Fact based policy? My racist friends from the other side aisle will have none of it. They blame the victim, and tell me that it is 'the blacks' who need to fix things.
3
Did anyone read the (clearly, politically, motivated) article?
The thesis was:
"[F]amily structure has a weaker relationship to the educational success of black adolescents than of white adolescents."
Note what was said: "weaker relationship" - not "inverse relationship" or "no relationship."
The author, in her fevered attempt to reach a contrarian point, just said "its not quite as bad as you think" - but it is still (very) bad.
To the extent she is advocating (and make no mistake, this is an advocacy piece), that broken homes in black families are not so bad...she is doing a disservice to black families, and society.
But what about the anecdotes, you say?
The person whom, in spite of overwhelming statistical evidence to the contrary, survived a car crash *because* they weren't wearing a seat belt?
Of course we can. And we are idiots if we use these *exceptions* to the rule, to disregard the rule.
All this study proves is that, if you give somebody money to find a certain thing (like "single parent households are really a public *good*") - they will find that thing, regardless of the overwhelming empirical evidence.
And what, you might ask, do I know about this?
I was the product of a broken home.
I dropped out of high school.
I served honorably in the military.
And I ultimately succeeded (graduating from college, then law school, and passing the California bar exam) not *because* I grew up in a broken home, but in SPITE of that fact.
31
First, there are too many humans in the world.
Second, medicine has advanced enough so that every male could and should have a reversible vasectomy implanted at the age of eight (8) and then would only be allowed to breed on the condition that he demonstrates he will be a responsible parent, mixes his genes as diversely as possible so that all offspring push the human population closer to all of us looking as anonymous as possible so race no matter means much.
Also, I am an atheist Jew. I have been faithfully married for 54 years to the only woman who would go to bed with me. Our only child is a distinguished lesbian medical researcher.
I am 75 years old. I promise not to cry myself to sleep if my comment is not published. I am fairly sure comments are not allowed to demonstrate a sense of humor. So please do not laugh.
Oh, go ahead.
2
Please Google the Black Tax by Sean Rochester.
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=black+tax+by+sean+rochester&view=detail&mid=31FF63EBDB428C3C684831FF63EBDB428C3C6848&FORM=VIRE
1
Sounds like one solution to the problem is to offer greater "socioeconomic benefits" (taxpayer subsidies, I assume) to 2-parent black families, as this will not only incentivize 2-parent households (a proven booster), but provide benefits that boost all households, resulting in an effective "double" boost.
8
Irresponsible behavior by people of any race should be discouraged. They become burdens on the social fabric of this country. Government programs cannot become the parent nor should they. It's very tiresome to see these cycles continue and this article does nothing to discourage it.
13
Why would someone attempt to put black children at a disadvantage by saying that it doesn't matter if a father is in the home? It matters to ALL children to have both parents--together and in the same home, if possible.The effects of fatherlessness are documented to a far greater measure than this writer can muster. This is disgraceful and racist.
17
If Barack Obama is any indication, a boy really misses his absent father. What we're talking about here is homes where there is no man present. Maybe if the man could have a good job and some self-respect, he would stick around and be a good father. We need to make an all-out effort to help young black men achieve success in life and this, in turn, will help the next generation of young black men (and women) grow into healthy, happy, and productive adults. Don't ask me how we do this, but that is the problem. All those young black men in jail or just in trouble We need to do something to help them.
8
That is spectacular nonsense. Whether you believe in God or evolution, it’s obvious that it is best for human children to be raised by a father and a mother.
11
Interesting. Did any of your research examine the role, the impact of or lack of a father on a family, black or white?
BTW--pls ck out McKinsey Report on structural race issues.
www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/the-economic-impact-of-closing-the-racial-wealth-gap?cid=eml-web
Who is 'black' and who is 'white" in America?
Who is 'African' and who is 'European' in America?
Africans didn't come to America voluntarily.
Africans didn't come to America as persons.
Africans didn't come to America seeking socioeconomic opportunity nor fleeing ethnic sectarian oppression.
'We didn't land on Plymouth Rock. It landed on us" Malcolm X
Who is black in America is defined by the arbitrary historical mythical one-drop aka 1/32nd of black ancestry rule. There is no biological DNA genetic evolutionary scientific support for that definition.
The one and only human race species began in Africa 300,000 years ago.
What we call race aka color aka ethnicity aka national origin is an evolutionary fit pigmented response to varying levels of solar radiation at altitudes and latitudes primarily related to producing Vitamin D and protecting genes from damaging mutations in ecologically isolated populations over space and time.
While race is a socioeconomic political fiction, racism is a historical reality.
There is no science in sociology nor politics. There are too many unknowns and variables to craft the double-blind and/or randomized controlled experimental tests that provide predictable repeatable results that are the essence of science.
Donald Trump had a two-parent family. Barack Obama did not.
See 'The Race Myth: Why We Pretend That Race Exists in America' Joseph L. Graves; 'Watson Decoded' American Masters PBS
4
Oh, boy! Harvard post doctoral fellow! What credentials!
Of course, resources matter! Who says they do not? You have set up a false choice. Resources and a two parent household mean the best chance for kids. Does that mean it is impossible to succeed otherwise? No. Of course not. Just that the odds are against you. Best odds? Be in a loving family. two parents, if possible. Obtain or have resources. Don’t make stupid choices.
From a humble non Harvard state university engineering graduate.....
14
not too far into article realized author wasn't really claiming 2 parent family structure benefit is a "myth" but only that the adverse impact of single parent home is different or less for African American children....so it's not the best known "myth" that she's rejecting, but a separate "myth" that may or may not have been known to anyone outside academia, namely, the differing impact of single parent home on black and white kids....what the headline of the article suggested then is not what the article is about. whatever the sociology, that was poor journalism guys....in other words, didn't seem to refute that generally a 2 parent home is better than 1parent home
4
Did you read the article! Socioeconomic barriers are the primary factor in determining the success of black kids, not family structure. Stop talking about whether your white 1950s paradigm is important! This white navel gazing is just one more form of racism. Many of the commentators here are too focused on their own mythology to even address the major point of the article.
6
And the easiest ways to get those resources is.................having two parents.
And having a father in the home with boys goes beyond resources.
The evidence is overwhelming, and its not so much about resources.
Another liberal shuck and jive from reality. And I consider myself a life long, long lived liberal.
9
Ernst Kantorowicz, in his classic "The King's Two Bodies," wrote, "Any effort to 'explain' a historical phenomenon, even though one may hope to understand some factors by which it was conditioned and with which it was interrelated, remains a hopeless task because there are too many layers of life effective at the same time and actively concatenated as to permit any straightforward explanation; and to answer the question why certain potentialities actualized in one way and why they did not crystalize in another will necessarily be an undertaking of limited and doubtful value."
History, like the present, is complex. And to solve the problems it's dealt us will require many different angles of attack. More and more, one sees insinuations of genetic explanations for racial achievement gaps. The point is not which particular "group" can do better when maxing out their potential, but rather to try to give everyone the best opportunities we can. The fact is, black kids often show up to class unmotivated. This isn't a product of resources but of cultural and familial expectations.
Many whites seem to secretly feel that this is normal for blacks, which is asinine. I quite agree that the poverty and dysfunction in inner-city black neighborhoods is largely, though not wholly, a result of racism past and racism present. But without an element of victim blaming, in order to push behavioral change, I'm not sure we can solve the problem. Resources matter, but they aren't all that matters.
Keep deluding yourself and things will never get better.
4
And this is good, why?
The study needs to include Asians and Hispanics to be meaningful.
3
This is junk science if ever.
6
This essay is an embarrassment to the Times and to Harvard. It reads as if it was written by a college freshman at best and the ideas it contains are scattered without structure or, unfortunately, coherence. Dr. Cross may have some valid points to make but it sounds more like a Democratic set of talking points for more money. What I really come away with under all of Cross's gobbedlygook is that Black grandmothers are holding together Black family structures. Thank G-d. But Dem policies starting with the Great Society destroyed the Black family and Cross ignores this.
8
Bookmarked and ready for deployment, the next time another Caucasian (and now Asian American pseudo allies whenever educational access is raised) wishes to dismiss the innumerable accounts of racism by racial minorities, especially African Americans. Strong work Dr. Cross
Various prohibitively successful intact Asian families evidently, conveniently not worth examining.
4
Why do I have this nagging feeling that most commentators who are quibbling with this author's findings are white?
4
Yeah kids don’t need a dad. One research paper and this gets an article?
You know what else a research paper showed? Vaccines hurt your kids and cause autism.
4
Because of the poor personal choices of many African American adults and the extremely high percentage of missing African American fathers, black youths are more likely to be exposed to socioeconomically stressful environments than are white youths. Poor whites from single homes perform considerably worse than two-parents homes also. Your shoddy research also fails to address the reason for which black youth of retrogressed in several categories over the past several decades. Asians, among whom divorce is uncommon, have eclipsed and outperformed whites and black in virtually every single category. And it is pretty difficult to argue that Ming Lin who arrived from Cambodia 5 years ago has benefited from "white privilege". Black Americans from the West Indies, who also have a far lesser divorce rate than heritage African Americans, also outperform AA in virtually every category. Illegitimacy, poor personal choices, widespread cultural acceptance of morally bad life choices that negatively impact children and an inability to take personal responsibility for one's own individual actions may also play a considerable role in the horrifyingly bad performance of AA youth. But the excuses are endless and the efforts to explain away and excuse culturally ubiquitous bad parenting choices is absolutely appalling. What a trash study!
9
Jeeze! Researchers are just figuring this out NOW?!
1
Obama is a perfect example of your thesis.
2
For all of human civilization, all generations of a family, the "extended family," lived together and shared child rearing, creation of food, clothing and shelter, and entertainment. There was always a way to find other sources of wisdom and nurturing.
Only in the past 100 years has the independent "nuclear family" been the norm. From the time I learned this in college I knew that this modern arrangement was unnatural and unhealthy.
I experienced it my own life by literally being trapped in a suburban tract home with a brilliant but emotionally-disturbed mother, an abusive older brother, and a distant father. If there had been cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents around, their impact would have been blunted.
I wholeheartedly agree that a "single parent" with an active extended family to help, is probably better than a two-parent nuclear family with little multi-generational input.
4
What a concept. Let's ensure everyone has adequate resources, education, healthcare, child care, decent wages for decent work, and then see what the gap between single parent households and married households is for how the kids turn out.
I'd take healthcare, college costs and a good job any day over another person to clean up after just because someone thinks marriage is a cure-all to the ills of society.
6
This study is interesting and important, and shines a new light on what many of us take as a given.
But the denigration of the role of father will only continue if we buy into the prescriptions outlined here.
Yes, more resources must be given the poor, whatever their family structure.
But is it really a the best use of government resources to ignore the beneficial role of a male parent in the household? Cultural change has certainly outweighed the effects of slavery given that almost 75% of black children are born to unmarried women. (It's shockingly high for whites too at about 50%.)
Is it really wrong for the government to promulgate programs that encourage fathers to stay with their children? All government programs employ social engineering. This author's solution would obviously obviate further the role of adult males in raising their children.
2
It's not the number of parents, but rather the quality of the parenting that has the greatest impact on kids. Two committed parents are better than one, but one committed parent is better than two uncommitted parents. Income matters in both cases, but is likely more important if there is only one parent. Low-income single-parent households struggle in ways that make it difficult for the parent to raise and nurture a child. But difficult doesn't equal impossible. When you look at poor parenting it's generally a reflection of the greater family and friend network.
1
I think we could turn this around and point out that the nuclear family -- two parents and children -- requires quite a lot of social support to be successful, mainly stable access to jobs and housing. In the absence of these, people tend to to rely on the extended family, which allows them to pool resources and frees up adults, usually men but sometimes women, to travel and live apart in pursuit of work. A sociologist once told me that in her study of a particular migrant group she found that the most stable family constellation was not a two-parent family, but a mother, her grown daughters, and their children by different men. The relative absence of a committed and involved extended family among white people accustomed to relying on the nuclear family for pretty much everything may actually make the breakdown of this nuclear family more harmful to the children.
2
My dad died when I was nine years old; so I grew up in a single parent family; my mother went back to school and became a teacher to support us; to me this was all normal. It was only many years after I became an adult that I realized how much I needed a father and looked up to male family friends for role models. I was lucky and had several good examples to follow. We did not need to go camping, hunting or to ball games. It was just having that presence in my life that made such a big difference to me. I now understand why many kids from fatherless families join gangs or similar groups; they need a father figure and the discipline that they get from gang leaders. Teachers often play a similar role. A bad father can be as destructive as no father; so in both cases, having good examples really makes a difference. My advice to male adults is to be aware of how important your example is to young people around you; you may be the role model that shapes that kid's life.
6
As a white kid who grew up with two parents whose sole purpose in life was to annihilate one another, I'd have gladly taken either one of them alone. I took another option when I turned sixteen: I left.
The best decision I made in my youth; surrounded by great and ambitious friends and very positive adult mentors, my life flowered.
I've been committed to the same person for thirty years now. We've raised two wonderful people. We never married.
Not sure where this anecdote fits into this study, other than to show that there are many paths to a fulfilling adulthood.
5
"...single parent households don't affect black families as much as whites, because the black families are already poor."
No.
The author gives us clear arguments that the evidence of more nearby extended families in many black communities is a primary reason.
This article and many of the comments is a compelling example for showing us how the prejudice of our own experiences prevents us from hearing and learning from what another person is saying and writing.
2
The author points out an interesting effect, assuming the data and methods are valid, but then fails to emphasize the fact that single parent households remain an issue, regardless of race.
No one has been insisting that socioeconomic factors are not also important.
1
@Frank Knarf
"No one?" We must be reading different comments.
Also, this is an article and not a book.
The author is attempting to encourage us to hear another particular part of the "story," a story that is hundreds of years long, and many miles deep.
2
The primary benefit I received from a two parent family was economic. My father was an aerospace engineer which ensured our family stayed in the middle class.
If they were divorced my two sisters and I would have ended up living with our mother who was mentally ill and incompetent to work.
My mother routinely beat my sister who came from an out of wedlock affair and had consistently bad judgment in parenting. My father found any excuse to be away from the house.
When they finally got divorced the children were all old enough to fend for themselves. My father married another mentally ill woman who was hospitalized at the mental health center where I worked as a psychologist. My mother ended up as an inmate in a psychiatric hospital.
Parenting leaves much to be desired and rarely meets expectations. Out of my closest five high school friends, none of the parents were happily married and one friend had a psychotic break in college and was hospitalized. He later became a physician. My two sisters and I all got masters degrees in helping professions.
All of this experience resulted in my marrying a woman who also didn’t want children. We both had learned our own lessons in our own families.
47
"does not carry the same cost for black youths as for their white peers"
Poverty swamps out the effects of the other problems.
That does not mean the other things are not problems, it is just Maslow in action, first you need food and reliable basics of life. Then you need role models and family structure.
7
Blacks from single mother households tend to end up in prison more, and their mothers tend to not finish high school, so I question if throwing money into 'resources' would actually help. The statistics for single white mothers who haven't finished high school are not much different.
The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D) NY warned of the rise of single parent homes and the heavy price children pay.
7
Thank you!!!
I have been teaching this for years, only to be undermined by racist male colleagues who like to perpetuate that myth and continue to engage in victim blaming.
@xyz Ideology is distorting your thinking and your teaching. Nothing in this study disputes the hypothesis that living in stable, two parent households is beneficial for children of any race, nor is the fact that white families of any sort have more wealth than black families an unusual insight.
4
I agree with more programs to help African Americans (and I'd like to add Native Americans, since they're often ignored). Head start, kindergarten (it was proposed to be eliminated in my state by a narrow-minded legislator), and quality college and career advising starting young all give people a good start in life.
Please, don't say socialism, this isn't what it is, it's helping. And those who cry socialism are the first to say nothing or applaud the socialism for the very wealthy -- tax breaks, golden parachutes, etc. -- while the middle and lower classes have to deal with harsh capitalism.
Why is helping others considered bad in our country? Our fictitious "pull yourselves up by the bootstraps" beliefs have given us extremely high suicide rates and drug usage. We should all pull together to make a better society.
Bottom Line: Black males who impregnate poor and uneducated Black women don't take any responsibility for raising their children. This perpetuates the main problem: Poor women are left with little or no resources - money, inability to emphasize and contribute to the child's education and educational culture, setting welfare as the only viable culture, and inability to defend young Black males from the intimidation or rewards of the 'hood.
Responsible Black fathers could do a lot to lessen the hooks that are dangled in front of young Blacks. I wished so many times that my father would have my back, protect me from the neighborhood thugs, or just help me with my homework. My mother was indifferent. When I was a teen she told me she wished I had never been born. I was fortunate enough to get past these negatives and bootstrap myself into a middle class income and its rewards. A roll of the dice.
4
"We have a three-legged dog. He gets along fine. Therefore, nothing's wrong with a three-legged dog."
This "social scientist" has taken a broken situation, then shoe-horned stats to make the broken situation appear normal.
Irregardless of race, there is no science that has ever shown that - on every level - a single parent is better than two loving parents at raising children.
Need a clue, social scientists? Just ask a single parent - Do you want to do this by yourself?
What, really, is the story here? Men making bad choices? Women making bad choices? Lack of intelligent birth control policy?
Failed social policies will not be solved by making excuses for failure.
12
Remember the Black opinion writer/ columnist William Raspberry?
He once wrote about how few Black unwed mothers (to use an ugly phrase) there were prior to the 1960's-70's.....White and Black statistics were almost identical then.
NOW we often assume Black kids are raised in fatherless homes with a woman (mother or grandmother) as the head. NOT ALWAYS.
I have to wonder what changed so dramatically as to make it now, nearly a norm?
4
The title is unfortunate. Resources and access to opportunities are a huge determining factor to succeed. Family structure is also a huge factor in success. I would think if you had two loving parents in a nurturing and supportive environment that would be optimal. The goal should be all the above, not either or.
3
Essentially having extended families to watch your kids while you work helps alleviate the cost of daycare. All that really needed to be said.
2
"If this is the case, then what deserves policy attention is not black families’ deviation from the two-parent family model but rather structural barriers such as housing segregation and employment discrimination that produce and maintain racialized inequalities in family life."
About 2-3 years before my family moved out of our near-east side Detroit home (Chene Street area) I wondered who would be blamed for the decay of our neighborhood into essentially a war zone. The reason my family moved out, or at least the event that finally triggered it was when our phone lines were cut one evening (late 1980s) and I had to chase off two would be perps. Fortunately I had a firearm.
This was the last in a long line of crimes perpetrated against my family some of which were racially motivated. At this time our local public schools had adopted an Afrocentric approach that included discussing the possibility that ancient Egyptians used gliders for transportation.
My family's attempts to influence what we saw as a destructive approach to living and education were dismissed as "not wanting to give up power" or "being afraid of people who didn't look like us".
This was all long before the mortgage crisis or Betsy Devoss.
Well getting back to the original question, it turns out the fact that we moved out was to blame for all the evils that beset the old neighborhood.
On and on it goes, the liberal perpetual motion guilt machine.
7
Yes, it's the resources! I'm probably not the first black commentator to say this but I was raised by a single mother in a stable working to middle class community of black families; had access to all four grandparents and my mom's sibs who are professionals; great private schooling, masters degree, yada yada. Gainfully employed with a reasonable success, despite disability for a long time. If you provide anyone with the tools and teach him how to use them, they will go far regardless of the number of parents he has.
3
Your comment totally negates institutional racism and barriers, such as the banks literally not approving loans for African American (and Latinx) families in upscale suburban neighborhoods, where there is access to more effective and high achieving schools, and the ability to attain wealth and pass it down to the following generations, which is just ONE example...
Does this mean that the usual absence of a dependable primary income generator, role model and authority figure, that is to say the relative absence of strong structure in black families, should be supplied by the taxpayers? That the taxpayer should be assigned the job of parental replacement figure to complete, or make whole, the inadequate or unconstructive socio-economic structure of black families? Did anyone ask the taxpayers if they wanted that role? Does this proposed arrangement excuse blacks from the responsibility to establish stable family structures on their own? Does the black family become, in effect, a tax supported public structure? Should it? Is this opinion article an effort to establish an academic research justification for a political position already accepted and promoted by the political left? Do people on the left see it as easier for them to advocate spending big amounts of tax money to externally stabilize the black family than call for blacks themselves to undertake the more difficult task of reforming their own family structures? Have leftists effectively given up on that idea? Are they attempting to throw the responsibility for a problem they know they can't solve onto the taxpayers?
7
@Ronald B. Duke
The idea that government can replace a parent is absurd. Government is the worst parent.
2
So, tell us all Ms. Cross how much money is needed to substitute for a missing 2nd parent in a family? $100,000 a year per family? $200,000 a year per family? $300,000 a year per family?
