The privilege of family children

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Peter Kopa, 3.1.2024, Prague

Social studies clearly show that children with only one parent are disadvantaged. That is why early support is so important in these cases. We comment below recent scientific contributions on the negative impact on children who have not had a father, which appeared recently in Zurich, in the ´Neue Zuercher Zeitung´.

The economist Melissa S. Kearney, who studied at MIT and then went on to do her research at the University of Maryland, has been studying the relationship between family and economics for decades. She has just published a book that is causing a stir in the United States: “The Two-Parent Privilege”. It examines the question of how the decline of marriage has led to more inequality and less social mobility. The work is celebrated by many as necessary, courageous and compelling, but is at the same time fiercely criticized by Woken and leftist intellectuals. They blame her for daring to point out the connection between family breakdown and the economic cost of growing inequality.

His studies have shown for years now that children from traditional families have a brighter outlook on life than those from single-parent families. This is neither a judgment nor a devaluation of other family forms. It simply reflects the scientific data. The privileges of children from two-parent families are a fact that does not depend on economic or social status.  Here everything is decided by whether the parents have firm principles of moral behavior.

Factors of inequality

According to Ms. Kearney children are not only our moral responsibility, but also our economic future. Children of single-parent families suffer from neglect and lack of resources. Not only are they at a material disadvantage, but they also receive less time and emotional attention. Two parents bring home more money, are better able to share the stress of the children and double the emotional attention. And if we look further into this issue, the child who does not receive the continuous stimulation, that is normal in a traditional family,  is often left alone with his or her electronic games.

What is published on this subject is very little, for fear of being racist or of disseminating politically incorrect content. However, the problem weighs heavily in the USA on the lower classes, both white and colored. Those who talk about poverty cannot ignore ethnicity and class, but neither can they ignore the relationship between poverty and single parenthood.

Children raised only by their mothers are less likely to finish high school or go to college, with the aggravating factor that these children are at high risk of ending up in single parenthood themselves. Nearly 30% of U.S. children live with only one parent. Racism quickly comes into play when the numbers are broken down by ethnicity. Only 38% of black children live in two-parent families.

Beyond racism

At the media level, there is always a tendency to condemn any privilege, even if the cause is the biparentality of a modest family. Thus, the great advantage of the two-parent family is overlooked. “The areas where more two-parent families live show a growing social mobility. Not talking about these facts does not help,” writes Melissa Kearney in her study. Harvard University’s ‘Opportunity Insights Lab’ confirms these facts: Black boys who live in neighborhoods with higher numbers of black parents are much more likely to get ahead. This invalidates any suspicion of racism.

Kearney doesn’t want to put single mothers down. She consistently stresses that many of them do admirable work under difficult conditions. But the gap is widening. Between 1980 and 2019, the proportion of children living in two-parent families fell from 77% to 63%. The decline is alarming when the educational attainment of parents is taken into account.

Kearney cites understandable reasons why so many well-educated black women raise their children alone: they can’t find a partner, because either he is in jail or has dropped out of the job market due to lack of qualifications. Such mothers do not want to tie their fate to a man who earns less than them or even lives on welfare, which is the same for white women. Over the past forty years, according to Kearney, “the economic status of non-college-educated men has deteriorated sharply compared to that of women, making them less reliable wage earners and spouses.”

Promoting young children

The only question is: who will break the vicious cycle? The state, which takes care of children, is clearly unable to solve the problem of poverty and inequality of opportunity. High levels of investment in quality early childhood education yield the best results. A group of African American preschool children (ages two to four) who received early support demonstrated that the intervention of strong parental involvement has had a positive impact to this day.

Compared to the unsupported group, children who received early care showed less school defection, were less likely to become delinquent, had more permanent jobs, earned more money, were more likely to marry, and had fewer teenage pregnancies. They also had more stable marriages, had children somewhat later, and divorced less frequently. Finally, they passed these long-term advantages on to their children. Thus, comprehensive early childhood programs are a promising vehicle for social mobility.

In essence, it is a cultural change. Statistical data can measure it, but they cannot solve the problem. College graduates starting two-parent families is a good thing, but the fact that they are the very ones who criticize the two-parent family is proof of “live on the right, talk on the left. The disintegration of the family, especially in the lower classes, is a fact that can be disturbing; but it is no use looking the other way, ignoring the data and denying the advantages of the two-parent family. Kearney has investigated the situation in the United States; the results could also inspire reflection in other countries.

Editor’s comment

The state has no means to promote biparentality, apart from tax incentives that can be a worse remedy than the disease when children are wanted for money. Traditionally, the family has been connected to a superior reality, which is the world of religious faith, which is the only thing capable of forming characters devoted to an ideal of love and fidelity, which will have to be realized in the constitution of the family itself. Here, as in the area of education, the enormous importance of cooperation between Church and State emerges, lest society be condemned to decay into the barbarism of pre-Christian antiquity.