. I’m not judging anybody, I’m just telling you that in the aggregate, we know that kids who grew up with two parents have a better chance of success. And I’m not pointing any fingers, saying anyone is making themselves a bad decision, but we should be honest about that. And then it comes across as judgy, but that’s more just a reflection of reality and being honest about reality.
Hannah Meyers: Right.
Melissa Kearney: What I do think is really important though is not to blame the victim. We could be honest about the challenges of single-parent households for kids in particular, and yet still be very empathetic to both the kids, the moms, the dads, whatever it is that led people to this situation. And I think there’s a way we could go back to a bit of a stronger social norm. You get a kid together, that kid . . . I mean, this is a lot of where my resolve in writing this book. Who’s advocating for the kids? Those kids, to your point, the kids want their parents. So where it gets really judgy is where there’s not really barriers, but the parents just decide that they would be more fulfilled if they pursued their own interests. Are we willing to have a social norm, judgy as it may be, that like, “You know what? You had a kid, you have an obligation to that kid”? You don’t get to decide now that you want to go pursue your passion and move away. Is that a social norm we’re okay with? I’m okay with it.
Hannah Meyers: Right. Yeah.
Rob Henderson: Yeah. I had this conversation a few months ago, this video call with this kid. He grew up not too far where I grew up in California, and he had just received an acceptance letter to Stanford. I was giving him some advice. He’s a reader of my Substack. He’s seen my post. He’s like, “How do I accustom myself to an elite campus growing up the way that I did?” And then we started talking about his personal life. He was raised by a single mom, worked multiple jobs to make ends meet, and make sure that her son had every advantage possible given those limited constraints to get into a great college.
After a while, this guy, basically he told me he was proud of his mom and he was happy with where his life was. But one thing that he got from my book when he was reading it was the realization that he would have traded his acceptance letter to Stanford to have known who his dad was. I think that to me, as I was hearing that, that sort of reiterates that point, that it’s important I think to . . . Having education is better than not having it. Mobility is great. All of those things, we should be focusing on them, but I think we could also spend some time focusing on repairing the family and making sure that a young guy can get into Stanford, but then also have his dad around, too.
Hannah Meyers: Well, this leads perfectly into my next question, which is, Rob, you write that coming from a loving stable home is more important than higher education, and Melissa, you reveal how well-resourced homes are now mostly just something well-educated people produce. Is there a paradox here? And also, are there any areas relating to these issues where you feel that you disagree with each other?
Melissa Kearney: I mean, I’ll just lean into this is why I ultimately landed on the title for my book, which is The Two-Parent Privilege. My biggest nervousness almost in writing the book, and again, this is why it’s so humbling to be here with Rob, I know I was coming at this from a point of privilege. I was raised with two parents. Actually more than that, my grandmother’s with us. I had three adults in my house every day who I knew loved me unconditionally. So I was coming at it from that privilege. I’m raising my kids with the benefit of a husband who’s supportive of me and the kids. And this is also where it’s like I find parenting hard and I have all the resources in the world. I’ve got a spouse. We both have steady jobs. It’s still hard. Of course, it’s hard to do this on your own. So I was coming at it as a position of privilege, which made me nervous.
I was calling the book at first The Family Gap, because I was like there’s a gap in families, by classes that leads to gaps and resource at least. And then the marketing team from the publisher was like, “That’s terrible title. No one knows what the family gap is. We’re going to call it The One-Parent Problem.” I was like, “I won’t publish the book.” There was no way I’m going to call it The One-Parent Problem and add on to this idea that single moms are the problem here.
Hannah Meyers: Right. Imagine the pushback.
Melissa Kearney: But in many cases, they’re their kid’s greatest asset. That’s not the problem. So when I was thinking about it, I was like, “No, no, I’m going to flip it. It’s the two-parent privilege.” I come at this from privilege. And once I was able to acknowledge that, in some sense it made it easier to talk about. But it is really, I mean, I know this sounds cheap to say, but it’s very true. I come at this from a position of empathy. I mean, this is why reading your book as a mom, it’s so hard to read. I want more kids to have that loving, stable home. So that’s the way.
That’s almost the difference, is I come at this, one, my lived experience is one that very much has the benefits. And then my book is written about marriage as an economic contract, two parents are making a long-term commitment to raise their kids together, talk about the economic outcomes. Rob comes at this with a different lived experience and then writes so beautifully in his book about the emotional psychological impacts of all of this, which is outside my expertise. So I read our stories and perspectives less as being disagreement, but almost really wonderful complements.
Rob Henderson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just coming at it from different perspectives. In the preface of my book and then I think towards the end, I make this claim that it’s fine that we’re focusing on these metrics, educational attainment and occupational outcomes and so on, in terms of these class divides. But I also just think that having a loving, stable family is a good in itself, even if . . . I mean, ultimately, if you have an infant and you have your crystal ball and you know for a fact this kid is just not going to have a particularly exciting and successful life, does it still matter if that kid grows up with two parents who care about him or her and prioritize their well-being and so on? And if the answer is yes, then I almost wonder if we’re sort of paying a little too much attention to these measurable outcomes, which is fine. As social scientists, you’re supposed to do those things, and it’s important to know the causal links and all the variables. But also just, it’s harder to measure these sort of ephemeral qualities of feelings and inner resources and how you feel about yourself.
A lot of people read my book and I think mistakenly get this view that, “Oh, well, you succeeded because you were smart and you had all these built-in attributes. You were an academically inclined and you were curious kid and so on.” That may be true to some extent, but I think that those qualities are maybe necessary but not sufficient to do well academically. I still barely graduated high school with a 2.2 GPA, and I still required eight years of military to basically teach me how to equip myself with the kinds of habits that I saw among the students at Yale, these 18- and 19-year-old kids who had grown up their whole lives with two parents, teaching them about hard work and studying and sacrificing and doing things you don’t want to do because that’s how you get into a university like that.
I was never taught those things. I had to learn them through this alternate path. But I don’t think you could expect kids who grow up the way that I did, not all of them are going to do eight years in the military. That’s not a reasonable expectation. I would hope that more adults would decide, if we’re going to have kids, to equip that kid ourselves with those habits and so on.
Hannah Meyers: I just hope there’ll be a Rob Henderson.
Rob Henderson: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
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