And also tell us Ms. Cross if structural racism is the cause of all the problems faced by black kids from single parent households, then why you didn't study 1-parent and 2-parent white families, where such structural racism by definition can't exist?
8
well, we cannot expect young women to go childless due to structural changes in the economy that have stripped cities and towns of reasonably well paying unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in manufacturing, warehousing and transportation.
On the other hand- I grew up in a single parent household and wish I hadn't.
3
I think a lot of the confusion here is coming from the fact that the title and below-title summary - which is almost always chosen by the editor, not the author - doesn't match the findings.
The title implies that it's a "myth" that family structure matters - but the article doesn't say that at all. The findings aren't that family structure is irrelevant...just that it's less important for black kids than for white kids because black kids tend to face so many *other* problems that whether they have a dad in their lives or not is pretty small fry by comparison.
3
The conclusions from this study make perfect sense. This is exactly why Professor Cross's recommendations will not be followed.
The ideology of black family pathology is a form of white institutional racism. Despite the data showing the black family's incredible resilience in the face of overwhelming obstacles, white policy makers prefer the standard story of black moral deficiency.
Today the greatest increase in single motherhood is among white women. And their rates are fast approaching figures once reserved for black teenagers. But the myth of black family pathology persists.
Who among us hasn't had friends or family that created family structures outside of the two married parent model? I recall growing up with kids who had "pretend" aunts and uncles.
During the Great depression my father and his siblings were sent to various other family members to live for periods of time because my grandfather had died of pneumonia and my grandmother was left with seven kids to raise.
If policy makers were serious about promoting the family they would fund universal day care and pre-K schooling. Every school would have a fully funded after school program to enrich childrens experience while their parent was still at work.
But this requires seeing the current system as inadequate. Our law makers still prefer to see the deficiencies in us, rather than the system.
1
If the greatest increase in single motherhood is within the group known as “white women”, why is this article about black families and their struggles?
Why divide along color lines at all?
Why not say this is a terrible problem for all women, when they cannot afford to raise their children on current US wages- nor are they permitted to stay home and raise the child themselves- all due to inadequate wages and misplaced social priorities.
It seems in our zeal to help every different group of special interests that decides to organize politically, the group known as, Women and Children, is the last group to stick together and advocate for resources to be shared and available to all US children, regardless of skin color or socioeconomic category.
Single parenting in and of itself is not problematic. A great single parent can often provide more love, a better home environment, upbringing etc., than two less-than-wonderful parents.
However, the majority of single parents (single mothers) out there are having UNplanned pregnancies. It's one thing for a woman to decide in advance to be a single parent...where she has a plan in place for how to do so. She has the finances, a stable job, no 'drama' in her life, and a great network of friends and family.
But far too often (esp in the black community) we see girls/women getting pregnant, not just once, but two or three times, and often by different men. There was no 'planning' involved, and the women's lives were typically full of drama before the babies even came along. We see similar in other poor communities (of white people)....in rural areas of the south, in Appalachia, etc. Were all or most of these births 'accidental', or were they more subconsciously desired, as a way to bring 'joy' or meaning into their lives...or as a way to (hopefully) keep the particular man around?
All this lackadaisical attitude towards bringing new life into the world creates generations of kids who suffer, all because of their irresponsible parents. When we see news stories of young black males in trouble with the law, 9 times out of 10 they came from a single mom.
The problem is not single motherhood in and of itself, but the particular irresponsible women.
2
The ultimate need for subsidies to farmers is caused by Trump's trade wars which have hurt us more than it has hurt China or other countries which choose to go around our market to others around the world. That Trump uses this policy to help the riches farms is not a surprise, but hidden as few people take the time to actually look at the effects an distribution of farm subsidies. Trump's use of tariffs has been a sledge hammer approach that pretends to claim victory for us, but has been completely ineffective in fixing anything. But the hurt to so many is real and tangible from the suffering of small to middle size farms to tax payers who shell out farm welfare to the riches farms. Trump's policies are a shell game where only the riches benefit from the sufferings of others.
My wife and I have 3 teenagers, and I often think we bring complementary skill sets to parenting. And when one of us is exhausted or sick, the other can take the lead.
I had a father who had multiple addictions and was essentially an absent parent (I am white) and even decades later, I still feel that loss.
3
How about the age of the parents? Children becoming parents seems a big part of the cycle of poverty, regardless of race.
9
It appears that Murphy Brown and Dan Quayle should both still have a seat at this table.
There are always single parent familes in bad neighborhoods that raise successful children as well as two parent families in bad neighborhoods (good neighborhoods too) that raise kids who basically fail and lead subpar lives that can be destructive to themselves and others. These are what the scientists call "anecdotes". Two parent families are the gold standard. We spend many tax dollars supporting single-parent families that are actually family "fragments" when there's no second parent present. I paid to raise my kids and devoted a lot of time to them. I expect the same of any parent. I don't want my tax money spent to support the children of "baby mamas" - of any color. If the father won't foot the bill for raising his kids, he should be learning work skills in jail.
5
This seems to be research with a specific goal in mind, rather than basic research. While I am sure that the data (effect sizes and all that) are accurate, the author seems to have a particular bone to pick - that 2-parent families are not an effective strategy. Turn the question around...and ask whether 2-parent families are effective in countering the "structural barriers" of housing segregation and employment discrimination. I think that the answer would be yes....2 parent families, one with a college degree, are clearly more likely to live in better housing (with access to resources) and overcome emp. discrimination. That is why educated blacks have mostly left inner cities for surrounding areas. They have the means to do so, and act on it. The most telling stat she shares is the adverse effect of poor and uneducated single mothers. Such data suggests different policy solutions....and these solutions are not reducing housing segregation and employment discrimination. Rather, they include emphasizing education, 2-parent families, and reducing the cycle of unwed single and poor mothers. I KNOW that many single mothers are successful and it isn't BAD to be a single mother...but if you look at the stats....well...that's what research is supposed to do.
7
I am an old caucasian, raised by a widowed at 40 immigrant mother. Dad died when I was 7 in 1940, I had two older brothers, the three of us were raised in depression era poverty. Dad was sick 2 years before he died so I remember little of him. Mom worked as a maid in a small midwestern town and without a societal support system. We lived in a rural two bedroom, no electricity, no running water, no plumbing. My brothers and I sold vegetables from our garden and worked odd jobs.
I worked my way thru college and med school, my oldest brother became a chemical engineer, the other a chemist. Ambition and perseverance? Just being white? This article disturbs me, not because we did it and they can’t, but because this the why?
4
Common sense suggests that the study is at least somewhat flawed.
8
Oh! A single study says something it was designed to say but makes no sense at all. In Washington black students score in the 28th percentile while white students score in the 85th percentile. Yet somehow the rate of single parent homes in black families isn't important. The lower rate of marriage isn't very important. Resources are the only thing that matter. Did anyone think to ask why resources are lower in black families? It couldn't be the family structure, along with other cultural differences, explains a big part of the reason for the lower percentile scores and the lack of resources.
10
File under: Ignore what they say, but watch closely what the top ten percent choose to do with their own kids, their own money, their own marriages, and their own property.
7
one study, published in an unscientific "social sciences" journal, does not create new truth.
many many studies have conflicting data
economic, cultural, social, parental, number of books in this house, number of words spoken to a baby, are all very important factors. Yes, two parents does matter. Dems da facts.
6
Was this meant to be funny? Shameful to highlight one study that is refuted by hundreds.
5
The racially segregated housing market more than anything explains the continual disparities between African Americans and whites. Housing and neighborhood location determine your home equity (i.e. wealth), schooling, access to employment, healthcare, daycare, hospitals, retail, etc.
1
@SV Hear hear!
The clear indication is that poverty makes life more difficult for everyone, especially kids. And while there are--by the numbers--far more poor *white* people in the US than poor black/brown people, a higher *percentage* of black/brown people live in poverty. Let's do something about poverty, period.
2
"Because of historic and contemporary structural racism, black youths are more likely to be exposed to socioeconomically stressful environments than are white youths."
This sentence invalidates the point of the author who is apparently biased anyway. There is no 'contemporary structural racism'. Period.
And the idea that somehow it is rather fine to live in dysfunctional families in which the fathers are absent in more-or-less every aspect is preposterous and unhelpful.
3
Basically, Ms Cross believes that single parented black youth achieve socio-economic outcomes about the same as those black children who live with both biological parents. This contrasts with her findings that white children benefit more from having two parents rather than one. So old fashioned concepts of two parent families are more beneficial for white folks than for black folks.
The difference in outcomes across the races must be attributable to white folks having better educated parents, better jobs, and better opportunities because they are not marginalized as people of color.
Maybe.
Maybe the fact that "Differences in access to socioeconomic resources such as mother’s education accounted for up to nearly 50 percent of the gap" is the issue. If "socioeconomic resources" includes mother's education or father's education, then we have a problem of a different emphasis. One that is addressable by the people directly involved.
The problem is as much education as it is anything else. The problem will worsen as the services economy, combined with a shift from labor to robots, combined with worldwide trade exacerbate the burden of a weak education.
The problem in educating poor black youth is shared by three entities: the child, the parent(s), and the school system. Money only addresses the school system and history has demonstrated that money alone is insufficient for change.
If change is the objective, then change is required.
1
"Some scholars predict that the additional stress incurred by living apart from a parent is only marginally impactful, above and beyond the existing disadvantages. "
What!!!??? It's the worst thing ever, unless the absent parent is replaced, be it by extended family or friends. A single parent without support can only do so much, and the devastation caused by a disappearing parent can be lifelong.
Yes, I'm one of those single parents whose husband abandoned us when the kids were 3 & 11. I worked hard to create a stable, loving environment for them. They both have issues, and it's been 22 years.
5
Certainly, the most helpful thing for a child is to grow up in a house with a mother and a father. But if that is not the case, the most important factor would be access to the resources that would be the most helpful to a child, like health care and an education.
What is the current administration doing right now? Trying to
deny food stamps for the poorest Americans, with benefits for nearly 700,000 adults.
Sharing the resources of the planet is the only way we can go forward and not end up in a worse situation than we are now: a war that engulfs everyone everywhere.
SHARING is the key to a peaceful and prosperous future for all of us.
1
This article and reader comments powerfully discuss what children need in order to sustain themselves and grow into the world around them.
Yet children with two parents and no food and no shelter are not likely to live well, prosper, or succeed, despite all of the hundreds of millions we spend on laws encouraging marriage.
We are deluded into believing that passing a law is a major solution to social or economic needs. It is not. A law is only a symbolic act. Nothing changes unless peoples' time and money is invested in supporting the changes to which the law points our attention.
We need to have 10 times more conversations about what is discussed here because, we need what we need, and from what I read here, comments are leaping over the essential points of the article, and most comments are talking past Cross's article, and most comments--that I'm reading--are talking past each other.
There is a lot of hurt, concern, rage, and hidden shame in these needs, and we will get nowhere in our needs for communication and connection without first hearing, in ourselves, how powerful our own experiences have affected how we respond to our common mutual needs.
How many variations of "us versus them" arguments and disagreements have ever succeeded in creating harmonious cooperation, instead of cooperation at the end of a cultural cudgel?
1
As in everything else in life, you get what you pay for. Or more specifically in this case, what you invest in. I’ll simply never understand people that rail against spending on education. A better educated next generation will have less poverty, ignorance, and reliance on the government. And that raises all of our living standards.
1
@VIKTOR Inner-city school districts like NYC, Chicago and Baltimore have huge per-pupil budgets, higher than many nice suburbs.
8
My wife and I work together to raise our three children, I couldn't do it without her and I know how difficult it would be for her without me. So I second all the comments which say having a partner in parenting is almost vital. Of course single parents can still make it but having a partner helps immensely and it should not be downplayed in any way.
I am also not sure what the author means by "structural barriers such as housing segregation and employment discrimination that produce and maintain racialized inequalities in family life", are there laws which prevent people of color from buying houses in certain neighborhoods if they can afford it or would anyone be denied a job because of their color if they are qualified for it?
I am asking this as a person of color.
10
While this information should be obvious, it is truly not to most Americans. Access to economic benefits is key.
It seems that 2 important factors are at work.
First, two-parent families can provide an advantage in the form of discipline, time available for parenting and instilling values, and so on. But by itself, it cannot overcome being born into a difficult socio-economic situation.
Thus, bring more benefits to bear on such families is also very important.
1
@Ken L
Of course we should bring more benefits to bear on behalf of families. But it's not a question of either a stable two parent family or financial help. Very often, its the stability that two parents working together provide for the family which helps overcome economic obstacles, and helps make the most of those resources the family has.
5
If a kid had 8 parents (and, say, no siblings), she would in theory have access to a lot of "resources." But of course, 1 rich parent might be able to provide more "resources" than 8 poor parents. It seems obvious that number of parents and level of "resources" are correlated some of the time.
3
Maybe it's just me, but I think a number of commenters are missing the main point here - to help black families, don't focus government policy largely on promotion of marriage. Her study shows that the difference between a single and dual-parent household for black children is marginally insignificant compared to white children. Therefore, if you want to help black children, focus on socioeconomic factors like resources and access instead of marriage.
2
I do not know how one could one run a controlled trial with only single or dual parents as the variable. All other influences would have to be constant--income, housing, geographical location, access to health care and day care, and more.
No one will be able to run those cohorts. It is reasonable to suppose that income level and access to any number of resources would carry the day over whether one or two parents were involved.
2
Kids need both a great family structure and access to resources and you can’t downplay the power of having a great mother & father, father & father or a mother & mother — great parents are key.
If all we had was access to resources, we would have emotional deficiencies and if all we had was family structure, we would have economic deficiencies and if we had neither a great family nor access to resources (which is a norm in our community) we create generational poverty.
So we need family and finance to converge in order for us to flourish — it’s a balance.
As a single mother and a professional who raised 3 children I can attest that the observations made by the author are spot on. Why I can be so certain has a large part to do with my profession, as a pediatrician who practiced at an inner city health center I saw a number of different ethnicities and family compositions. Those who had strong support systems were less likely to be struggling in school, with the law or in overcoming chronic health issues.
4
I strongly support giving educational benefits and supports to poor families (single parent or not).
That said the language and structure in the arguments given are they type I use to use (when teaching statistics) to get my HS students to read carefully and think critically.
There is a lot of talk about how the "chances" of one thing are less than the "chances" of another. Bottom line: in both cases there are negative impacts. With out real data and some of that boring statistical stuff such as standard deviations etc. there is no way to judge the validity of the argument.
There is implication of some sort of statistical validity but no real way given to check the significance or degree.
Sadly, I never ever had any difficulty find current examples of this sort of logic for my teaching. There are always lot's of articles using this sort of argument around.
1
I'm a white father. Both my non-white wife and I invest enormous amounts of time and effort into our children's well being. My children are better off for those efforts - I see it everyday. I cannot imagine that only matters for white people and I can't imagine that similar efforts from a married black couple would somehow not produce similar positive outcomes. Yes, everyone needs money and a lack of access to resources does negatively affect a child. But more than anything, children need the emotional security and structure that a family provides. Anyone who has ever raised a child knows that without question.
I work a lot with data, and there is a time we need to pull our head out of the numbers and ask ourselves 'does what the numbers say make sense?' Here is one of those times the author would benefit with a bit more skepticism and introspection.
6
@Dave
"Here is one of those times the author would benefit with a bit more skepticism and introspection."
I suspect you got caught in the article's rhetorical trap of making this a black/white issue. Though no details were provided, it reads like the more significant factor is family support for the child regardless of whether this is from multiple parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, or wherever.
But that might have been insufficiently controversial.
...Andrew
Money can't buy love....
5
It would be interesting to see how many completed college versus just attained a high school diploma. High schools give diplomas to those barely literate just to get them out.
Look at college graduation. I think we would see the value of a father and two incomes there. There are always exceptions to the rule. Beyoncé is an exception. Your average construction worker is the rule.
You are not the exception, you are the rule.
3
So, yeah, if you are a millionaire it doesn't matter how many parents you have. Or maybe where you came from.
1
So did African American children in fact do _well_ in single parent households with good economic means and an extended family to help? Or just not any worse than usual?
3
I'm surprised Dr. Cross didn't consider two parent adoptive families at all in this article, only biological ones.
Grandma is the rock in many black families. I think many Grandmothers make better Dads than many sperm donors.
2
@Diane what of kids who have a mother, father and two grandmothers?
1
You've left out some significant data points that are essential to evaluating your argument. You point out that "black youths raised by both biological parents are still three times more likely to live in poverty than are their white peers," for instance, but do not tell us how much more likely black youths in single-parent homes are to live in poverty than their white peers. Similarly, you tell us that "black two-parent families have half the wealth of white two-parent families," but don't give us the apples-to-apples data point for comparison: What is the wealth gap between black single-parent homes and white single parent homes?
I agree with the overall thrust of your argument as it pertains to the importance of socioeconomic factors. But by failing to include these crucial data points, it feels like we're missing the chance to talk about a larger point, which you only nodded to briefly: Single-parent homes are far more likely to face socioeconomic disadvantages. And perhaps more significantly, families facing socioeconomic disadvantages are more likely to become single-parent families.
I'm not so sure that these two vectors, family structure and socioeconomic disadvantage, can be easily separated, or even discretely understood.
5
@Revelwoodie
The data points are purposely left out to encourage people to subconsciously jump to the biased conclusion that fatherhood doesn't really matter, even though the actual full set of data shows that it absolutely does.
10
@Samuel Russell While it is true that most single-parent homes are female-led, I don't think the author is trying to raise a gender issue. Race seems to be the focus. And as I said, I do agree with her point out about the primacy of socioeconomic factors. Even her more specific thesis, that black families are not as severely impacted by single parenthood as white families, seems both well supported by her research as she's described it, and consistent with my common sense and real world observations.
However, by leaving out those data points I mentioned, we might be burying the lede. If it's true that "black two-parent families have half the wealth of white two-parent families," for instance, but the comparable data point showed that black single-parent families have one quarter the wealth of white single-parent families, that would mean that black two-parent families have twice the wealth of black single-parent families. The conclusion then would be that while family structure does have less impact on black families than white families, it still does have devastating impact.
If we found that black Americans got pancreatic cancer at half the rate of white Americans, I would hope no one would be tempted to write about the "myth of pancreatic cancer."
2
@Revelwoodie Oops...I made s serious typo. When I said "but the comparable data point showed that black single-parent families have one quarter the wealth of white single-parent families," I meant "but the comparable data point showed that black single-parent families have one quarter the wealth of white TWO-parent families." Sorry about that!
I agree with this premise. While my boys would have definitely benefitted from having their dad in our house/state, the fact that we are fortunate enough to live in an affluent suburb with great resources has one applying to great colleges and another starting a community college this year.
1
If the issue is indeed, "access to resources," it stands to reason that a child will still have more resources if there are two adults rather than one providing them with resources. This is nonsensical, semantic tomfoolery.
7
The experiment we need to run is to take $1T from the richest 10,000 families in the US (the top 0.01%) and circulate it through the real economy by rebuilding schools, roads, parks and other infrastructure, extending healthcare to all, hiring more teachers and raising their pay, distributing healthy food to neighborhoods that lack it...I could go on all day with what $1T could do to make America greater.
If instead it makes America worse, then we could go back to the policies of the Republicans and Corporate Democrats. Or brainstorm some other new solutions.
But till we try that experiment, all our talk is just camouflage for 10,000 out of 100,000,000 families hoarding half the wealth. We've been running that experiment for 40 years. Time for a change.
1
@Dan Coleman And what happens when that 1 trillion is gone? Do you anticipate another 1 trillion being available to continue funding the proposals? Or are you advocating a one time taking? We could collect all the wealth, divide by the population, and in one year we would still have inequality.
1
I think it would be far more constructive to put aside the idea that a child must have two parents to prosper and focus on the idea that the more adults are involved in a child's life, the better off they are. Certain two parents are better than one, IF the parents are mentally, emotionally, and financially healthy. Blind adherence to the idea that a child must have a mother and father bound by marriage leaves the child at the mercy of neglect and abuse and the parents unable to leave a marriage due to social pressure.
We would all be better off if we recognized that ALL children deserve loving, healthy adults involved in their lives, and that these adults can enter from many directions - family, friends, neighborhoods, faith communities, activities, and so on. Moreover, adults who involve themselves in the lives of children serve both the children and themselves and help create a more resilient, vibrant community.
2
Dr. Cross' arguments make sense. They also imply an application to white families. Because our racist society tends to give white people extra advantages, a relatively large number of white children grow up in middle and upper class households, where commonly in a two parent family, both parents bring significant resources to the household, so the loss of either parent means the loss of more resources than would be true in a poorer family. This is true not only about loss of income, but loss of other resources, such as prestige, time and attention (whether directly of the parent, or from paid substitutes such as high quality child care). I'd suggest, in other words, that Dr. Cross has found the application to black children of a general rule that has been misunderstood.
