Marriage is about more than math
Conn Carroll
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University of Maryland economist Melissa Kearney has a new book out on Tuesday titled The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind.
If you care about the future of this country at all, you should buy it.
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The book is not targeted toward conservative readers — quite the opposite, in fact. Kearney bends over backward to reassure her audience that she is only analyzing marriage “as a religious or cultural institution” and is not “promoting a norm of stay-at-home wife and a breadwinner husband.”
Only cold-calculating economics are advertised to be in Kearney’s book, as her New York Times op-ed notes that the primary advantage of marriage is just numerical: “Two adults have the capacity to earn more than one.”
But Kearney’s book goes beyond just an economic case for marriage. She also notes there is significant empirical evidence showing that the benefit of fathers goes beyond their paycheck.
“The absence of a father from a child’s home appears to have direct effects on children’s outcomes — and not only because of the loss of parental income,” Kearney wrote in the book. “A 2006 study … found that children in single mother-families exhibited worse behavioral outcomes than children from two-parent families, even after accounting for individual characteristics such as the child’s race and ethnicity and the mother’s educational attainment and age at first birth.”
“To the extent that the beneficial effects of marriage for children are derived from the resource advantage of that arrangement, the actual marriage is irrelevant,” Kearney said. “However, the practical truth is that, to date, there has been no alternative institution to marriage that is characterized by the same long-term partnership and commitment in the United States.”
At this point, Democratic critics of marriage will often try and argue that if a father’s love and guidance are so necessary for child development, then biological parents can just cohabitate. No marriage needed. But as Kearney amply shows in the book, this just isn’t true.
Especially in America, but not in Europe, cohabitation has proved to be extremely unstable. The children of married parents are far more likely to reach the age of 18 with their biological parents continuing to live together than the children of parents who were only cohabitating at birth.
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The loss of a father’s presence in the home and the disruption of mothers cycling into and out of relationships are both huge detriments to child development.
All of this is well documented in Kearney’s book, which is why you should buy it.