The family: Altered? Or abolished?
Timothy P. Carney
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Look around the pages of our prestige publications and you will conclude that a revolution is afoot in which modern enlightened adults are crafting innovative new family structures.
“The nuclear family was a mistake,” declares the headline of the Atlantic feature on “chosen families.” We are rewriting the notion of family and the sources of meaning, declares a New York Times op-ed on divorce that insists that “the number of parents around to make a working family was arbitrary.”
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“The family — as the property logic and mode of social reproduction central to capitalism — is killing us,” declares one family revolutionary in a magazine piece that celebrated the “classless poly-maternal commune.”
The family abolitionists should be cheered that the first half of their project is complete: A shrinking portion of children live with married parents in the U.S., and American children are three times as likely as children in the rest of the world to be raised without two parents.
But this regime change war on marriage hasn’t played out as planned. No commune or chosen family has come to raise the children of the post-sexual revolution. What replaced Mom and Dad is, overwhelmingly, a single mother.
The Two-Parent Privilege by Melissa Kearney of the Brookings Institution is the latest in a series of liberal authors making painstakingly careful, and at times apologetic, arguments for the most basic common sense truths.
Where Christine Emba argued that sleeping around might not maximize happiness and female empowerment and Richard Reeves argued that boys have different needs than girls, Kearney is arguing that the best arrangement for children is being raised by two married parents.
Kearney, an economist, shows that the growing portion of children raised without two parents are not being raised by a bevy of aunties or in some communal co-housing nursery. No, they are raised by single mothers, and overwhelmingly they are raised by poor or working-class single mothers.
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We’ve liberated children from the patriarchal prison of the married traditional family and plopped them in the struggling arms of disadvantaged women.
We haven’t modernized the family. We’ve abolished it.