The scientific method for discovering relationships/causation is useful, but limited. Every question, every hypothesis or idea cannot be studied or rationalized. Two parent vs one parent is loaded with morality claims and biases. The bottom line facts are that poverty and lack of choice/empowerment make it much more difficult to raise future productive citizens- much more impactful than whether or not a child has a two or one parent household.
What about parents that divorce but are still actively involved in the children's lives? When a single parent home is mentioned, is the author refering to the other parent not being involved at all in the raising of the child?
I am divorced but I am very much involved in my boys lives. I teach them about working on cars, play outside with them, take them places. They do more activities with me and my new wife then they do with their mother and her boyfriend.
My boys will not be a burden on society even if they don't live with me full time. I am more actively involved in their lives than their mother and they spend 76% of their time with her.
5
@Amone rates for depression and crime rise dramatically for children of divorce. Your children may be the exception. They are not the rule.
1
@Amone, this is my question too. There are must be differences between children who lose a parent to death or abandonment vs. children whose other parent is still very involved, vs. children who are born to or adopted by women who are truly single. There must be both financial and emotional differences.
2
Well, Dr. Cross, there is a correlation between family structure and resources. Most families with good structure have access and ownership of positive resources. This is why marriage is so important. Even divorced parents will have children that will have better outcomes than poor children from single families. This fact is across the board for all ethnicities and races. I think a better study would be finding out why black marriage rates have been so much lower than marriage rates of all other races in the past 50 years.
6
Brad Wilcox (UVA Scholar) had an interesting Tweet about this article. He mentioned the author's own studies that come to opposite conclusions. Why aren't these included?
9
Two can live for almost the same cost as be one, the years a couple live together before they have children they can save, single-mother household don't have that opportunity. Rent, gas, electric cable, all are pretty much the same whether there's one or two living in the house. Even with food it is almost the same effort to shop and cook for two as it is for one.
Asian immigrants who have strong two parent families, a saving culture, are getting ahead economically. Families that are headed by single parents, are falling behind.
Many single parents headed are retiring without any savings, their children don't have the benefit of a college fun and graduate thousands of dollars in debt.
Some groups are getting ahead others sadly are stagnating or falling behind. family composition is frequently a determining factor.
6
It's actually not that complicated: given *any* socio-economic circumstances, the child raised in a stable (non-abusive, etc.), intact family with two biological parents in the house is going to do better. Period.
Of course there are many complicated factors that go into creating single parents families, including economic injustice, crime, structural racism and the like. Of course single parent children can succeed in life. But it does not cancel out the superiority of raising a child in the aforementioned two parent household.
The only myth this essay exposes is the lie the cultural liberationist left has been telling us for generations, that men don't matter, fathers don't matter, commitment doesn't matter, that having babies out of wedlock is just another consequence-free decision people should be able to choose without the slightest social stigma.
We've been picking up the pieces ever since.
7
This is why there is such distrust of the social sciences. Anyone who grew up with or without two parents, or had such friends knows the immense value of two parents. I say this as someone who grew up with access to resources yet without a father, something that affected my life on almost a daily basis and took decades to overcome.
9
It would be interesting to separate the sexes of the children in the study. My priors are that boys suffer from the absence of a dad more than girls, but I'd love to see some evidence.
2
Folks, an op-ed about science can't cover all the methodological details and controls in a research study. If you want to criticize the study's methods, and malign the author's intentions, fine -- but consider reading the actual paper first, not just the newspaper summary of it.
1
The study would be more meaningful if the author compared the achievements of black youths brought up in two parent households with those brought up in single parent households.
56
@Paul Kovner I suppose the data would show that two parents are better than one, and two impoverished parents are better than one impoverished parent. And one financially secure parent is better than two impoverished parents. The last point being true doesn't negate the first point, which is what the author is trying to do.
4
@Paul Kovner you are too kind. Without doing the comparison or presenting the results for the scenario you describe the study is meaningless.
That one sub-group fares better than another sub-group in single family homes is meaningless if the difference is between starving and going without shoes and just simply starving.
This article is the definition of misleading through omission.
1
Ludicrous.
But then, I didn’t go to Harvard.
9
Nice try; the point of this piece is to demonstrate that the breakdown (i.e., elimination) of the two-parent family structure in the black community is having no ill-effects on the children raised by single mothers,, who frequently have multiple children fathered by different partners. To me, it doesn't sound so good. But then I'm no social scientist.
9
The racist evil in this article is subtle. As far as I can tell, the underlying premises have to do with race. What would the findings be if economic circumstances were controlled for in the analysis. But no, the authors seem hell-bent on making it about race!
8
NYT publishes these op-eds by academics about their studies somewhat often, and this isn't the first time I've been struck by the lack of specifics about the author's findings.
Ms. Cross says her study, "found that living apart from a biological parent does not carry the same cost for black youths as for their white peers, and being raised in a two-parent family is not equally beneficial."
But what's the difference? Are we talking about just a couple percentage points different in measured outcomes, or more significant differences? Maybe I'm a cynic, but I assume if the numbers were that persuasive the author would not have neglected to improve them. I guess I should read the study, but...
9
Christina Cross concludes: "...what deserves policy attention is not black families’ deviation from the two-parent family model but rather structural barriers such as housing segregation and employment discrimination that produce and maintain racialized inequalities in family life."
Whoever has to break this news to David Brooks has to do it gently. He's going to take this pretty hard.
@batavicus As an Black American female, I have more faith in David Brooks' assumptions than this op-ed. During the period in our history where structural barriers were much higher than they are now (during Jim Crow & segregation), Blacks had marriage rates around 90%. The author doesn't explain why that dropped as structural barriers dropped.
7
How do you improve the "socioeconomic" conditions of a household? Have two adults making money and taking care.
11
It's merely empirical observation, but during my 30-year career in criminal justice, I encountered a relatively tiny number of men and women - regardless of race - who came from an intact family.
6
Time to get out of the classroom and get on to the street Dr. Cross.
I live in a poor section of San Diego. There are kids who are successful at getting an education, moving up and out, then there are those who are not. You are correct in that taking advantage of the many programs available to help disadvantaged students is a key factor in their success. However you miss the point completely about why so many Black students from single parent families do so poorly as opposed to say Asian families who live in the same neighborhood and go to the same school, who have two parent households.
A single parent household, almost always headed by a woman, DOES NOT HAVE THE TIME, THEY ARE TOO BUSY TRYING TO SURVIVE. Many are working long hours or holding two jobs. How are they supposed to get their kids to the resource centers or the social service agencies, or follow up with school councilors about learning problems, or even learn that such programs exist? In many cases these are kids who have had kids. They did not come from a stable household to begin with and education was not a priority, thus the "the sins of the father will be visited upon the children."
I am not a sociologist, but in 45 years of observing the human condition, all over our nation, having a two parent stable household, that sets rules, makes education a priority, and provides an example for the kids to follow, is the greatest factor in children's success.
13
I'd be curious to see a deeper breakdown of the effects (of different family structures) on girls vs boys, since the vast majority of the single parents are moms, not dads. So one gender is largely growing up (the last 40 yrs or so) lacking parents or role models of their gender and one is not.
I have no numbers but I'd guess that the last 40 years have seen boys (from such homes) decline in school vis a vis girls, get in more trouble, take drugs, act violent or go to jail more than their female classmates from similar homes.
Boys growing up without involved dads are put at a great disadvantage in our society. I wish the author had addressed this distinction.
5
The destruction of two-parent families began, I believe, when government funding to help the poor was limited to single parent families. I suspect now that many parents are single on paper, but not in reality. Marriage is not economically feasible when it comes with cuts to much needed social services.
That said, some of the most well adjusted children I have ever known were from single parent homes.
To further my point, please note that Donald Trump was raised in a two parent home. I would not call him well adjusted.
6
The author has short term data which is the weak link in behavioral science research. While one needs to keep an open mind that there are multiple paths to a child’s well being into adulthood, the question remains as to whether or not benefits are passed onto the next generation. In our current social and economic structure, the ability to generate substantial savings is critical. Can a single parent household create this kind of security? It certainly strikes me as a better safety net than relying on the government. The ability of one generation to stand on the shoulders of the prior generation is a huge advantage. Then again, public resources when well conceptualized is a good investment.
3
The most interesting part, and the most difficult to gauge, is the access to extended families. Generally, blacks, Latinos and Asians have more access, closer families. But family and culture can both improve and limit an individual, e.g., a girl growing up in a very tight-knit religious community may have fewer options than an only child of a single schoolteacher who has lots of friends. But this is ONLY food for thought, as the variables are so vast that a supercomputer couldn't figure it out. And that is the biggest problem with sociology. Happiness and success are not the same thing. So what are we talking about?
1
There are many barriers for black children and certainly culture and social norms are different in many black families. I would have liked for her to research the difference in economic status between black families with a single parent and black families with two parents, as well, though. I believe the difference will be significant and still should be considered, too.
3
Does the the 'myth of the two-parent family' (father and mother both present) negatively impact research outcomes. How do you measure the effect of a societal myth?
Extended family nearby seems to be a major factor, plus a 'demanding' family loved/respected family figure is also important.
Can extended family and stressing the importance of education at home overcome an inadequate public school system?
More research!
I have read quite a few of the comments here and I am disheartened. The author has put forth research to substantiate the misconceptions that childhood performance is linked to single parenting. Anecdotal experiences can't dispute the facts presented.
So many of the comments seem angry that maybe our society is to blame and not, conveniently, the people of color themselves. This is the kind of thinking that perpetuates poverty and hinders achievement.
I call it implicit bias.
5
Well the first three letters are “ I pulled myself up from my bootstraps”. Wonderful,this is the American dream. In this capitalist society the thought that love and hard work will always wins is strong. It’s also wrong, after 65 years orbiting the sun. It’s cash that opens doors.
The rest is a lovely myth.
1
Oh my God. This essay is beyond the pale. It’s remarkably poor quality reasoning. Almost worthy of The Onion.
Quality of parenting matters far more than number of parents, regardless of race and socioeconomic status. I had two parents. One parent was toxic and emotionally abusive. A seemingly perfect nuclear family is often not what it appears to be.
I’ve seen plenty of children raised in affluent, two-parent homes grow up to be wastrels or monsters. And I have seen children of single, low income moms thrive. Don’t blame the circumstances — race, income, overall socioeconomic status, upbringing — for parental failure. Parents make choices.
“Happy families are alike. every unhappy family is unhappy in it’s own way.” —Leo Tolstoy
3
One element that has been perhaps overlooked in this discussion is the effect of unprecedented mobility of the American family from roughly 1920-2000, especially during the post WWII boom years. While my grandparents’ generation (I’m a Boomer) lived near each other or in multigenerational arrangements, my parents and their siblings scattered all over the country following careers and enjoying focusing on their own nuclear families. It was they heyday of individualist thinking for whites. My generation started out with the same assumptions but with the economic turbulence that has marked our worklives, especially since 2000, we are again seeking to rebuild our familial community nearer to each other—specifically to share resources and to enjoy the richer life that extended family (and other kinds of close community) can add to our lives beyond the financial. My Gen X/Y children find that draw to community attractive as well, but they also are pushed by risk factors such as student debt, exorbitant housing costs and lack of anything like real long term job security.
Perhaps future research can help us overly individualistic white people learn from our African-American brothers and sisters the strength that comes from being strongly connected to a close community, whoever they may be.
15
@WhatshernameOne There are plenty of white people with strong communities, your generalizations are very racist.
This article should be titled, “The Myth That 2 2 = 4”.
Life is hard and filled with challenges no matter the color of your skin. That is why it makes so much sense to find a partner and face the challenge together. Marriage is not rooted in romance or reports from Congress, it is a product of our fight for survival over the millennia.
The fact that “economic resources” doled out by the government and extended family can help offset the disadvantages inherent in a single parent household is obvious, but certainly not a prescription for future success. This study makes no mention of the common sense challenges that arise when marriages break down. Parenting is a full time job. Who volunteers at school, who gets involved in community organizations, how does the fabric of society get woven when every hour is consumed with work? This is a big enough challenge for two parent families. It is nearly impossible for single parent families.
Nothing beats having a teammate bound to you with a vow of “for better or for worse I will be there for you and our family.” No government program can replace that.
9
If we women want the right to choose to have children (or not) to be fully our own choice and right, then we have some obligation to our civil society to use that right responsibly. Waiting to have children until we, alone or with a partner, can fully support them, is part of that responsibility. Neither shame nor scorn are necessary to accomplish this, but on the other hand, folkways that promote what is best for children and our society should be respected.
4
OK, so while two parents does make a difference access to resources makes more of a difference….lets accept that premise….
So what?
The parents are still the parents and by taking full responsibility for their children will improve their children’s chances. The fact that resources make a difference too is interesting but completely irrelevant to the importance of parents standing up and doing their bit.
3
The critics of this thoughtful column are willfully blind to the realities of race and poverty.
I've known, and written about, this phenomenon for years, albeit with less empirical support than Cross.
We've always had the associations and correlations backwards. It is because of race, poverty and lack of resources that so many black children have difficulty. Those same factors make it very hard for single mothers to manage the complexities of parenthood and financial stability. Looked at through this lens, single black mothers are heroic. I've known women of color who care lovingly for a child and ride a bus roundtrip for hours every day to provide "services" to the kinds of smug white folks who criticize the lack of family values in communities of color.
And, of course, there would be so many more two parent families of color in America if not for our systemic racism putting the fathers in jail for doing things every white suburban kid does with impunity.
And a whole other column could be written about the factor of extended family support, which is a critical necessity for those living in America's racist shadows.
3
@Barking Doggerel Let's be clear that there is some female portion of our society who become pregnant and decide to have that child regardless of whether or not they can afford to raise that child. Many of the critics herein are speaking to those women. Women cannot demand respect for their own agency to bear children while ignoring their responsibility to those children and our society. Waiting to have children may often be better for the woman, by allowing them to pursue training and skills for their own futures, which would bring that child greater access to the resources this writer shows are valuable. The results of this study support that waiting to have a child until one has a partner and greater resources with which to raise that child is best.
3
So Moynihan was wrong. I'm going to have to work hard to wrap my head around this new paradigm. Problem is, "resources" is the polite word for "spend more of your money". Just give minority kids more stuff (dress it up all you like, make it sound like a moral imperative) and it'll all be super-groovy. Oops, been done. Johnson's Great Society produced the results we have today, and so the logic here is all that's needed is MORE money in the bucket. Then again, the alternative explanation is that Dr. Cross here is just barking up the the wrong (old) tree.
8
In the United States, there is virtually no available, quality child care that is not very expensive. Women who think it's fine to have a child or children on their own are, in my view, making a big mistake unless they are very well to do or have family that is. Food, shelter, clothing all cost money. Unfortunately, where one sees the real problems are with the multi-children poor women (both black, white and other) and the opiod-addicted women (usually white) who become pregnant. Children deserve a lot better than too many of them get.
5
I accept that having two-parents won't solve all problems and won't, by itself, lift families out of poverty or guarantee good outcomes for children. But it's better than nothing, as even this author tacitly concedes. Because, in the end, everyone is ultimately responsible for their own life and choices, even if we recognize that some people need a little extra help from society. Folks like this author would have us all sitting around doing nothing and waiting for society to lift us up.
8
"I demonstrate that family structure has a weaker relationship to the educational success of black adolescents than of white adolescents."
This result is, no doubt, because, unfortunately, African Americans are so poor, and discriminated against so aggressively, that it hardly matters if the child is raised by single parent, two parents, two parents and four grandparents, or that plus an entire village, or any combination of people.
Which, I think is what you are saying, but it is not crystal clear.
1
I wonder is a female's ability to be selective about their mate is a factor. There may be some sorting where women with high levels of education or career can be more selective in their mating partner, while other women can't or won't be as selective.
Female empowerment has been a good thing, but I see more and more sorting where a professional woman will pair off with a professional man, creating a more wealthy household. Men without a highschool diploma or with a criminal record are no longer able to attract a female with more resources, so females with low resources have a more constrained population of males to select from.
We talk about wealth inequality, income inequality, but what about partner inequality? With marriage no longer about survival, for the most part, it seems like those who are most likely to get married are the same ones who are going to have successful careers and higher resources for raising kids. Which is to say, marriage doesn't cause better performing children but is correlated with it (policy implication would be that you can't bridge the gap by promoting only marriage, we would also have to promote better selection processes before marriage).
2
I'm embarrassed for some of the commenters' lack of critical thinking. It should be obvious that those who are extolling the value of 2 parents are implying that the parents are responsible, law abiding, free of drugs/alcohol, etc. No one thinks two junkies are better than one solid hard working parent.
Also, please look up "anecdotal". Comments like, "my brother-in-law's cousin grew up with a single parent and he's a Rhodes Scholar!", are meaningless.
5
The primary familial relation is that of mother and child. The two-parent family myth has always lurked and loomed behind “traditional” “values based” socioeconomic systems that categorize mothers and their children as dual dependents, dependent on men or on social welfare systems. Both caring for a child and keeping a home are work. People question why birthrates are low. Birthrates are low, in part because values- based systems encourage many working and educated women to delay bearing children. Females are most fertile from their pre-teen years until their early thirties. It is in someone's interest to keep women in their places and some girls and women in lower places that others. Another reality that lurks behind the “dependent” label applied to many single mothers who may need public assistance: the children of single mothers become more easily appropriated and blended into wealthier two parent families where, sometimes, childbearing, has been delayed in order to accumulate more wealth. It’s all about money and what sort of work is valued.
A two parent family which includes the biological mom and dad. It's not a myth. Must be coincidence that all the wealthy people stay married and poor people don't. Or that poor people don't even get married.
Of course the fact that it's near impossible to get TANF(Clinton's abbreviated welfare), section 8 housing, or qualify for food stamps if living in a two income family doesn't help. The govt handouts are predicated on single parenthood.
2
Dr Cross's complete article says that indicators of socioeconomic stress are parents' education, age, and health status and that these variables largely account for the racial differences observed in graduating on time from high school.
It also says children whose mothers had a BA or higher, were older at childbirth, and in good health were more likely to graduate from high school.
Aren't many of those factors the results of individual choices?
1
I worked for a time as a volunteer with juvenile prisoners. On Mother's Day one year I asked how many of the young men wanted me to bring them cards to send their moms -- Every single hand went up. I asked the same question for Father's Day -- Not a single person raised his hand. That told me all I need to know about the importance of two-parent households as it applies to young men.
8
"...but rather structural barriers such as housing segregation and employment discrimination".
Presented without evidence. Both practices are illegal.
Does Dr. Cross have even a basic understanding of statistics? What about exploring the correlation between two parent households and their increased economic status? It would seem to be a more promising approach than using racial tropes to explain away your data.
3
How many of us reading this article grew up in two-parent households? How many of us over-educated white people (count me in) preach to the rest of society about how "beneficial" the changes of the 1960s have been? Do as we say, not as we do. Shame on us for this nonsense. The collapse of a two-parent family has devastating consequences for the children; everyone who lives in the real world knows this, and shame on all of us for pretending to suggest otherwise. Until and unless we support the family - all families, all types of stable families - we will continue to reap what we sow: chaos and poverty for our children.
3
This is why sociology professors only get paid a percentage of their peers in law and engineering: they often have an outcome they want to prove so they select statistics that prove their points. This is case in point; it's just absolutely ridiculous to argue with any merit that kids don't need both parents for a better shot at success. Yes, there are outliers (I am one), but one doesn't need a study to know the obvious.
7
Children who grow up in poverty and every day deal with bigotry are simply less likely to thrive. Poverty also prevents marriages from happening and helps break them up.
1
This kind of selective reasoning gives sociology a bad name. So the conclusion is that single parent households don't affect black families as much as whites, because the black families are already poor. And they are poor because of structural racism (which conveniently is never specifically defined or proven in the study). Perhaps they are poor due to generations of single parenting and teen motherhood. But this obvious "chicken or egg" factor is never considered.
So guess what? It's society's fault! I'm guessing that's the result the professor intended all along.
206
@Max You don't need to guess.
If you read the last paragraph, it appears she intended to call for a collective reconsideration of the zillions of dollars the Federal Government currently spends on promoting marriage amongst poor people. Her rationale being that traditional marriage does not benefit black communities in the same way it benefits white communities.
25
I think her intent was to help us question something that has been widely and historically accepted. Yes, teen motherhood and single parenting are issues in the black community that should not be blamed on society, but lack of resources and education are also factors in that community. Those issues need to be addressed directly rather than promoting marriage. That, I believe, is her point.
28
@Nora Again, they lack resources more because they have fewer parents making money and caring for their children. More government makes it worse, not better. Society has never thought it better for government to raise kids instead of parents.
15
I'm sure the author of this piece imagines that, by writing it, she is helping black people, but she is not. In fact, she's harming them by making it sound as though the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks in this country isn't that big of a problem.
But it is a big problem. A very big one. And so is the wildly disproportionate rate of violent crime. So long as these problems persist, socio-economic progress within the black community will be tragically minimal.
So talk about structural racism all you want, but please don't downplay the negative effects of crime and out-of-wedlock births. By doing so, you're simply hurting the people you wish to help.
7
Simply put, marriage does not cure poverty.
80
@maryann Perhaps, but then I suppose working two jobs doesn't either. Nor having children out of wedlock. Nor government handouts for many generations.
Government overspends by $1 trillion each year, yet there's no benefit to the poor, only more harm due to constrictions on free markets that blocks jobs, price out the unskilled labor, promotes automation investment over labor, etc. The less free your markets, the less free your people.
5
@maryann
But it doesn't hurt, either. In fact, it can only help.
10
@David "having children out of wedlock" is an oversimplification of the large proportion of single parent households among African Americans. The War on Drugs - which disproportionately targeted black and latino men for minor drug offenses that in many states today would not be considered criminal acts - incarcerated millions of fathers. The effects of this were immediate and also generational.
9
I was a black single parent with financial resources to make enough money to raise a doctor and an economist. I totally agree with the author. I know of two parent black families living in poverty in Chicago seeing their children shot.
I got out of the hood.
92
@Denise Yes, the hood is a bad culture. Escaping bad culture is key to avoid me-too-ism that continues the cycles of violence and poverty over demands of respect and government handouts.
4
@Denise Your experience is outside statistics. A two-parent family that got out of the hood would be better off financially than your single-parent family. A single-parent family living in the hood would be worse off financially than the two-parent families. To really compare, you have to look at similar situations.
4
@Denise
I think that you are actually arguing against the author's point. You had resources and you moved out of the hood. Single poor mothers in inner cities are less likely to be able to move compared to 2-parent families, especially if one parent is college educated.
4
Thought provoking important research. Pay attention people, and grow wiser, do better. Thank you.
It's a shame that it takes 30 years of data to demonstrate the blindingly obvious -- that growing up in poverty has negative impacts on kids regardless of how many parents live in the household.
It's a worse shame that so many people would rather make moralistic judgments about family structure -- since those who scold single-parent families also bemoan gay families, polyamorous families, and extended families -- than to do the real work of fighting poverty.
We could work for living wages, affordable child care, quality education, and universal access to health care, but we have chosen to be scolds instead.
1
Nothing moralistic about it. It is the simple truth that life is hard and your chances of success are much better if you find a teammate to face it with. All the better if that teammate is bound to you with a vow of “for better or for worse” because things can get pretty rough. If you stick together, your odds of success and that of your family are much better.
1
Proving resources help family outcomes is kind of like proving water is wet. My first thought though was extended family makes a difference. What's two parents when you have two grandparents and a host of aunts and uncles? Even in two parent households, you'll find outcomes improve in relationship to communal support. Most community begins with familial proximity. It's not hard to knuckle the relationship out.
If you're our on your own, you'll have a harder time raising a child whether you have a spouse or not. In fact, I'll wager community support is correlated to divorce rates as well. A married couple with children is less likely to stay married if they don't have that same network of support. The result isn't derived from your marital status. The result derives from how widely you can distribute the burden of parenthood. Narrow is bad. Broad is good. Resources obviously help compensate for a narrow distribution.
1
“The Myth of the Two-Parent Home” is not a myth, it is a fact, given the author’s conclusion that “youths raised in two-parent families are less likely to live in poverty”, and her conclusion that socio-economic stresses are the key determinant in youth outcomes.
And this from Harvard?
7
Apparently working at Harvard is no guarantee that you can observe the obvious. If "access to resources" is the key wouldn't one expect that in general a two parent household would have more resources than of single parent one. I wonder if the good doctor looked at average income comparisons between one and two parent households. Putting aside the nurturing effect that having a known father who demonstrates he loves you by being a father, mathematically two is more than one. Can you say confirmation bias.
4
Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were both raised without fathers, and both became the most successful men in the world (US Presidents). So yes, it is true that single-parent households aren't always a barrier to children's success. However, those two examples had unusually brilliant DNA/genetics that allowed them to compensate for their parenting deficiencies. Biologically, the success of children depends on the combination of genes and parenting. Sometimes the extremes can compensate for each other, or the middle-ground combination of the two can also lead to good outcomes.
2
The key sentence in this analysis is this: "Differences in access to socioeconomic resources such as mother’s education accounted for up to nearly 50 percent of the gap in high school completion..."
It's not that the parents are married or living together, it's the parents' (and/or extended family's) belief in the value of an education, and the support they give to the child to achieve in school. A high school or college grad is much more likely to believe in this value than a non-grad. I know this anecdotally as both my mother and ex-wife did not finish high school, and both were much less invested in education than either my father or myself.
1
Raising kids is expensive and demanding of time, energy and resources. Any couple who decides to have kids puts a drag on their wealth building due to these demands. Single parents living in low socio-economic status have even less opportunity to build wealth. Ones chances of escaping poverty are greatly reduced by having children, even more so by doing it as a single parent. How many more people living in poverty would better their lot by not having children unless or until they could afford them? I'd bet we would see great changes in the poverty rate if birth rates among the impoverished were greatly reduced.
4
High school graduation is a useless measure in an age of social promotion. To graduate from high school these days, all you have to do is show up and breathe. If that is a measure of achievement, we are in trouble. Pick a real measure, like juvenile delinquency, drug or alcohol use, and crime rates.
4
What this article is missing is the effect of absentee fathers on the incarceration rate of black (and white) youths. As someone who has visited and corresponded with prisoners for many years, I can tell you that the effect is profoundly destructive of self-esteem and a young man's capacity to resist the allure of criminalizing peer pressure.
6
This column made me think of Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice,' where a financially loaded Mr Darcy swoops in and demolishes all Ms. Dashwood's financial and social problems with a single 'I do.'
Whatever you think of the romance genre, it does persistently message an underlying social expectation of white culture: marriage is supposed to make men happier and women wealthier (humor me, please).
But what about in poor communities, where wealth is scarce, wealthy partners more so, and prospects for 'moving up' don't exist? What's the calculus there?
Among white women, studies suggest that a delay in marriage for more educated women also correlates with a delay in child bearing. This is not so among less educated and (usually) less wealthy white women, who are more likely not to delay child bearing until marriage.
Another factor: what women who delay childbirth are doing during those years ( getting degrees, starting careers and businesses) vs how women with children spend that time ( providing childcare).
When sharing scarce resources is the likely outcome of marriage, there is a strong disincentive to marry.
The number one factor in success of children across many communities is the resources of the birth mother. Whether those resources include a partner, ex-partner, an income stream of her own, her personal wealth, extended family, or a mix, they all play an important role in family outcomes.
Marriage doesn't cure poverty.
I think children can thrive in all kinds of family arrangements. What is disturbing to me is how many fathers are absent and apparently have no sense of responsibility or obligation to their kids. Raising kids is about more than writing a check--and many fathers don't even do that.
Politicians seems obsessed with interfering in the lives and decisions of single mothers, but are strangely silent about the obligations of the men who father these children.
6
The author is making some pretty significant causal claims that I'm not sure is backed up in the research. Throwing the kitchen sink of variables into a set of (non-hierarchical) regression models and looking at changes in the magnitude or statistical significance of other coefficients doesn't prove anything. In many cases -- particularly when the data is observational and there is not a clearly thought-out casual structure (where's the DAG?) -- it can induce significant bias.
8
Children without a father in the household yearn for one. It is not just for financial reasons but also for security. The father figure sets a good example in the home especially for boys. I feel it is better to be poor with a father than poor without one. There is always hope that your life situation will improve and it usually does. How often does a family first starting out struggle the first few years only to see their lives turn around. This happens frequently and with determination and hard work they usually succeed. Two parent families are best and are wonderful role models for future generations.
48
@KMW Did you read the article?
5
Isn't family structure itself linked to income/poverty? Poverty - particularly generational poverty and poverty that pervades whole communities puts immense stress on marriages. The nuclear family and father as breadwinner model is not tenable when a family is one missed paycheck away from eviction or one or both parents is being targeted by a justice system and banking system which are both predatory towards the poor. Maybe we've been looking at a symptom of the same problem and calling it the cause...
1
" I demonstrate that family structure has a weaker relationship to the educational success of black adolescents than of white adolescents. ..."
This, frankly, is nonsensical and I am certain that a rigorous analysis of the report in question will find fatal flaws. Dr. Cross may mean well but the overall context of her article is rather damaging as it seems to excuse the tendency of black men to run away from, and be accountable to, their families. This can't be good any way you slice or excuse it.
9
"Myth" - you came up with a conclusion on your own and found data points you think support it.
Follow the scientific method and this conclusion crumbles: there is much much more information that proves your theory wrong than there is information that proves it right.
9
I’m black. I was raised by a professional single mother. I graduated from high school, went to an Ivy League school, got a master’s degree and have been gainfully employee since graduation. I had extremely involved grand parents who would move in with us for months at a time. My grand mother cooked frozen dinners for us to relieve my mom. My grand father taught me how to read in pre-k. They also helped me stay debt free in college and grad school.
A few miles away, my black half siblings grew up in a two parent home, with a stay at home mom who did everything right. They have struggled far more than I have to hit those same milestones.
I’m convinced that school quality, neighborhood quality and extended family networks that provided enrichment and demanded I meet very high standards made all the difference.
237
@BB
The key is that someone demanded you meet high standards and you respected that someone enough to meet them. The project Aunties were that someone for me. The first school was not so good so the Aunties taught us. Forced bussing came and the lighter skinned kids were bused to a nearby "white" school. Things got better but the Aunties upped their demands. Years later when I met my black father's family, I saw the same demands placed on my half-siblings by our Big Momma. We all have advanced degrees save for 2. One was a very successful beauty salon owner and the other did not respect Big Momma and refused to meet her demands and has been struggling with 5 kids ever since.
21
@BB "Demanded that I meet very high standards..." YES! Whether it's a single- or two-parent home, this is the most significant factor, IMHO.
19
@BB Yes. I've been "poor" at different points in my life, but I always had family and friends with resources to share if I needed help. I would be much worse off - definitely could not have earned a degree - if that weren't the case.
As for "demanded high standards" - people often call this "tough love" - but really it means believing a child can meet those expectations. Kids in poverty are often surrounded by adults with low expectations for them. Its actually been measured that children in poverty receive more that twice as much negative reinforcement as middle class children.
17
Being raised in poverty is a really really bad lot to draw in life. Black people are much more likely to be poor because of structural racism. Other factors- like family structure, though significant- are not that meaningful when considered in this light.
2
More money is better than less.
Two parents are better than one, unless your man is a bum. In that case, just get rid of him, you’ll be no worse off, and maybe you can find an upgrade.
It helps to be close to grandma and your clan.
There. I just saved you $100K for a PhD. My great grandmother knew the same wisdom. Nothing changes except for the cut of the clothing.
She used to sew the sequins on the costumes for strippers, was born in Europe and ran away from what would have been a poorly arranged marriage, and we had rum runners in the family, so save your breath on how she was privileged.
8
Irrespective of race, it has become much more common and socially acceptable in America during the past half century for young men to father children then become absent in the children’s lives in any meaningful way. This lack of taking responsibility for raising these children and being present in their lives for all of the reasons that we intuitively know are important, has weakened society and the family unit. I’m wholly in favor of the government providing financial support for families in need, whether two parent or one parent households. And racial barriers to housing, employment and education must be removed. But, the author’s statement “Let me be clear: I’m not suggesting that the two-parent family is bad for children of any race or ethnicity.” is not the full-throated endorsement for the two-parent household needed today. To somehow imply that fatherhood is less important because of other factors leading to a child’s success is not the right message for young men today.
170
@Karen J. As an aside: it is not just The fault of “young men who father children and then become absent”. Women who enter into relationships without commitment are equally complicit.
26
@Matt I would prefer a thoughtful choice in having children through artificial insemination rather than a "whoops, I'm pregnant" 2-parent household.
8
Your point would much stronger if there was an expectation of responsibility. The social safety net has made providers obsolete. That's from a guy that's fairly liberal. The sad truth, borne of my extensive experience in the adult and juvenile criminal justice system is that there is zero expectation that young males will partake in the child rearing process or provide financial support. Males are a total afterthought in this respect. They are to be provided for, not actually provide. Jail visitation days, guilty pleas, hearings, trials --- there was rarely a father, uncle, or male authority figure to be seen. I make absolutely no judgment calls here. Poverty necessitated the safety net, but the safety net, like a lot of "solutions", had unintended consequences. One of these is a dysfunctional matriarchal system that supports males.
18
A two parent family is a resource.
I guess that means a a 4 or 5 parent family is an even stronger resource.
It all ain’t necessarily so.
Quantity does not equal quality.
It’s past time that we stop regarding children as the sole responsibility of their parents. Society, if it is to continue and thrive must take a larger part in insuring success which means helping more where needed.
The family unit is too narrowly defined and perhaps should not be defined at all. Protection for individuals is what’s needed.
A person should not be punished or preferred for his/her being a child, adult, man, woman, father, mother, young, old.
No family benefits, no married benefits, just individual benefits.
Our relationships with each other should have no place anywhere except with each other and as we choose.
My son-in-law is African American. His parents were married, his mother became a crack addict. His father went to prison for 5 years for brutally assaulting her when he was 8. He says it was a relief since he terrorized them, beat them hard and frequently. His mother abandoned he and his 2 sisters. His mother's extended family, though very poor, stepped up and took care of them. His great aunt and grandmother gave them a home and made extra money as cooks. His younger sister was born addicted to crack and another cousin took her because she needed intensive help. His cousins bought groceries for them when they could. He disliked summers cus there was no free breakfasts and lunches. I am amazed at how close they all are. He especially loves an older cousin, who is now a school teacher and usually hosts their family gatherings. He shares many fond memories of her gathering them together as children to read stories, make hot chocolate and tell them she is always there for them. She has encouraged them all to graduate from high school and attend college. I admire and envy their relationships. They are a wonderful, happy group. They especially nurtured my son-in-law. He is a kind and sensitive person. The first to hug you when you need it and offer a shoulder to lean on. My daughter didn't just get one guy she got a whole group of loving people
2
I would love to see a study on the impact of providing all sorts of resources to kids of single-parents or newly arrived families AND the effect it has on kids who are identified as NOT in need of any resources based solely on the information that the kid has two parents. I would argue when as a society we work to provide resources to one identified group because the assumption is the family unit can’t provide, we undermined the feeling of security and social cohesion that the other group feels. For example, our school system extends after school learning resources to families who work. Those same resources are NOT available to kids who have a stay at home parent. The assumption being, those families can afford to send their kid to other enriching activities. Doesn’t always work that way. At least locally, there ends up being a group of kids disenfranchised from some resources BECAUSE they have 2 parents.
4
@Past, Present, Future In our idiotic school district only esl children are allowed to enroll In public preschool at the elementary. If you’re a working parent you can go pay for it somewhere else and if not you can stay home and watch your own kids. All children would benefit from high quality preschool, but wouldn’t the kids who can’t speak English and don’t do so at home benefit most from interacting with other children who are native speakers? One wonders who makes these rules and if they are setting kids up for failure.
@maryann here too. The list is long and not open to families who would simply love to pay the basic rate. Not an option. Preschool is heavily subsidized by our County but open to at-risk youth only. I would have been more than willing to pay even the full basic rate because it was still much less than private preschool. And as you point out, isn't it better that kids, no matter their background, learn together even at a young age. They will be in school together at some point anyway. Good time for parents to meet too. I ended up staying home in the end out of necessity. I am not sure things are much better 10 years later.
1
What a good and informative article. It makes sense, in light of these findings, to support programs, as they author suggests, that broaden access to more and better resources for black people in terms of housing and jobs. Alas, however, it has always been thus - blacks have routinely suffered from racism in housing and employment. How long, oh Lord, how long. :(
1
All the resources in the world won’t help a single mother who had kids when she was a teenager, dropped out of school, has little employment prospects, and provides a chaotic and insecure life for her children. To act like her actions made are inconsequential is foolishness.
13
I thumbed up your comment but there is more to say. you'd be wrong to say that the problems you name are the end of it, just as the author is wrong to say that all we need to do is expand resources. values and resources are important, and perhaps intertwined. purpose without money, and money without purpose are both sad.
1
In other words, it isn't "father figures" or "male role models" that kids need. It's money.
Wow, who'd've guessed that.
6
"Although in general, youths raised in two-parent families are less likely to live in poverty, black youths raised by both biological parents are still three times more likely to live in poverty than are their white peers."
This is classic statistical nonsense. Either the author does not understand statistics or she is trying to mislead and manipulate the readers.
Let's say that 2% of white children live in impoverished two-parent families. That means that 6% of black children live in impoverished two-parent families. I wish the numbers were the same. But it does not come close to suggesting what the writer is trying to suggest.
A better statistic - compare the poverty rates of black children in one-parent and two-parent families. That difference would be a shocker, and would disprove the writer's thesis.
7
@Erik
Exactly. From Harvard, no less. It is well-meaning but flawed studies like this that end up hurting both the field and its subjects.
7
Put a poor kid who lives in a stable 2 parent home in a good school ,in a safe neighborhood, and you'll be shocked at the high success rate. Pretty simple, really.
5
Dr Cross -
Good job, learned a lot. Your take on my mistaken preconceptions was dead on target.
It is refreshing to hear from a scientist backed by evidence based facts that yes it is OK if the kid lives with only one parent. There is an extended family close by... What is needed are the resources that keep the family afloat. Current administration is cutting help from 700k welfare recipients, slated to loose their food stamps. Not to mention finding for schools, day cares, after school enrichment classes, etc.
Go, Christina!
47
@Ana Right, because most broken households have wonderful extended families to help? No, the more adults, the better. Two parents is step one, and if you are lucky to have other family, you are luckier than those who do not, yet suffer a single parent who cannot ever escape the bad environment that mentally and physically keeps the residents down.
6
@Ana The food stamp cuts (which I oppose anyway) don't affect families. They are targeted at single adults with no dependents. Facts matter, on both sides of the political debate.
7
No father is better than a bad father? A government handout is better than a bad father? Well, nothing is better than a good father. How about that?
4
Show me a single-parented kid who isn't jealous of kids with two care-givers! Even kids know having 2 people in your court is better. Signed, that kid
3
Blaming black families for not having 2 parents allows us (whites) to deny that systematic racism exists and has a powerful effect on those who experience discrimination. Blaming blacks for their lives and outcomes makes it all their fault and relieves the rest of society of any blame. Then it's easy to refuse to provide support and pretend that we don't owe poor people any kind of support.
Yet historically speaking, blacks were not allowed to have 2 parent families, indeed not allowed to raise their own children. Yes, I'm speaking of slavery, when it was routine to separate families. That is a legacy that whites don't share. Who knows what white families might look like if we had.
90
@democritic Sadly, rural areas impacted by the opioid crisis are going to find out what effects of not being raised in a two-parent families will be on white children.
18
@David Dismissing slavery as a potential influence on the family structures in current black families ignores the fact that a cultural history of something as horrific and long-lasting as slavery can have nuanced lasting effects that are not easily quantifiable by marriage rates in the first half of the 20th century.
20
Historically speaking, the black and white marriage rates in the first half of the twentieth century were essentially identical. Look it up.
8
Children thrive in a safe, stable and predictable environment, surrounded by people who take an active interest in their lives. The specific number and combination of parents/guardians matters less than the environment they provide.
I live in a community with significant generational poverty. The kids struggle not because they have one parent instead of two, but because they live in places that are unsafe (mold and pests in the house, drug and criminal activity in the neighborhood), their families don't have a routine (parents working multiple part-time jobs with variable schedules), and their homes lack stability (they move a lot/change schools, father figures come and go, utilities get shut off due to lack of payment).
Those problems aren't automatically solved if mom & dad are married. We need safe & affordable housing, universal healthcare, and full-time jobs that pay a living wage instead of precarious gigs. That would go a long way in helping all children grow up better.
4
At some point, we will chip away, as this study does, at all of the old tropes that blame black families for their lack of economic advancement. Or we could just own up to the fact that this country systematically, over centuries, has created a society designed to keep black Americans down. Once we do that, we can start to remove the barriers we've so carefully constructed, to housing, education, healthcare and employment. But we first need to acknowledge that the barriers are real, and that we intentionally created them.
119
@Lisa Wesel This is exactly what I was thinking. From slavery, separating families, and not allowing black people to marry to the current rate of mass incarceration that deprives felons of perhaps ever being able to support a family, and discrimination in employment, education, and housing that is still rampant (despite legislation that tries to prohibit it), this country still has a long way to go. This article is meaningless without consideration of the systemic racism that persists here.
8
@Lisa Wesel But explain how Black marriage rates were around 85% during a time when barriers to education, housing, healthcare and employment were much higher than they are now. How is it that the Jim Crow era of our country produced better Black marriage rates than now?
9
@Lisa Wesel Former President Obama and wife Michelle, two of the most respected people in America, Jay Z and Beyonce purchased a 70 million dollar house in Beverly Hills...we could go on and on and on. A society designed to keep Black Americans down?
1
So we can conclude that commitment to caring for the children matters. Whether it is mother or father or both or extended family, paying attention and caring are important.
How about we first start with a national commitment to helping people recognize that commitment and to choosing whether and when to have children. Free birth control for every woman who wants it.
AND clear education in junior high school: human anatomy, human physiology and health, family physical and financial health, and family planning.
I think a life size model of the human body with all removable parts would be really really engrossing for kids. Ditto working models of the heart, the stomach, the lungs, the lymph nodes, and reproduction.
Anyone else interested?
3
Wow, this is some seriously circular reasoning. And it's completely refuted by census data.
According to the census, the single easiest way to avoid poverty (or in the author's words "socioeconomic stress") is to delay having children until you're married or have a committed partner. Have a child on your own and the chance of both you and the child living in poverty increases dramatically.
I don't think any reasonable person would deny this. What I don't understand is why any reasonable person would want to make excuses for a lifestyle choice that is clearly causing grave harm to millions of children.
Fathers matter.
11
Replies seem to indicate that loving, involved parents can be ordered from Amazon. There are many reasons a child has only one involved parent-death, addiction, abuse, mental instability among them. Does anyone believe that an alcoholic, physically and /or sexually abusive father in the home is actually an asset?
The author points out that the education level of the mother, along with a supportive family unit and economic resources can produce successful children. That generations of non traditional homes more prevalent in black families because of centuries of institutional discrimination have made them better equipped to function in that scenario. Seems reasonable to me.
2
A sociologist always finds what a sociologist wants to find. We get a clue to the motivation here in one of the later paragraphs of this analysis, when the author references the Moynihan Report--a report sociologists have wanted to disprove since 1965.
"repeated changes in family structure are less negatively consequential for black adolescents’ risk behaviors than white adolescents’ risk behaviors. They determined that this weaker association was also explained by black adolescents’ more frequent exposure to socioeconomic stress."
Yeah. So the presence of other variables washes out the impact of family structure. This does not necessarily mean that family structure would not be relevant if black adolescents had less frequent exposure to socioeconomic stress. There's a tendency, in social sciences, to see statistical controls as magic. But the context may be vastly different if socioeconomic conditions were different, and that could impact the relative roles of these variables.
The research cited here indicates that black extended families are more likely to live near one another than white extended families. What if they didn't? What if they didn't because parents were more geographically mobile in pursuit of economic opportunities? Wouldn't this change the context for how family structure affects adolescent risk behavior?
7
Correlation does not equal causation. Neither do any models of regression.
7
I work at a high school and I see every day the detrimental effects of well-off, two parent families that are absentee parents, or are dysfunctional themselves.
And I see stable, hard-working students who are parented by one person on a very tight budget.
Yes, in an ideal world, kids would have two devoted parents and access to good resources.
But simply having two parents does not necessarily equal success for young people.
4
@SLB: We're talking about averages here, not individual cases. When constructing social policy, one needs to look at large trends, not the exceptions to those trends.
I say this as the child of a single-parent home who has done pretty well in life: being raised by just one parent--even a very competent and loving one--is a considerable disadvantage.
7
Great article. I just wish the author was more specific when she referred to “socioeconomic resources.” I would not have thought a parent’s education level was a socioeconomic resource. I would have thought it a factor in and of itself. (And if parental education level is a predictor then we have Circular reasoning.) The author does mention housing segregation and employment discrimination; so I guess living in whiter community and parents’ having jobs are contributors to success. No mention of crime. I’d be curious what the other socioeconomic factors were that were correlated.
3
The comments miss the big picture. Whatever works to raise a kid to become a successful adult is what we all want.
4
As a teacher I have observed many students from two-parent and one-parent families. I have seen students from two-parent families flounder because they don't have enough support from home. I've also seen students from one-parent families thrive because they have a strong, attentive single parent. The biggest problem is with parents who are too young but who also don't have strong families to help them out if they are struggling. Another problem is with parents of any income level who don't establish a home that values responsibility to oneself and the community. For children of divorce, the biggest problem is the tug of war between parents over child support and custody. If divorcing parents can separate themselves amicably, at least in appearance it will go a long way towards happy, successful children.
2
What kids of any color need most is parental involvement. Obviously, the more parents involved, the better. That just stands to reason. I know segregation is a very bad thing. I know black kids are relegated to bleak parts of town with bad schools. But I also know that the lack of parental involvement in a child's life is the death sentence. Government can spend more money, build better schools, pay teachers more, etc. It has a lot of work to do to right the wrongs of the past. What it cannot do is check a child's homework every night, religiously attend parent-teacher conferences, make good grades an expectation bordering on a prerequisite, set curfews, and vet their child's social network. Many geniuses were borne of one-room, un-air-conditioned schoolhouses with hand-me-down books, but they didn't do it alone. Money can't buy happiness and it can't buy well-rounded, educated citizens. OK, sure, it doesn't hurt....but you get my point. We have a serious parenting problem in America and the longer we ignore it, the worse it's going to get.
12
The author does note that the extended family in the Black community is a big help. My daughter is a single parent and a teacher. There are not enough hours in the day for her to do her job (which does not end at 3 pm) and be available for her daughter’s activities, homework, etc., never mind make dinner, etc......
This conclusions from this op-ed are way off base. It is mainly arguing that family structure does not matter that much, but the study itself focused on the impact of family structure for blacks versus whites, which is a different question. The overall effect of family structure on child wellbeing is huge and has been supported by numerous studies over the years. Even among blacks, the poverty rate for those living in married couple families is 8 percent, compared to 32 percent among those in a family headed by a single mother (from the U.S. Census).
11
Does Dr. Cross imply that more government (MY) money be given to these disadvantaged black single or no parent households?
Perhaps if there were two parents available, one might actually work and earn the money that is necessary to raise children. Alternatively, the parents might be mature and realistic and realize that they cannot afford to bring more children into the the world who will grow up disadvantaged and perpetuate the burden on the tax paying, working members of society.
17
I don’t think there is any magic in a two-parent family. My parents divorced when I was five and I had a very happy childhood and am pretty successful as an adult. However, my parents were highly educated, I was an only child, and the insistence on the importance of education and success was inculcated in me from very early on. Though divorced, my parents remained friendly and were both involved in my upbringing. So I agree with some conclusions in this article. But the notion that governmental money can make up for the intellectual and physical poverty of the child’s environment is ridiculous. The problem with the African-American community, as far as I can see, is not that highly successful black women refuse to get married while having one or two children. The problem is that ignorant teenagers have three or four while barely out of high school, and that they have no skills, no ambitions and no education to pass on to their kids. Breaking the cultural stereotype that having babies takes precedence over having money and career is what is necessary to ensure better outcomes for the community, not irresponsible procreation.
11
What could possibly make more of a difference in "difference in access to resources" than family structure? Having married biological parents who both work and support one another and help raise children is a HUGE economic (and social/personal) advantage. When one gets laid off or has a shortfall, the other can carry the family unit.
This article reads like a bizarre attempt to argue that drunk driving really isn't a big deal after all...once you control for reckless driving, that is. Which of course makes the study rather empty. Like, what do you expect to get from the research about single parenthood and the familial norms of the bottom 10% in America?
11
Wordy, esoteric, paralysis through analysis and a liberal (pun intended) dose of intellectualization.
Anybody with experience or even half a brain will tell you that two parents, preferably both working (unless one has a high enough income to support the family) that cares for their kids, especially education is the best guarantee of success.
A single mom or dad can do it too, but the odds starts to go downhill.
A safety net is important but not the welfare state.
We tried the welfare state in the big cities in the 1970s and it practically destroyed them.
I know, I went thru it in NYC and we still have generations of families on welfare that destroyed them for generations.
10
In the last @ 4000 years of human civilization it has been the breakdown of the nuclear family that has doomed society. The security of family cannot be substituted with more and different half baked schemes which are little more than retreaded old half baked schemes that have failed. Perhaps we should eliminate families altogether and have state sponsored pre programmed robots raise our kids.
5
I would personally be much happier to participate in a resource increase initiative rather than a marriage promotion initiative, wouldn't you? Which do readers think would be more successful and relevant for single parents of any color?
Forced maintenance of a dysfunctional marriage or the false creation of marriage as an institution is silly public policy. Thanks to the Times article for some logic and a potential turn in our attitudes on the issue.
2
Emotional Intelligence in a one parent or a two parent household is what is the most important ingredient in a child's life, economic
stability is a must.
Wiping out social safety nets is one of the most important fights of our life. Without both social safety nets and Emotional intelligence it is a much harder row to to hoe for a parent and a child.
Just because there are two parents in a household does not guarantee good outcomes for the child. Many a household have abusive parents. We hear about it ever day.
Better one loving parent, than two dysfunctional parents.
17
@Jean is so right, and I really cannot relate to cuts in safety nets that are so necessary for life and children. Children need the adults in their lives to have enough and to be able to survive comfortably in subsistence. Yet there is the push to shove persons out of the safety net onto the street. Our kids need meals in the schools, need for the adults in their lives to have food to share -- so why oh why cut food stamp entitlements. So the adult buys sodas and chips, so what? I just don't get the push to deprive entitlements to people who already are in want. And, as a career military man, why spend billions on arms when we shove our poor from needed entitlements? What kind of people are we Americans?
9
@Armand Beede
Thank you Armand, I think most Americans would agree with you. But when we have crass and morally bankrupt elected Politicians it sends a bad message to those people who look to their Leaders for examples. We had better change our Leaders in the next election cycle or children won't have a chance.
4
So now your saying that blacks are different in a very fundamental way, than whites? And they should be treated differently? In fact whites may not be able or capable to understand their plight because they are so different? Our help could actually be misspent and misdirected?
Could it be that your findings really are because, the families studied have been so long bereft of a family structure(some for generations) that they have no way to recognize or "anchor" to one when it appears? And therefore don't see a worthwhile benefit from it, to even pursue it.
Have other studies confirmed this? Have other studies supported your hypothesis, or explored same? It seems to me this would need independent verification, by not just one, but many. Also, why now? Why is this only coming to fore now? What insight did you uniquely have in all of this?
11
In our rich country studies have shown that pre-K, universal breakfast programs reap rewards for the attendees no mater their economic status. They become better more productive citizens. Yet we allow politicians to gut the programs imposing income criteria that hamstring many who need it. The denseness and rigidity of politicians are making our country poorer, dumber and less civic minded. We need to make decisions for the people not for some of the people! Our war on technocrats has to end. Facts and study results do matter.
85
Parents have many important responsibilities, but feeding your child is at the top of the list. If a parent can’t manage to provide a bowl of Cheerios and a cup of orange juice in the morning, they are unfit to raise a child and no government program can fix that.
8
@Max :
I think the point is not that the parent can't provide such a minimal breakfast, but that helping her out by providing it makes a big difference to the mothers and their children.
2
There's quite a logical leap from this
"Differences in access to socioeconomic resources such as mother’s education accounted for up to nearly 50 percent of the gap in high school completion...."
to the conclusion that discrimination is the primary explanatory factor. I don't doubt it, but this column is not persuasive.
5
My wife's father abandoned his family before she was born. That devastated her mother so much that she never really recovered from it for her entire life. That left my wife's grandmother and grandfather to raised her.
When we first she still had issues with not having her father in her life but over the years she has come to terms with it.
But no daddy for this little girl hurt her for a long time.
2
I often wonder why people hang onto this broad-brush assumption that families led by single moms are "broken homes". One loving mom can do far more good than two parents who are self-absorbed and dysfunctional. Sure, these two parent homes can hide behind shiny suburbs with new cars, big homes and all the latest gadgets for their kids but none of that means anything if they're terrible parents.
See, it's easier for Americans to cling onto our many, many stereotypes even when we know they're false, including the stereotype that families led by single moms are irretrievably "broken" unless they just get a man in there to fix things up and make it a "real" family.
163
@Tres Leches you are looking at this on an individual level so of courses these dynamics exists but statistically the numbers reflect your example to be the exception not the rule.
13
@Tres Leches I'd like to recommend your post 1000 times over. I do think that single parenting requires a lot of effort, and some resources, but I am so tired of people saying "single parent" like it's a dirty word.
22
@Tres Leches People are saying "All else being equal, 2 parents in a home is better than 1." No one is suggesting that keeping an abusive parent in the house is better than a single parent with lots of resources."
But in a poor household, 2 parents are better than 1. In a rich household, 2 parents are better than 1. But a rich household with 1 abusive parent and 1 good parent may be worse than a poor household with a single parent.
17
SIngle parents without a support system and reliant soley on thier abiity to gnerate income are usually in trouble, no matter what the racial designation. Black people have many more obstacles to overcome, becuase generational lack of wealth, income and access to opportunities causes lasting problems.
A two parent family is not essential to a child being able to develop his/her full potentials - - but it potentially provides more resources, financial and personal, that can provide more stability and choices.
To raise a child alone, you really need money, caring and dedicated extended family, or a strong government support system which accepts that services such as child care are a collective responsibility to provide the best for all. Scratch the last option in the US. Needless to say, you need a working wage system, and health benefits as well.
Blacks have it worse: but all the poor are disdained in our society
75
Is this dubious science intended as consolation for those who prefer to give up on promoting two-parent families across every community?
9
When you're starting out from near zero, OF COURSE basics like a livable income make more of a difference. Being able to pay for food and having a roof over your head are a bit more important than family structure.
BUT once you have the basics covered - a livable family income, decent living quarters, etc., family structure DOES matter.
Having said that, the surest path to poverty is having children early and often - and making a bad choice for a partner.
Race, religion, whatever doesn't matter. I have a s-i-l who married poorly and had a protection order against her husband while giving birth for the second time. She lived with her parents for a time and then survived on welfare. Her life was a mess for 20 odd years. The contrast with the rest of her family was clear. It seems that having a child early and out of wedlock is generational. Fail to break that pattern and you are also doomed.
9
The fact that “extended family” networks can help aid the child when a parent is not present is more evidence that a two parent household is much for beneficial than a single. The extended family network, is likely to have a uncle or other male figure that can take the place of the missing father figure. Same goes for missing mother of a female. Not to mention the dual parent household can bring in twice the resources if both partners are willing and able to work. A Two loving parent household is most likely to lead success for the child.
5
I grew up in Los Angeles in the time of the Latch Key Kids generation. The kids learn to model their parent's behaviour. The foundations of our society, schools etc are devolving as kids see what is done versus what is told to them is "right." One Housewives of Orange County said it all....when a 16 year old says, "they tell us not to drink and they get wasted"
2
“All that humorless document (the Kinsey Report) really proves is: (a) that all men lie when they are asked about their adventures in amour, and (b) that pedagogues are singularly naive and credulous creatures.”
---- H.L. Mencken
Looking for answers in social science research is akin to looking for needles in haystacks, except that locating needles in haystacks is a lot easier.
3
Anyway working in a school knows that involved parents make the difference for self discipline and delaying gratification.
Giving all the resources in the world will not help children whose parents are neglectful/absent/abusive.
Turning your pain into your benefit is what spiritual people do. Unfortunately liberals are mostly atheists who think the government should do everything instead or lending a helping hand themselves....
5
All of this discussion is missing an important word: good. I grew up in a two-parent home and I spent my childhood fervently wishing that my father would disappear from our lives. A "good" father certainly is a blessing in a child's life. A bad one is a curse.
I suspect many people cringe when they hear about how great two-parent families are and want to say, "Oh yeah? Did you ever meet my mother/father?"
Kids need adults who love them and take care of them. To heck with how they are related.
181
@loiejane You capture a key distinction. Yet, how do we train the next generation of fathers, if little young boys grew up without a good role model close-by? Raising a good man is a monumental effort; and it starts with finding a good mate.
2
@loiejane Couldn't agree more. I wish we could stop focusing so much on identity politics and start seeing people as more than just their gender, skin color, ethnicity, etc. We're so much more than our labels.
@loiejane Thank you. I've listened all my life to the woes of now-grown children of divorce. It's tame stuff compared with what went down in my intact family of origin.
3
I live in an ethnically and economically diverse part of NYC--a mixed-income neighborhood in the Bronx.
One factor that is hugely important and seldom mentioned in these discussions of family structure in poorer communities is the presence and importance of extended family networks.
I recently took my son to the pediatric ER at Jacobi hospital, a public hospital that serves the entire borough and a large Medicaid population, and was struck by the fact that every child there was accompanied by at least two adults but often three, four, or a larger family group.
Obviously families pool resources out of necessity. But there are positive impacts of close family relationships and strong networks that are often overlooked in these discussions, and I'd even say that this kind of family support is disappearing among the educated and professional classes. I'd call that a negative outcome of our atomized American culture that prizes moving for jobs above the maintenance of family ties.
3
Seems like the top few commenters miss the point of this research: that access to resources is MORE significant for positive outcomes for black children than whether their parents are together. She's not saying that there's no effect from single-parenting, just that our focus should be on the thing the actually matters more in terms for outcomes: black families of whatever type have access to far fewer resources, and kids suffer because of it.
10
Yes, poor children have a hard time.
With two parents, married to each other, a child is much less likely to be poor. Most of the other indices cited (mother's education, for example) are so strongly correlated with stable marriage that their effects cannot be separated.
It has nothing to do with race. There is no such thing as "structural racism", although there are bigots (not all white).
54
@Jonathan Katz. Your comment that there is no thing as “structural racism” ignores basic and pivotal history: Jim Crow laws that parts of our country try to resurrect in various forms; redlining with discriminatory mortgage lending and real estate practices; the refusal after WWII to give black veterans the benefits of the GI bill that gave their white counterparts college educations and a foothold in the middle class; zoning laws that benefit white communities at the expense of black neighborhoods; a criminal justice system that disproportionately hurts poor and predominately black people, and on and on.
5
Perhaps this is because two people who have resources to begin with are more likely to get married. Marrying is not cheap.
I’d love to see research on poor black women who decide not to have children and what happens in their lives. Do they rise out of poverty? I bet they do. I’m from another country and I’m white, but the only way I was able to rise out of poverty was by choosing not to have children (not through abortion, but simply by using contraception methods). I could then use all my resources on getting a high level of education. I was the first in my family to get into high school, and I proceeded to become a PhD. My friends who chose to become mothers (married or not) all work for a minimum wage, because their priority had to be taking care of their children.
25
Two parents are better than one no matter how you cut it, and money is better than poverty for kids, and blacks are poorer. Isn’t this just common sense? But who should pay the cost to these children of both the single parent home and the historical results of race? To move from parental responsibility to public responsibility in both cases is a real political issue it’s ok to discuss. Advice from scholars is welcome but political correctness is over. That, the failure of our capacity to respect each other as fellow citizens and discuss our issues with each other is this country’s issue now. Not Russia. Not Trump. It’s on us .
22
@Sandra Cason
No. Two parents are not better than one, "no matter how you cut it." There are many individuals who ought not be parents. Period. Glad you did not have to find this out the hard way.
20
Finally someone who has studied what has been clear to all. an experiment I would like to see is all day school. that way the school, using high school junior and seniors can provide after school help with homework and mastering the material. In my town which as free lunch to billionaires, that seems to be the difference. The affluent know or buy in knowledge while the less fortunate cannot, either because they themselves dint have the skills or have the funds. Education can be the great equalizer but the system needs to be equal “after school”.
5
We need to see your research before we can accept your conclusions. For instance I don't doubt African Americans face a lot of employment discrimination, but, clearly, a significant part of the wealth gap is caused by differences in education and interpersonal styles, differences at least in part created by the poverty and care-giving deficits that almost inevitably come with single parenting.
Work, or stay home and care (without help) for the kid(s). It's hard to do both.
The multi-generational effects of the damage done to these kids throw all your premises into doubt.
People incapable of supporting children financially, emotionally, and developmentally shouldn't have them. In fact they shouldn't be allowed to have them. Public assistance should require mandatory birth control for BOTH parents, especially for one (we have DNA tests to identify them now) who chooses not to participate in his child's support.
11
@Green Tea : Seems like you have a solution to the "race problem" in mind. You are not the first to promote sterilization as a method to get rid of easily identified fellow citizens that you would like to get rid of.
1
Seeing how in recent years "studies have shown" that 2plus2 is not necessarily 4, or "It depends what the meaning of the word 'is' is" can be accepted as a pearl of wisdom, we should question the results of this "new research," as we should all of our ideas.
Otherwise we'll be stuck with un-examined lives, and who wants that?
8
Add me to the list of many who don’t buy this ‘study.’ Everyone knows that academic studies are like buses. Wait five minutes and another will come along.
31
@Pablo : Seems like the only information you would buy is what "everyone knows" especially when academic studies challenge your beliefs. After all the academics are only just educated persons who are experts in their field of study, and what do they know?
1
The point is that a single parent family is statistically much more likely to lack adequate resources for the children and getting other tax payers with and from two parent families to subsidize the culture that creates so many fatherless families is a pretty tough sell, even though careful investment in these children would ultimately benefit all of us.
Whites, as a group, really don't want to admit or address the legacy of slavery if it involves significant economic sacrifice- even if that sacrifice is actually an excellent investment in the long run.
If human beings weren't such short sighted creatures we would be in a much better situation in our relationship with each other and the planet.
We need to encourage black, brown and white fathers to be responsible parents and meanwhile subsidize the care of the children they fail to support to break the cycle.
That is where slavery reparations need to be spent.
9
Is the logic a bit circular? Its not two parents, its access to resources but two parents have access to more resources (money, time, attention).
25
Iceland has one of the highest rates of babies born to unwed mothers. Comparing the socio economics of Iceland to this study would be interesting. Given close familial ties, and relatively similar income to to general population, children can thrive.
11
@Bucko33 there is very little discrepancy between earnings of males and females in Iceland, thus the resources are there for the children, regardless of single or two person parent family. Day care is free, as is education and college - not to mention health care. This is a game changer for kids and women.
8
This opinion left me with more questions than answers. The writer doesn't provide any context for single parent households having more or less impact on children by race.
- What's the baseline for comparison? Is it an average of all families, or within a specific ethnicity?
- How big are the differences? Are we talking about single digit percentages or much larger?
- What are the relative correlations between family status and poor outcomes for differing ethnic / racial backgrounds?
This complete lack of context and supporting data suggests that the differences are small and possibly meaningless. The author clearly didn't want to show her cards.
23
Why is it "but rather" instead of AND? All else equal, having two parents and extended family will help. So will having no discrimination, a better social safety net and policies that help close the racial wealth and income gaps. When it comes to publishing I understand that"but rather" helps but when it comes to changing the real world "AND" is better.
11
Looks like Dr. Cross took a shot at a sacred cow and hit it. Good for her. Enjoyed the article. Thanks to NYT for publishing it. Given the pervasiveness of skin-color prejudice and its constant and subtle shape shifting, we should welcome such research and humbly if not aggressively doubt our common "knowledge."
10
@Paul Or we should be skeptical of ideologically-motivated researchers trying to overturn common sense using badly designed studies. And yet, even then, her work clearly demonstrates that two-parent households are better, regardless of race. I guess some "sacred cows" are bulletproof.
3
@KM How do you know she is ideologically motivated?
While the resources of a second parent, often a father whose income and access to economic opportunity are greater than his female partner, are valuable --- not to mention time and shared parenting responsibly --- it is not a deal breaker. What holds these kids back, and their mothers, is that they simply cannot get a break. Employers still lack vision and innovation to retain talented moms, of all partnership status, and segregation of housing and schools for black children is a long-standing national crisis. Then factor in the lower pay for women, especially women of color, and the insecurity of these jobs.
By many readers comments "just get a husband" continues to have a stronghold on our collective psyche. Right now, single moms work miracles in our country. Culture and structure inequality matter. I hope the author continues her research and changes hearts and minds.
17
@Erin V Yes!
"But what if common knowledge is wrong, ..."
And what if common knowledge is right? What if the women researchers in sociology, that least scientific of the pseudo-scientific fields, find what they want to find, true or not? Beyond helping the public hear what they want to hear - YOU are not responsible - it's like a lot of the current promo ideas: thin ice.
18
@Anonymot
There’s a big difference between research and conjecture.
1
@Anonymot . And you focus on this researcher’s gender to question her professionalism because . . .?
1
I think the wording of the article are unfortunate and perhaps intentionally so. I do believe the data and conclusions. But I find it put in the worst possible light to convince.
What the data shows is that marriage does not bring black families the resources that it brings white families. In other words, even "doing the right thing" does not work for black families. This is a shameful truth that condemns our entire society.
9
Why did we need to do a study to net us the answer that having two parents at home - two stable people who provide a stable home - is better than one, but and extended family can offer the same support?
Or - shocker! - that poverty, stress, dangerous or violent environments, and social community structure have more of an impact on a child than whether he or she has two parents instead of one in a stable household.
Next, you might be trying to tell me that children raised in a secure and loving home, with a parent of family that values them, in a neighborhood that doesn't tend toward violence, and an income that precludes hunger, and a future that includes opportunity, might have a better chance of growing into happy adults than children without those advantages.
Why did we need a study to tell us the obvious? Yeah, the answer to that is a shocker, too. Right?
13
Because having no 2nd parent resources is often times better than a bad 2nd parent. This shouldn't be surprising and would be true for any household regardless of race. We owe all American children as many chances for success as we provide them.
6
Decades of empirical data proves three things on poverty and success.
The Nuclear family; Race is irrelevant. Poverty is irrelevant. Neighborhood is irrelevant. The family is critical. There is no more stark break point between predictors of future success than the nuclear family.
Stay in school. Quite obvious but still true.
Deferred satisfaction. Live within you means. Stay out of debt. Invest 10% of every paycheck. The longer you stick to this mantra the greater your chances of success.
This article makes the case that despite decades of data, and hundreds of millions of examples that support the facts, a tiny number of apocryphal cases negates reality.
Sorry Dr. Cross but your research just doesn’t pass scientific muster.
20
@Canis
You forget network, which gives you access to opportunity.
Not all networks are created equal, especially for kids who are already disadvantaged financially
5
You obviously have no idea what it means to be poor. Your advice on money management is great for people who are not desperately poor, but if a person is really poor, he/she simply cannot do what you suggest about finances. Try to live on a minimum wage and provide for a child, and then you will understand what the reality of really poor people is. I agree with staying at school, of course. But saying that living in a dangerous neighborhood has no impact on a child is absurd. Poor kids need to be offered the means to stay away from those neighborhoods as much as possible, and they need to be helped, or they won’t be able to break the cycle they are in right now.
6
Two parents in the household usually equates to higher levels of socio-economic stability. Additionally, two parents have more flexibility to care for one another and children without endangering that economic success. There are many advantages that are difficult or nearly impossible to replicate just with extended family or government programs.
9
My parents were married but my father didn’t contribute anything. He didn’t work, he didn’t help out and he gambled away our resources. I spent 13 years working full time and going to school at night to stabilize my life. I didn’t get pregnant until after I finished my education and after I was married. My husband is the opposite of my father in every way. There is no event or issue he is not engaged in. My children don’t have the stress or anxiety or fears that I had.
Growing up we would have been better off without my father, but as an adult I would not advise anyone to go it alone. I would never have had children unless I had a committed partner. That’s what it takes. Commitment to being a parent...financially, emotionally, and personally. You have to be there in every way.
24
How sad that so many commenters just dismiss this important research out of hand. It reminds me of the article about black women having triple the pregnancy complications and mortality rates regardless of socioeconomic status. Many people were quick to criticize and disbelieve that data also. We need to stop assuming the problem is with something black women are doing and understand that the problem is structural racism in America.
Support jobs programs and education that create real equality and stop pretending that marrying a disadvantaged man magically decreases disadvantages.
9
@Hope I grew up without my father, and being now a father made me really how truly impactful my fathers absence was. I totally disregard her research as shallow and shortsighted. Parents giving a child a sense of self and support can have a much bigger impact than she is assuming.
39
@Hope once again the “woke” millennial lashes out against reality.
America moved passed racism decades ago. The last vestiges of that sad period is found in the remaining Democratic Party poverty plantations of the metropolitan inner city.
1
I would add that access to quality schooling is a must for success. I attended mostly black inner city schools thru seventh grade and by chance moved to the Shaker Heights schools for my upper grades. The contrast was overwhelming. I know that this superior education opportunity allowed me to succeed. If this chance move had not happened I could never have achieved the fortunate life I am living.
21
I hypothesize that the failure is from a direct correlation of the children acting like their parents. Be one or two parent homes.
Access to resources doesn't change the learned mentality.
11
@Randy L.
You hit that square on. I grew up in public housing. Older ladies went out of their way to parent the kids who had parents with lifestyles that would keep the poverty cycle in tact. I was one of those kids. It was their board of intervention applied to my seat of learning when needed that kept me and several others on the path out of poverty.
In suburbia I saw kids running amok and failing to launch as they say. When I looked at their parents these kids fell into one of 2 camps, the kids were treated as fashion accessories that fell out of vogue after 2 years or the parents were so focused on collecting status symbols that they hired surrogates to "watch" them.
And please take note that I intentionally left out skin color because it is irrelevant. These behaviors exist in all skin colors and the outcomes are very similar.
10
The people "not buying it" seem to have missed that this isn't only about money but about all socioeconomic resources. When we are looking at socioeconomic success is it better to be raised by a single mother who is highly educated, or two uneducated unemployed parents in a poor neighbouhood? Of course growing up with two parents in a rich /educated environment is best, but which of the two elements is most important? This is what is being explored here.
12
@S North
Good point. It exposes the "everything being equal" fallacy: everything else being equal, it it is better to be raised in a two-parent home. The fallacy, of course, is that not everything IS equal.
The focus should be more on social and economic resources rather than strict adherence to family structure.
6
@S North you've missed an obvious relationship between being a single parent and someone's personal wealth and education. Raising a kid take time and money that childless adults don't have to consider when seeking education and gainful employment.
But in fairness, the author didn't answer any of your questions. She just said she did a study, and there's less impact on black families. What she didn't do is explain the magnitude of the differential impact or how it's measured.
1
The comment section here is divided between those who are married and those who are not. Those married have a decisive edge. The debate is about the relative merits of the life styles of the married and the single as they raise children. Some comments revolve around the article. But those argue subliminally like those who don't address the article. The debate is not about black kids. Since I was single when I raised my kids, I will weigh in on the side of single parents. The comments of everyone, even those who attack, are defensive about the life style those commenting have chosen. And since the majority of comments are from those who are married, I would argue that they are the more defensive. Marriage must be tough.
1
Is the number of parents in a home more a factor for child success than the demeanor of parents in the first place?
3
Politically correct sociology on parade: sustains that discipline's reputation for ideology over social science. There is a huge literature on this complex topic, including delinquency studies which consistently show a strong correlation between serious, chronic delinquency and one or no-parent families. Data have been obvious ever since the late Daniel Moynihan's classic 1965 study of the beginnings of disintegration of two-parent families in urban black communities.
24
The elephants in the room that the author ignores is that one parent families predominate among US born blacks; that black achievement in school is much lower than that of whites and Asians; that foreign born blacks, usually from two parent families do better academically than US born blacks; and that poor Asians, usually from two parent families, do better than blacks.
I would also add that graduation from high school is not exactly much of a standard for accomplishment. If you look at the statistics from a lot of inner city schools, the competency in English and math scores are in the single digits, while the graduation rates can be in the 70's. The statistics of white versus black graduation rates could very well be skewed because white students may go to schools where the graduation requirements are more stringent.
27
The elephants in the room that the author ignores is that one parent families predominate among US born blacks; that black achievement in school is much lower than that of whites and Asians; that foreign born blacks, usually from two parent families do better academically than US born blacks; and that poor Asians, usually from two parent families, do better than blacks.
I would also add that graduation from high school is not exactly much of a standard for accomplishment. If you look at the statistics from a lot of inner city schools, the competency in English and math scores are in the single digits, while the graduation rates can be in the 70's. The statistics of white versus black graduation rates could very well be skewed because white students may go to schools where the graduation requirements are more stringent.
6
This just all feels like verbal jujitsu. Ok it’s more resources than two parents but two parents are more likely to have resources than one. We’re back at the same square. As a high school science teacher, I can say that the only important resource is emotional intelligence: being able to pay attention, being respectful, wanting to learn, and not thinking that you’re the only person in the room. Those kids, regardless of single or two parent or one grandmother home will do fine. This is a messed up country but it’s still possible to get a reasonable education at a city/community college and move up in the world. I’m woke but I have eyes and a brain. Let’s write about that not go around in verbal circles. We objected to things Angela Duckworth but she was on the money.
18
I will never forget how one of my professors summed up his experience of growing up in the Deep South in 1930s and 1940s: "We were poor, but we had our dignity. Our fathers didn't earn much, but they brought home enough to feed the family. They had work ethic and were honorable men. And then The Man gave us welfare - but took away our dignity and our fathers..."
47
We could solve so many societal issues, childhood poverty in particular, if we could incentivize men and women (of every race) not to have children until the age of 30. Some sort of guaranteed universal basic income and free birth control as long as you bring no children into the world until after 30.
29
@Hotel Al Hamra That would create other issues. "Consistent with prior literature, we find that children born to young and old mothers have worse adult health, are shorter, and have higher mortality than those born to mothers aged 25– 34 years." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3881604/
1
@Hotel Al Hamra Yes but... Can you see how this might backfire like China's one-child policy?
Many comments refer to the definition of single-parent vs two-parents family. But there are key differences in the reason for single-parenthood: unwed teen, divorce or abandonment due to mental illness. domestic violence, or differences in values, widowhood from war, illness, accidents, suicides. These reasons are all relevant in a home with planned commitment to provide stable consistant parenting to the children involved.
15
@IN Most of the factors you mention are comparable to factors affecting marriage, including teen couples, mental illness and abuse. There is a pervasive assumption here that married couples live happily ever after. Is everyone who read this article newly married?
5
Robert Coles, the Harvard child psychiatrist, introduced another element to success when he explored why some children and mothers succeed in situations where many fail: resilience.
Truth is, it's probably not either/or. Two parents; resources; personal genetics/personality/resilience. Each of them can make up for a lack in the others. All of them together are likely the recipe for success in most kids.
As a pediatrician, I'm passionate about this: every kid deserves our commitment to provide every support that we can. As a gay man, I'm equally passionate about this: every kid is "our" kid.
17
The conclusion of the article conveys an urgency to redirect resources from promoting two family households instead to solving economic disparity. That even larger problem won't be solved quickly no matter how urgent it seems.
The helpfulness of "resources" could be a vital discovery if a specific list of which resources provide the most positive outcomes could be developed with the same non-anecdotal scientific rigor as the author's research.
Then it might become possible to develop programs to specifically target and provide the actual resources that work in a speedier and nimble manner.
If social science could learn to micro-target, then perhaps public enthusiasm would be increase to look at some of the larger issues.
4
Comparing two-parent families with one-parent families ignores factors that make this a spectrum, rather than two distinct options;
Deductions from two: the business trip; the long commute; the fling and the affair; sleep away camp; the maid; three jobs; the first novel; care for an ailing parent; a death in the family; one child protege or club soccer team member; etc., etc.
Additions to one are covered in the article.
I suggest all those in traditional families do the math and tell pollsters where they are in reality on the scale from 0 to 2.
3
“Differences in access to socioeconomic resources such as mother’s education“
This is sad in so many ways. We could take it a step further, and say that the mothers did not have sufficient access to equally important socioeconomic resources, like competent and responsible men, or simpler things like personal responsibility or plain common sense.
But we probably won’t.
11
I have no problem believing that black
kids have a better time coping with certain stress than their white peirs. This doesn't necessarily draw the conclusion. The author states "My research shows that differences in access to resources largely explain the relationship between family structure and outcomes for black youth" but doesn't it make sense that the chances of accessing those resources increases dramatically in a 2 parent home? What am I missing?
18
What are you missing? Structural racism.
At no point do you tackle the more difficult issue of why so many of these kids grow up in single parent households.
25
The social services system actively discourages fathers, married or not, from living in the same household as the mother and children. It would be interesting to examine the impact of this policy.
23
The author's reasoning appears a bit of an attempt to ignore the fact that a two parent family structure is more likely to provide those economic factors that would enhance their ability to benefit from a higher income unit associated with two parents working, not to mention the supervisory inputs of two parents instead of one. The last statistic I saw are that in recent years seventy percent of African-american children are being born to out of wedlock mothers. At this rate it is no wonder that their children grow up in lower income families that stunt their educational futures.
55
Two parent families? Really? That was and still is a myth. Let's face it: the vast majority of children in our culture live with one parent or caretaker. Want to guess what gender that caretaker is? Yes, that person is a woman, almost always that child's mother or long-term caretaker, like a custodial grandmother.
I grew up with the 'nuclear family' myth entertainingly purveyed by the likes of "The Donna Reed Show", "Father Knows Best", "Leave It To Beaver". It was the most obvious and naturally perfect way to raise a family. Heck, my mother looked like a TV star, and my Dad surely resembled good-ole Ralph Cramden of "The Honeymooners".
Unfortunately, when my parents inevitably divorced, as most marriages did then (and do now) my siblings and I felt the sting and shame of being from a broken family.
Decades later, I'm a counseling student counseling parents and children. It's time for Americans to embrace reality, give women full reproductive rights and support, and help our children succeed without thinking the only way is to so-called 'recreate' the nuclear family.
8
@Roy Staples
"Have you heard that statistic that half of all marriages will end in divorce? It’s wrong. Even if that many marriages ever did disintegrate at one point, they don’t now. Divorce is on the decline and has been since the 1980s in America (when that 50% divorce statistic took hold). Experts now put your chances of uncoupling at about 39% in the U.S."
6
@Roy Staples You don't have to have a nuclear family per say but you don't need several involved and loving people... Two women raising a child is better than just One. However present fathers matter as healthy ones give more vital support for healthy risk taking compared to mothers....(pc alert: gender difference)
What is the point of this discussion, exactly? As a society and culture we could afford to be a lot more supportive of our children, no matter the marital status of their parents.
The government can’t be in the business of legislating family structure, because it would inevitably have the effect of punishing those who don’t fit the proscribed model of what a family should look like. And despite what we may all wish for our children, life - and abusive relationships, romantic failure, death, and dislocation - happens.
But no matter what kind of home a child is dealing with, or how stressed their parents are, that child should still be entitled to three wholesome meals a day; a school where they can feel safe and valued; a neighborhood with friendly and generous people.
Neoliberalism encourages us to view all things, including people, in terms of commodity value; it is this ideology that not only tracks our children’s progress with a series of abstract data points, but reduces their entire value to the statistical estimation of their future earnings vs. the financial cost required to support their lives.
I believe we can do better. We all deserve healthy, meaningful lives, and our children have the greatest chance at living those lives. Stop trying to pigeonhole human lives into neat little roles and instead support a society which treats people like people, not just economic machines.
11
@Jerome S. THANK YOU..this so needed to be said, it was blatantly missing. "But no matter what kind of home a child is dealing with, or how stressed their parents are, that child should still be entitled to three wholesome meals a day; a school where they can feel safe and valued; a neighborhood with friendly and generous people."
7
@Jerome S. "A neighborhood with friendly and generous people"? And how might we ensure that? "Neoliberalism encourages us to view [people] in terms of commodity values." It does not.
Hayek discusses this anti-profit attitude in "The Fatal Conceit": "What intellectuals ... find most objectionable in the market order, in trade, in money and the institutions of finance, is that producers, traders, and financiers are not concerned with concrete needs of known people but with abstract calculation of costs and profit. But ... concern for profit is what makes possible the effective use of resources. ... The high-minded socialist slogan, 'Production for use, not for profit,' which we find in one form or another from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell, from Albert Einstein to Archbishop Camara of Brazil, betrays ignorance of how productive capacity is multiplied by different individuals obtaining access to different knowledge whose total exceeds what any single one of them could muster."
"It is hard to believe that anyone accurately informed about the market can honestly condemn the search for profit. The disdain of profit is due to ignorance, and to an attitude that we may if we wish admire in the ascetic who has chosen to be content with a small share of the riches of this world, but which, when actualized in the form of restrictions on profits of others, is selfish to the extent that it imposes asceticism, and indeed deprivations of all sorts, on others."
7
@Jerome S. -----"The government can’t be in the business of legislating family structure"
Since one of the most important tasks of the government is to dispense benefits, it certainly does shape and determine legitimate family structure by taxation, social security survivor benefits, legalities such as who can benefit from long term marriages, dependency status of military family members, and thousands of other laws that favor marriage and the family unit. All these benefits hinge on one thing: the legal status of the people connected to you, and that legal status is determined by the federal or state government.
51
I wonder how many of the commenters insisting on the importance of two-parent homes actually read the entire article and come from black families. Her research conclusion is simply that for black families, other factors make far more positive difference than two parents in the same home.
32
@What time is it?
That actually is not what the article says. It says that for both black and white families, educational outcomes are worse for children from single parent families than for children from two parent families. But, for black children the decline is less.
The link to the article shows that for on time high school graduation, “resources” explain 42% or the variation, extended family support explains 15%, and family separation explains the rest (43%). It also notes that after controlling for the rest, on time HS completion declines 10% PER YEAR of family separation.
Note that resources is not defined as wealth or income, but as mothers educational attainment, which also correlate with intelligence and other measures of functionality aside from economic resources.
5
The research findings make sense, but it also raised troubling possibility. Given that majority of African American children grow up in single-parent household, it’s reasonable to assume that single-parent household is normalized within the African American community. So, within the community, it seems reasonable that African Americans children are not as stigmatized for being in single-parent household as are white children. However, what this underscores is the high prevalence of single-parent households within the African American community that still deprives African American children from an adult care giver, income earner, and role model. It’s hardly comforting to know that African American children are more resilient from unnecessary hardships than white children.
28
@UC Graduate
The biggest problem with the author's research is that it is highly biased and should have been rejected by the reviewing peers. It would be fine to compare families of a socioeconomic level based on skin color but to compare them in different economic levels brings in discriminatory factors that should make one question the findings.
Poor kids in general deal with adversity better than the rich. Single parent families are not stigmatized in the lower economic groups as they are the majority. Kids view the world around them as Normal. There was no need to bring skin color into this discussion. As for race, there is only one - Human.
3
The myth should include that both parents very much want the children.
12
I taught in an immigrant Queens neighborhood for 25 years. Most kids with two parents were more successful than those with one parent, or worse, being raised by an overwhelmed grandmother or other family member.
31
But doesn't that reflect access to resources? Family with two income is better off than with one
I'd be curious to see detailed breakdowns in backgrounds.
Back in the 1980's I worked for some time in the South Bronx in a manufacturing plant. There was a large contingent of female bindery union workers. You had fairly old white women, then something of an age gap due to economic trends and then a large contingent of minorities.
There were substantial differences between 'American' blacks and Carribean blacks when it came to family structure and attitudes. The immigrants - especially Jamaican - were more focused on education. Most had two parents at home who worked multiple jobs. They sent their kids to parochial schools because they were better than the public ones. I suspect that having 2 parents made it easier in many ways. A single mother is often overwhelmed and has to leave kids alone more. There were also differences between Central American, Mexican and Puerto Rican families.
Those that had 'conventional' two parent families - often with other relatives around - seemed to cope better than others. While family income was a large part of it all (2 people earn more than one), more than simple finances were at work.
31
I live in a city with great wealth disparities, where African American communities are the poorest and live in geographically segregated neighborhoods. I work in those neighborhoods and despite the amount of poverty, violence, and addiction, there is an incredible community of adults around the children. The neighborhood ties are keeping these children connected and cared for on a daily basis, even if individual parents are struggling and unable. These children have access to an asset that my and my middle class and wealthy peers' children do not have. There is a network of older people from a few years older to seniors, who consider each other family and the children their own, whether they are blood related or not. Science and evolutionary psychology tells us that humans do best in networks and community, not in nuclear families headed solely by one or two adults.
16
Dr. Cross writes "Differences in access to socioeconomic resources such as mother’s education accounted for up to nearly 50 percent of the gap in high school completion . . ." If a mother's education is the major factor in the gap of high school completion, how does Dr. Cross propose to break the cycle?
9
I would like to see a comparison of how children do when brought up in a 2-parent family where the parents fight or where there is physical violence versus a one-parent family. The one-parent family often results from the woman's leaving a 2-parent family with fighting and violence.
Do kids do better in an abusive 2-parent marriage or after that marriage is dissolved? There must be some evidence on this, but it is rarely cited in discussions. But it seems to me that a child used as a weapon by one parent against another is better off outside that situation, even though he or she will often be materially poorer.
16
Finishing high school is the measure of success? We have every school,district doing everything possible to force high school,graduation while colleges and employers routinely complain how ill-prepared the new so-called graduates are. Maybe the bar is too low and the project needs another measure of success.
22
While I believe that multiple kinds of family structures can provide good outcomes for children, this column seems to focus on financial resources. One place where a two parent family may have an advantage over a single parent family is in intangible resources: time and energy. With two sets of hands, there is more likelihood that a parent has time to devote to nurturing their children--reading, talking, helping with schoolwork, and fostering an emotional connection. While intensive middle class parenting is not the only way to raise children successfully, parental involvement has been shown to have benefits, and this benefit may be harder to quantify.
(From a policy perspective, this makes it all the more important that we invest in family support programs--a single parent can only do so much, and long hours and erratic work schedules cut into the time they have to care for their children.)
8
The problem should not be framed as one of achieving "economic success". What's more important is the child's happiness, and children, of any race, growing up in a broken home or one with boyfriends moving in and out will lead to a child's despondency and unhappiness. They then become adults and continue to make bad choices and often go on to behave in anti-social ways.
We need serious sex education in high school and we need to do things like show videos in high school of young women who had children out-of-wedlock detailing the constant struggles they are going through. Then we need to show these same students of young people who chose to get married and are raising their children together.
Sure, the videos need to be a little propaganda-ish, because you can find two-parent that are chaotic, and successful one parent families. However, we know the chances go way up if couples are starting off on the right foot.
But we have to be careful that trying to fix something that has already broke is the right way to proceed. I'd rather see propaganda videos and education first, and if people ignore that, then we can try something further. But let's keep in mind that a child's happiness and contentment is paramount.
7
@Sirlar
I grew up in public housing and on welfare. Happiness was not something my peers and I thought about. Sure we had fun moments and were happy when we could play. Eventually life would come back and somebody would be arrested, robbed, shot, die and so on.
Now more than 40 years after the projects happiness is still not a high priority for my life. What must be done to survive is closely followed by what needs to be done. That is followed by making sure I can survive if I cannot work. See happiness is a by-product of the above. I built a good life with some security. Of course everyone will have a different definition of happiness.
1
When all else fails, the problem must be "structural."
Enough.
11
Was it just me, or did the fictional Evans Family try to tell us this, 40 years ago? James was in the household, at least for three seasons, but was always struggling to make ends meet!
@vjskls I came from a home in which I was mocked by my father for my college ambitions (I attended on a Pell Grant for low income students) and given zero support; yet I, like you, ended up with a PhD and a university teaching career. In my case, the support you posit as essential was missing, yet I was able to succeed.
One anecdote does not equate to data.
12
Stop trying to theorize, hypothesize, and explain it away. Children do better when they have a stable home with two parents.
65
“living apart from a biological parent does not carry the same cost for black youths as for their white peers,”
I’m far from expert, but as a two parent white household, could it be that as a result of “Black Americans have the highest rates of single-parenthood and non-marital births”, and living in urban areas, there is more interaction amongst a larger population of single black parents and their children. A “we’re all in this together” sort of situation.
I’m quite sure children going to school knowing many of their classmates also have single parents, makes it more acceptable for them. And similar for the single parent.
A smaller minority of white kids with single parents live in the suburbs, and may carry a stigma with them as outsiders with those peers having two parents.
Just a thought. Thank you Dr. Cross.
8
If a single mom needs additional income from the government to raise her children, that’s effectively a two parents household. Tax payers ARE the second parent.
29
Of course money and extended family helps alleviate the problems of 1 parent homes. This is the old chicken egg dilemma. Kids from single parent homes are extremely more likely to end up in poverty or jail. How do you possibly reverse this issue in an already impoverished community ? You make an assumption that money and access to housing and education solve for the 1 parent dynamic but you are not accounting for the other intrinsic gifts children of families of means receive such as expectations and proper socialization. Money alone doesn’t solve for these deficiencies. I think you are dead wrong to not think that increasing 2 parent homes is not the best and only way to lower poverty in the black community. Structural racism is driven by poverty and it’s effects and can’t be solved without solving the poverty issue. Racism will only be defeated when the poverty cycle is broken
14
@David
Racism will only be defeated when there are more anti-racists and people who freely admit there is only one race, anti-racist policies and agendas replace current ones, and identity politics is dead.
One of the interesting things about becoming old is finding that much of what I once took for granted was true wasn't. It was not because people lied or fudged the data (usually), but occasionally someone comes along who looks at the world differently, asks different questions, and isn't afraid to challenge current knowledge.
Science corrects, as we get more data, ask better questions, and the world changes.
I think that one of the secrets to survival and success in this century will be the ability to adapt to new knowledge, new environments, new jobs, new cultures, and a new climate.
8
JFK's kids did just fine after his assassination, probably because Jackie had the resources to get them the best education possible and the connections to help them get into the careers of their choice. RFK's children succeeded, for the most part, better than most kids from 2 parent households. The bigger problem is when both parents are working multiple jobs 7 days a week to make ends meet. This leaves the kids without adult supervision for long stretches which is hazardous to the kidds welfare and educational outcomes.
10
This is so valuable. There are so many ways to construct, constitute and structure a 'family'. I have no doubt that social and cultural constructs dictate the values of these various models. I have known many models in my lifetime, both intimately and through observation.
It all boils down to access to opportunity and resources. This changes and is dependent on where you are in the societal and cultural pecking order.
3
Anecdote is not data.
Having a two parent home helps. Having access to resources helps. But if two parents and access to resources was some sort of magic formula there would be a lot fewer failures in the world. Sometimes it's the individual. And whose definition of "success" are we using, anyway?
2
Think back through history. What was most important in raising a family was having extended family or a community or a tribe. Remember "It Takes a Village?" Sailers and soldiers were gone often for years and women had to raise their children alone. In early tribal days the men were off hunting and sometimes didn't return so again it was the women and the "village" who were raising the children. Survival and success depends on the whole community and the biggest mistake we make these days is to expect nuclear families of two parents and however many kids to be the ideal.
24
This is all just begging the question: Why are under-resourced individuals having kids?!
I like kids. I'd like to have some. But guess what, I couldn't meaningfully support them at a level I'm comfortable would be enough to ensure their success and provide mutual benefits to society.
So I won't be having kids, until there is a reasonable likelihood those very very basic threshold tests can be met. It's not racism or "anti-natalism" or solipsism or narcissism to hold this basic ethical view.
128
Because accidents happen. Condoms break, someone forgets a pill.
So you are saying that if the situation is already messed up then another disadvantage doesn’t really make that much difference.
Who would have thought?
19
Got my own agenda on the subject of two-parent families. When we divorced, Denise and I agreed to share the kids 50-50, just like the property. We alternated weeks so we had to live nearby. For 15 years. And we had to pretend that our differences were not irreconcilable. On our weeks on, we were single parents. On our weeks off we were free as birds. They overlooked my cooking and her inability to throw a ball. One parent fully responsible one week. The other the other week. Two sets of rules, two different styles of parenting. When we started they were 3 and 5. Neither much remembers anything different. Neither of us had the money to make this easier. But both of us had what it takes. I don't mean to brag, but we didn't do half bad.
23
@michjas Finally a comment that touches on the benefits to the non-cohabitating parents. The freedom most married folks lack.
When I have my son, I'm very involved with him. When he's away, I have my solitude and can focus on my interests and other relationships.
Marriage is stifling and can easily leave one miserable ... loss of independence, autonomy and new relationships.
2
@michjas :)
Lack of stimulation from under-educated parents is the prime driver of poor educational outcomes in children raised in poverty.
These kids are behind in language development when they start kindergarten. The 4 rules are: 1 - Finish school. 2 - Get a job. 3 - Get married. 4 - Have kids that you can afford, financially and educationally.
76
@turbot Teachers must once a year fill out federal forms about the students in their classes. The most relevant question is the education level of the mother, which usually corresponds to the achievement of the child. There are exceptions, but it is truly a good indicator of how well the child will do.
11
The income and education of the father have historically had the biggest effect on children's outcomes and generational resources. With missing/absent dads there is a great loss economically, psychologically and practically as a role model. The author throws out long standing solid data. Ask how many prisoners had a functional, involved dad in the home. Families are a microcosm of society and the vulnerabilities start there.
16
A big thank you, Dr. Cross for helping to break the stigma of single parenthood. I cringe every year on Father’s Day, when the collective we are scolded for not supporting a two-parent family (and heterosexual no less!). I was 4 yo when my father died, and near the youngest in a poor family of 9. We ALL graduated from colleges and now participate in a comfortable middle class, paying our taxes and supporting to the more needy in our society. Our success comes from the networks Dr. Cross discusses - extended family support and government support such as worker training programs.
16
@Frank Dick
As the second youngest of nine children, you benefited from the fact that you had siblings who had lived in a two parent household through their developmental years and were able to unconsciously pass on to you what they learned from their father before he died. Plus you had support from extended family.
If your family had the same size and income, but your mother had never been married and your eight siblings had more than one father, the nine children would have been very unlikely to have gotten college degrees.
There is no stigma attached to being widowed.
1
@Frank Dick
Orphans are a special case, because they know the dead parent wanted to be there for them and didn't abandon them deliberately.
Imagine a model of an atom with the nucleus the best possible home to raise children in. That includes two parents, one stay at home parent at least until the child or children are all in school full time, the parents are married, heterosexual marginally superior to same sex couples and on and on and on. Some factors are more important than others. A stay at home parent trumps the sexuality of the two parents. Each orbit further and further away from the nucleus makes the success of the children a little less obvious. This doesn't mean that single parents can't raise successful children, but everything else considered, two parents are far superior to one.
17
One possible flaw in your study is taking 'high school graduation' at face value. Standards have been lowered to allow more students to graduate,
I would suggest testing the study sample to see what they actually know.
23
This sounds like it might potentially be, in part, a mixture problem.
Let's pretend that the rate of severe dysfunction of some sort (such as chronic substance abuse by a parent) is the same across groups. Just to randomly pick a number for an example, call it 20%.
If two-parent households are far more common in one group than another, and severe dysfunction almost always leads to a single-parent household, the single-parent households in one group will be very different from those in the other group.
Let's say, just for an example, that one group has 30% single parent households and the other has 40% single parent households. The first group will have two-thirds of its single parent households with severe dysfunction. The second group will only have half of its single parent households with severe dysfunction. A difference in rates of dysfunction could, hypothetically, be the real cause of educational outcomes for the children.
Two groups may be similar overall, but because they might have different patterns of partitioning themselves, comparing nominally similar subgroups of the two groups may not really be apples to apples. This is a common error in many settings.
I have no idea if the author(s) looked at this possible difference or if it is applicable to the research question. I mention it to illustrate the general common problem with comparing groups.
16
Excellent point. And no, the actual paper sloppily missed this.
If this about resources and not marriage, I’ll gently point out that two parent families tend to have more money than single parent families.
147
@Man I read "resources" as educated parents, parents who care about education, parents who read to kids and ensure kids get to school on a regular basis. (We reared our children in Seattle public schools, including the Central Area's Garfield, and the kids who had lots of absences were the kids most likely to do poorly.)
2
It is academically interesting that you can find statistical limits to the correlation between single parenthood and poor outcomes. That said, single parenthood in certain communities typically leads to dysfunctional families and kids who are ill-equipped to lead a happy, healthy life.
17
"If this is the case, then what deserves policy attention is not black families’ deviation from the two-parent family model but rather structural barriers such as housing segregation and employment discrimination that produce and maintain racialized inequalities in family life."
And assuming that housing segregation and employment discrimination were addressed, what then would be the impact of stable 2 parent families?
Does Dr. Cross think that this would have no impact? Negative impact or perhaps positive impact? I think the last option might be correct.
Dr. Cross is correct that when a parent is missing the other parent needs some type of support structure to fill in. But what if that were to change, particularly if alleviating housing discrimination were to open new housing opportunities which might weaken that "living nearby" support structure?
One peer-reviewed post-doctoral article in sociology does not a revolution make. Next week another article will appear stating the opposite, citing appropriate statistics.
I would counsel a little more modesty.
51
I am just one case study, but my dad died when I was 4 and my sister and I were raised by my single mom in a country that is less respectful to women than the US. But my mom did it and I'm grateful to her for doing so - it helped that we were well off and we were given everything we wanted - extremely spoiled. I'd say that has played a great success in my career than anything else.
10
This is one of those times when we need to have both a good grasp of statistics and the ability to hold two ideas in our head at the same time. Dual parent families have statistically better outcomes than single parent families, but this effect is dwarfed by the access to resources that either family type has. It might not be good click bait, but both of these ideas are supported by the facts.
18
@ThirdWay resources go way beyond the tangible and that is the mistake made here. Money doesn’t fill the void without those other gifts kids of means receive
1
The author should be more forthcoming that her actual paper clearly show that two-person households for black, brown, and white children show the best results for the kids.
What she seems to be saying in this article is that the PENALTY is less severe for children of color. That is not even close to the common sense claim [backed up bey her own models] that children are universally best served by a two-parent household - you know - without any penalties.
I won't even get into the whole 'association is not causation' issues and the assumptions inherent in the "fun with numbers" sociological models that are so prevalent today.
Bottom line - decades of research has not been unseated - two parent households are still better - your 'Trump' friends are right
124
@SteveRR Yeah, I'm sure having four adults in a household, as in extended families, is even better. The researcher is not saying two-parent families aren't important, she saying, if I understand correctly, that the socioeconomic resource factor is much more decisive for black kids. I don't understand why everyone is so confused about her message.
6
@SteveRR acknowledging that wouldn’t fit the narrative. This shouldn’t be a liberal/conservative thing. It’s science. Just social science. Liberals get upset when conservatives won’t accept climate science. Liberals should accept this piece of science.
2
@SteveRR You completely misunderstood the point the author was making. Two parents, single-parent, or grandparent households that provide loving support and enough mullah are just fine for children.
Get off your "marriage for everyone" high horse! It just ain't true! Marriage is a personal choice made by consenting adults. Child-bearing is a personal choice made by the mother, but only if contraceptives and abortion are available and affordable.
In 21st Century America, marriage and child-bearing do not necessarily coincide or correlate!
As a (blessedly) well enough off single parent (widowed when my now teenager was 3) the conclusion that access to resources is more important than household structure is glaringly obvious. I have the blessing to spend a large amount of quality time with my kiddo, which I wouldn’t be able to do if I had to work multiple jobs. She has the opportunity to go to a small alternative school (where I also teach) where her educational needs are well met. She doesn’t have to worry about where her meals are coming from. Do I miss her Dad? Absolutely, but in our family, that is my problem, not hers, because I, luckily have the resources to give us both a good life.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that these studies are out there as they emphasize the hard work that we as a society have to do to give equal opportunity to all young people. Please, let’s keep our focus on the real problems of inequality, and not get distracted by labeling families.
46
One thing to consider when doing an analysis of outcomes and related to the "two-parent-household" is that the phrase itself comes from a time when it was usually the mother staying at home taking care of the kids.
If both parents are gone most of the time, or one works at night so the kids don't see them much, the personal care and nurturing part doesn't really live up to the hype. Now that both parents have to work by default, the quality time with kids is about the same as it would be with a single parent. Now that wages are stagnant and as low as can be, there isn't a financial advantage to having two parents working either.
15
In general two parent homes have more resources both personal and material in the home than one parent homes do.
Those resources, which the author did not define, have to be provided by sources about which the family has no immediate or distant control. That is the good will of the taxpayers to provide the 'socio economic resources' lacking in single parent home.
If those resources are not forthcoming the children will suffer the deprivation.
It is a more certain path for childrens success to have the resources more certainly available.
6
@Edward B. Blau There's no certainty without a social safety net though; even in a two parent home, it's quite common for, say, one parent to be laid off, or unable to work, suddenly, because of a disability, or for the whole family to go into debt because of a medical issue, etc. In fact I would argue that society as a whole provides a greater level of stability than do two mere mortals.
2
@bess My point is given the vagaries of life that probability favors a two parent family.
I agree a safety net supplied by the state helps all families. But we do not live in Western Europe and when the Republicans are in control here at both the state and national level the safety net is shredded.
Case in point Trump is kicking off tens of thousands from food stamps.
2
Interesting—not much mention of dads in the article.
While not always the case, the presumption is that the 'single parent' is the mom, not the dad. It all fits the narrative of the supermom.
For whatever reason, our culture has decided that it's better for kids to grow up without fathers than without mothers.
Having both parents at home is downplayed by 'scientists' as though a traditional family structure is little more than nostalgic.
That's wrong.
26
@Questioner When you think about how theses families become single households, it all fits. Most military personnel who are killed are males. The same is true for industrial and mining accidents. More males die from smoking and other preventable health issues. The result is more female household heads.
2
"Living in a two-parent family does not increase the chances of finishing high school as much for black students as for their white peers"?
As much indicates that, in fact, living in a two parent home DOES improve chances for black and white students.
How much is AS MUCH? If for white children, children from two parent households graduate 90% of the time vs. 50% for for single parents (a 40% difference) and it's 80% and 60% for black children, is that NOT still a difference worth pursuing?
"I found that living apart from a biological parent does not carry the same cost for black youths as for their white peers, and being raised in a two-parent family is not equally beneficial."
And again, TO WHAT DEGREE? If one believes in the law of diminishing returns, it make sense that the cost would be higher to the wealthier party, but it doesn't nullify that it's a cost to the children.
I'm not sure the conclusions the author makes is justified by the evidence presented.
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@OneView
very true
2
My two very accomplished kids were raised by myself and my ex from ages 1 1/2 and 4. They saw both of us on a regular basis (almost daily) and had access to all the advantages that could be provided by two high-earning, educated and involved parents. I'm sure they would have liked it if we could have stayed together - but their success and happiness as young adults reflects the advantages of their upbringings, and not that they came from a "broken home." I assume that if my husband had been out of the picture, and I had been poor/uneducated, then the results might well have been different. So this makes perfect sense.
8
The thesis rests on the assumption that a nuclear family unit is normal.
Perhaps, what is lost is the sense of an extended community and investment in resources in developing a community could help ensure success and address structural problems parents have to contend with.
5
It's far better to be raised in a loving home with one parent than in a house with two parents who constantly fight and make it clear you were unwanted. While I thrived academically, it was despite their presence in my life, or perhaps my strong desire to not be stuck in a life like theirs.
It's easier to measure and analyze data such as how many parents are in the home, socioeconomic status, and race classifications. The quality of family/mentor relationships, a commitment to future goals, and prioritizing education seem like important ingredients in all of this, yet they're harder to quantify.
Many financially stable students are neglected, having been babysat by electronics for most of their lives. Parents more and more are detached from their children and their needs. Kids are over-scheduled (to 'keep them busy'), stressed (24/7 social media) with no solid foundation in interpersonal skills.
Would we really expect the number of parents in the household to be a reliable indicator of their children's success?
6
Until we have a society where the VILLAGE is the extended social unit a cohesive and well supported single or two-parent family is needed. In my children's school [very diverse ethnically, but relatively uniform socioeconomic group] ALL parents gave 'permission' to the others to keep and eye on, and scold or otherwise control their children. By and large this cohort turned out 'well'.
7
Being a single parent and being poor puts a huge strain on a family, but being a 2-parent family and well-off doesn't guarantee intelligence, accomplishments, or excellent moral and legal behavior--or an absence of tough times. The author's research touches on the problem inherent in society's false belief that anyone in a single-parent family (whether the parent or the child) is somehow "less"--less ethical, less intelligent, less capable, etc.--less than anyone in a 2-parent family. It is a myth, but it's ingrained in our country's laws, religious practices, social groups, schools and universities, real estate, banks, tax codes, and so on.
7
My parents were married for 60 years before one of them passed. Growing up during their first 20 years of marriage- They often fought- yet I couldn't imagine myself without them together. Then I lobbied hard for both to divorce during their last 40 years, but they refused.
In early childhood, parents being together and raising their children is imperative. What happens after the child turns 20 or 21 is fair game.
So I too concur single parent homes up until the age of 20 are unhealthy environments for children. The only compensating factor is an over abundance of love and compassion for the child- and that, especially in blighted neighborhoods is often in short supply.
7
@Aaron As someone else pointed out, a home with dueling parents may not be as healthy as one where the parents have separated. Your parents may have fought, but there are plenty of married couples who present toxic environments for their children.
7
@Rena
I understand what you are saying, but even in my darkest moments, I still wanted my parents together even if my dad slept in the family room three nights out of the week.
9
@Aaron Okay. Were there constant screaming fights? Did objects fly? Did your dad beat your mom? You know how you feel but that's just you. I have a friend whose parents stayed together until her dad's death who remembers (when she was a teenager) begging her mother to get a divorce.
There is no easy one size fits all in something as complex as the family dynamic. We should spend more time understanding what these relationships entail long term rather than if it does not work out we can always get a divorce. I am curious as to how much time one spends sourcing out the purchase of a new car vs the amount of time one puts into understanding just what kind of maturity is involved in venturing into a marriage.
5
Thank you so much for this cogent argument, important information, and analysis. Sick of the marriage/two-parent family equation being touted as the "solution" to a problem of structural socioeconomic inequity based on race, sex, and class reproduced at every level of society and centuries in the making.
I think single parents who are well-supported and well-connected economically, socially, and in the community can do a fantastic job raising children. A two-parent family is no guarantee of a happy, healthy, or stable home, but it does usually mean that the rent and chores are shared (to varying degrees of equity).
It would be wonderful if our society supported all families with equal tax breaks and benefits, fair housing costs in safe sought-after communities, good employment opportunities for parents, real anti-racist/anti-sexist/anti-discrimination work, gun control, anti-violence against women/children work, universal healthcare and free daycare/preschool/afterschool. Imagine what a utopian world!
24
Ms. Cross, great report. But I think you miss the thrust of the two parent family. Tax payers don't want to make all of those social outlays to build a whole village. That's why it's cheaper and easier for the taxpayers to require your parents do most everything. If one's ethnicity (we're all the same race) doesn't place an emphasis on parental pair bonding and child rearing, then their ethnicity will always be at a disadvantage compared to those that do because the taxpayer will not pay for food clothes and shelter that should have been provided by the child's father. No one deserves 18 yrs of free food provided by the taxpayer.
18
@No big deal Dr. (she's a postdoctoral fellow) Cross' argument doesn't prescribe "social outlays" as the path to more resources. She explicitly names a list of structural barriers and discriminatory practices that have produced unequal access to economic resources as key solutions, and is making the point that it is these things, and not marriage per se, that will make a difference.
9
@Lucinda One correction--it is *correcting* these structural barriers and discriminatory practices that will make a difference.
6
@No big deal I think everyone deserves free food and shelter for a life time provided by those with the means to provide it. People shouldn't have to work to make enough money for food and shelter.
This is not all that surprising. If you have hung out in Manhattan or other wealthy enclaves long enough you've encountered financially secure single women who by IVF or adoption have children. They have resources, and in some circumstances, extended family. These kids grow up financially secure (their moms make more than a lot of two-parent households, I can assure you), and they have a lot of extended family looking out for them.
13
@cb77
Outliers !!
Wait, so moving from one parent to two did not change educational outcomes very much for African Americans.
Do you mean that educational outcomes were very low regardless of the number of parents? Isn't that low achievement observable in the real world?
For students of other races of similar economic levels, did the data show the same thing?
18
Every child needs at least one loving, involved parent who WANTS that child and who will put in the 24/7 for 18 years required.
The U.S. divorce rate is so high because the leading cause of divorce is children. Then comes money problems.
Until women were granted the right to divorce in the 1970s, along with no-fault/uncontested less expensive divorce, many children grew up in miserable 2-parent homes with thick emotional frost and distance among the parents, or one was abusive, a drunk or adulterer. Unhappy parents are never the answer to child rearing, nor is the woman staying in a horrible situation "for the sake of the kids". Children end up with emotionally bonding and relationship problems they carry through life, if not also abandonment issues. So too, adults using birth control and accessing abortion is part and parcel of the healthy family structure that curtails too many unwanted offspring.
9
Grandparents are often better at transferring wisdom to youngsters than parents are.
9
wisdom don't change diapers.
It seems that there are two findings here.
1) Resources are important.
2) Having more than one involved adult is also important.
I mean, we all know intuitively that extended family can sub in if one parent is absent, whether out of fecklessness, necessity (distant jobs, military deployment etc.), or even death. In some cases, close friends do the same. And there are even cultures where it's assumed the grandparents will do the child-rearing while the in-between generation works.
Lots of things can work, if there are enough resources and enough adults. The heterosexual couple certainly works well in many cases, but we shouldn't make a fetish of it and ignore other ways people have raised families successfully.
27
"Living in a two-parent family does not increase the chances of finishing high school as much for black students as for their white peers"? So, the author has found that a two-parent family increases the chances of high school completion -- why argue against spending money in programs on promoting two-parent families? Every parent knows in their head and heart that two incomes are better than one; that two parents can provide emotional support more fully and balanced than one; (and in line with the study's conclusion) that two parents are more likely to raise the degree of access to socioeconomic resources than is one. I believe that all people should do their utmost best to find a partner with which to raise children, before getting pregnant or adopting. Women should put off getting pregnant until they have done their utmost best to find a partner. That is best for children, and best for our society.
64
@Maureen But not all parents work. And I'm not really sure men provide much, if any, emotional support to children. It's nice to think of men as being equal to a mother, but the reality is far different. Most "fathers" can't even identify their children's shoe size or name their friends -- exactly how much do you think they are really offering to child-rearing in light of that? Personally, most women I know consider their partners to just be another child to keep track of, because they aren't really contributing much to child-rearing at all.
37
@Michigan Girl You have identified one of the reasons for my divorce. I went from three children for whom I was responsible to two.
27
Your generalization is inappropriate, inaccurate and diminishes the important role fathers play in children’s lives. You state, “And I'm not really sure men provide much, if any, emotional support to children.” I disagree. I’m a father, and I care deeply about my children and provide “emotional support” to them, as do the dozens and dozens of other fathers I know. And, yes, I know my children’s shoe sizes and their friends (quite well, actually).
The fathers I know are extremely dedicated to their children; they love and care for them. You ask how much fathers are “…really offering to child-rearing…?” I’ll tell you. They coach sports teams, support theatre, educational, and music pursuits, take their children camping, hiking, swimming, biking, skiing, boating, serve with them, etc. They PLAY all kinds of video games and sports with them. They lead by example, help with homework, teach them to work and earn money, help them develop skills and the self confidence to survive in the world, teach them to care for other human beings, care for them when they are sick, and would do anything honorable they think will help their children. There are so many great fathers who are totally engaged and have strong relationships with their children.
Perhaps the fathers you know aren’t living up to their important role. I’m sorry to hear that. Can we fathers do better? Surely. But for you to insult and demean fathers as a whole is simply inappropriate and wrong.
28
Money talks.
Who balks?
Policy makers: probably far more Republicans than Democrats (including the whimpering fearful, not wanting to be tarred by Republican attacks for being "liberal").
Combine this scholar's findings with the NYT's recent op-ed on Finland: high taxes, excellent education and healthcare for all, strong family support and a robust, cutting edge economy.
What do you get?
A total repudiation of every single tenet of the Republican Party.
47
While this professor has explained risk behaviors that have to do with stress, I believe having a young teenage single mother is the biggest factor in determining future behavior and stress.
Babies having babies with limited income is what dooms a kid's future.
215
@mainesummers , I live in a country where, relatively speaking, lots of "babies have babies," so to speak. (Mexico's population isn't declining as fast as, say, all of Europe's or the US's without immigrants.)
Younger mothers, often single, also often deserted, get very generous support from their babies' grandparents and from the mother's and sometimes the father's parents. Babies are welcome in Mexico.
Also, our health system, which needs improvement -- no doubt, supplies usually adequate, often admirable, care ...
1 ... as part of a worker's (any related adult) tax-supported, federal-gov't-supplied health services or ...
2 ... as part of tax-subsidized, gov't-supplied infrastructure dedicated to the needs of the informally employed (around half of the working population) and the unemployed and kept as inexpensive as possible or ...
3 ... as part of tax-supported, federal-gov't supplied health infrastructure and personnel in a majority (but not all) very isolated rural areas or ...
4 ... supplied by tax-supported infrastructure and programs created and maintained by some states and (our equivalent of) counties and cities.
It's possible that your statement is only valid for the United States.
18
@mainesummers
"Babies having babies" justifying white/Asian flight--best decision I ever made making sure my children ( two Ivy League educated, one currently attending N.Y.U.) attending public school amongst cohesive, stable, productive people feeling likewise.
5
@mainesummers I found it curious that the author failed to mention age at which one becomes a mother as a factor as well.
12
On-time high school completion is a pretty low bar. If the bar were higher - lets say a college degree - I'd be very surprised if the findings would continued to support the low-bar result.
82
I would add that other structural barriers for African American students are often a lack of the same supports that White students are offered in high schools and even earlier in their educations: advanced coursework, ACT practice and tutoring, academic help that affluent students routinely have access to, mentors, private lessons whether musical or athletic, access to technology. These barriers to all the things that make higher ed achievable for many middle and upper class students are frequently absent for African American students. Without those supports, even the brightest students struggle to make it to college. And if they get there, stats show many leave after freshman year. If we really believe in equality and equity, we need to do better.
32
Note to naysayers: I’ve been happily married for 45 years. I’ve had a successful career as a physician. And yes, I was raised by a single loving parent (and we struggled financially). Fluke? I don’t think so.
53
@Janice
Congratulations! Do you suggest the one parent family is the model? Are you a parent? If so, do you believe your kids would’ve beeen better off had they been raised w/o the influence and love of your partner?
@Janice I'm also a doctor and a product of a single parent. However dont for one second confuse your success as a validation of the one parent model.
You were a success IN SPITE OF your single parent.
My life clearly would have been better off if I had a responsible dad in the picture. Your's would too.
Nobody said that a single parent is a guarantee of failure. But having 2 good parents is better than having 1 good parent.
@Janice
Congratulations. Do you suggest that your experience should be the model? Are you a parent? If so, do you believe your kids would be better off if you’d been single? I seriously doubt it.
If you put aside the heartache and drama that comes from divorce, the biggest long-term hurt is that a family unit now needs to support twice as many homes. Sure, the spaces can be smaller but generally this means a much bigger drain on resources than a couple living under one roof. And so two-parent homes and more resources are tightly intertwined. Not perfectly, of course, but closely enough.
29
So, economic resources have a big role in how black youths (or any youths) develop. No surprise there. But more thorough research would undoubtedly shown that single parent homes generally have fewer economic resources than two parent homes. The author avoids discussing this by reminding us that two parent African-Americsn homes have fewer resources than two parent white homes. True, but irrelevant to the discussion of the one parent home issue. Similarly, we're shown the value of a nearby extended family. Arithmetic would suggest that the child in a two parent home as, on average, twice the extended family resources of on in a single parent home. This research seems to show which variables add or detract from success in a one parent home. They do nothing to suggest that a one parent home isn't the negative it is generally believed to be.
181
@Jerry The analysis does purport to evaluate the importance of the different variables as contributing to success, presumably through standard statistical techniques. Whether this was properly done, or how significant the results are statistically, is not determinate from this piece. The author does not claim that number of parents is unimportant, just that it is not the factor which most contributes to success among blacks.
4
@Jerry, twice the resources is only true if parents are close to their families literally and figuratively. Lower incomes mean people tend to stay closely located to family. Interesting how people jump through hoops to reject evidence that doesn't support their (biased) worldview. The author mentioned everything you noted but what you're missing is that black children seem to become more resilient to the vicissitudes of life without two parents, helped in part by these strong family connections. Do you personally know multiple black families who can support your point of view? Because I know many who can support mine.
4
It is not the myth of two parent families. Whether it is a black or white family, the parent(s) need to be more involved with their children, interact with them and teach them. Work with them on their homework, teach them right and wrong, and manners.
All children would benefit from this.
120
@DJ , how can you prevent one parent's dying? Single-parent families are biologically inevitable (and have been since forever).
11
That’s really hard to do when parents must work multiple jobs to keep food on the table.
4
@DJ That's harder for poor people to do, and much harder for uneducated people to do, however well meaning. The researcher looked into "SOCIAL and economic disadvantages".
4
I’m not buying it either. Anyone who has ever parented knows that having a partner is incredibly important. Raising a child is a full time gig that drains energy and patience like a Hummer drains a gas tank. Life is hard. Parenting makes it harder still. If you want the best for your child then you want a partner that can help.
451
@vjskls Lots of people - married and unmarried/single parent - raise children not full time. So are further implying that if the parents both work - that is, NOT raising a child full time - that is a problem too?
15
@marylanes
Seriously? I was using the term”full time gig” to mean it’s all the time. It does not mean “40 hours per week. As it happens. I work two 40 hour per week job and parent two daughters too. My wife also works.
Furthermore, and for whatever it’s worth, I’m a very liberal Democrat. Not a Republican dreaming of the 1950s. I just won’t ignore facts. Two parents are better than one.
94
@vjskls It's a fantasy that all marriages include a partner equally involved and helpful.
25
I’m Sixty. So, I have work and life experience, and am a keen observer of Human behavior. I completely agree with this Writer: it’s not the Family or Group make-up, it’s the amount of Money (resources) available that is THE determining factor in a Child’s success. Sure, there are exceptions, but on average and across large cohorts, Money makes the world go round. It also allows access to better Schools, Tutors, Medical Care, safer Housing and Transportation, EVERYTHING. So, keep Voting for those that give yet more Tax Cuts to millionaires and allow Corporations to pay NO Taxes, not to mention “ religious organizations “ that just mooch. And keep blaming the single Mothers for all the ills of society. And make sure that they can’t easily obtain or afford contraception, because Jesus. It’s a perfect recipe for Failure.
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@Phyliss Dalmatian
I come from a poor family of seven. We lived in a tiny 1209 sq foot home with one bathroom. We drank Carnation milk and wore Sears Toughskins to school because we could get 5 pair for $25 during Back to School sales. You get the idea. But I had two parents that loved me, showed up for me, and encouraged me. Now I have a doctorate degree and make a very nice six figure salary. It’s not about dollars. That can help. But it’s the support that’s indispensable.
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Yes, I agree. But money sure makes life more equal, for everyone.
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Money is profoundly irrelevant. Many of the most academically proficient and economically successful people have a history of deep and crushing poverty.
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Might it be that two parent families have a higher likelihood of being able to provide access to resources as compared to single parent families?
On the one hand, your research seems to urge municipalities toward providing adequate resources for minorities regardless of family structure. That is fundamentally sound and is along the same lines as economic research in low income countries depicting that poverty often arises as a result of lack of access to things like credit, banking, currency etc. In fact, the emergence of micro banking in Bangladesh and in rural India was a conclusion of that research.
On the other hand, it would seem myopic to dismiss the financial stability and access to structure and resources provided by two parent families as not being causal factors in achieving success.
30
So this professor starts with the theory that the absence of one parent isn’t detrimental to black kids and then, like most sociologists, backs into her methodology to support the conclusion she advocates. Still she has to concede that two-parent households are better overall for both blacks and whites, although according to her, the difference in outcome isn’t as stark for blacks as for whites. I guess that tells me that the research has been right all along: Kids of all races benefit from having been raised in two-parent households. Glad we’ve spent so much time, money and effort just to learn the obvious.
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@Arthur G. Larkin This is the classic straw man argument. No she didn't start with the theory that the absence of one parent isn’t detrimental to black kids. She started with evidence that there is not the same correlation of thriving with two parent families for black children as for white children.
What I don't understand about her and other researchers here don't finger as the reason, that marriage does not bring the couple the same resources that it brings white couples? In other words, even "doing the right thing" does not give black people what white people get for doing so.
That is what is so shameful of our society as a whole.
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@no one
Excellent letter! Also not stated here is if a man was less likely to be employed does that mean he would be less likely to marry? Doesn't it all boil down to access to education, jobs and housing?
3
@Arthur G. Larkin The writer is not pointing out that two parent households are best for children.
A loving, supporting environment is best for children, and the structure of the family, be it single-parent, two-parent, or grandparent is more or less irrelevant. That should be obvious.
People pushing the notion of marriage for the sake of children are busybodies with their heads in the sand!
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The research discussed points to the complexity involved. Obviously both single parent families and social inequality play important roles in determining outcomes for children. More research is needed to understand the exact role each play.
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I don’t buy it Professor. Kids who are missing a parent hurt from the loss. I see it every day at the courthouse
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@Lauren Inker Your assumption is that single family homes are the result of divorce.
I know a ton of financially well-off single moms through adoption and IVF whose kids are very privileged and will succeed.
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@Lauren Inker I don't think she said anything that suggested that kids aren't hurt by losing a parent. The article instead argues that resources are an even greater issue.
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@Lauren Inker I agree with you. I wanted to say the Professor could do well visiting truancy court, divorce court, and drug court.
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All of the policies pushed by Republicans and Corporate Democrats push narratives like this. Teacher accountability! Charter Schools! Two Parent Households!
But it was, is, and always be economic inequality that is the cause. But that’s not a convenient answer that doesn’t require a radical restructuring of society, so it doesn’t get mentioned other than by Bernie and Warren.
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@Ken My children attended a middle and high school with great income differences among families. The classmates with parents who cared---who ensured kids were in class every day, who ensured homework got done---those were the kids who did well, regardless of family income.
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@Linda Carlson economically poor parents often do not have the time to be there for their children because they work multiple jobs. I do agree that children from all economic backgrounds do well if there is someone there to shepherd them through school and homework, but at the end of the day, economics may not give them the time to do so.