Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege has caused something of a stir: a mainstream American academic (an economist) at a mainstream public university (Maryland) writing for a mainstream American university publisher (Chicago) in 2023, arguing that the decoupling of childbearing from marriage in America is not a good thing.
Reviewing this book, I am confronted by the Mark 9:40 versus Matthew 12:30 dilemma. Mark (and Luke) have Jesus telling His disciples, “Whoever is not against us is for us,” while Matthew has Him saying, “Whoever is not with me is against me.” Though contrasting, those two positions need not be mutually exclusive. It’s also my approach to this book.
That American children are growing up without the “benefit of marriage” is no revelation. The most cursory survey of the average American community attests to it.
Nor has Kearney wandered into hitherto unexplored scholarly territory. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote about the implosion of the black family over half a century ago. Brad Wilcox and the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia have been documenting the decline of marriage and the raising of children outside its boundaries for decades. They produce an annual report, “The State of Our Unions,” detailing and analyzing current trends.
Why, all of a sudden, has Melissa Kearney’s book caught attention? There are three main reasons.
First, probably because it comes from such “mainstream” sources. Secondly, probably because it is the work of an economist. Americans experience frisson when something is quantifiable, even though Kearney does not burden her book with numbers or economic jargon: it is a very publicly accessible work. But numbers provide a certain cachet, making the work sound so much more “scientific” and “authoritative.” And, finally, because it puts together compactly (184 pages of text) and readably a global picture of just how dire our children’s situations have become.
Not that Kearney wants to call it dire. She essentially admits it is, but consciously refrains from trying to paint in too dark colors, lest anybody think she is discriminating against “all” families or shaming some lifestyle choices. But even she admits that the American marital wardrobe has become negligée.
The difference is that I will come out and call it buck naked.
There are a lot of valuable insights in this book, not necessarily original but certainly beneficial in terms of being assembled between two covers. One is that there are several interrelated though potentially independently causal factors at play in the situation she describes. One is that marriage as the locus of childbearing is increasingly marginalized: only 63% of American children today, she says, are being raised in homes with married parents (p. 172). Another is that marriage itself as an institution is in selective decline. People defer marriage until later. Other forms of “relationship” compete with it. And marriage’s institutional decline seems to be increasingly a class-related phenomenon: the more highly educated people are, the more likely they are to marry versus opt for some other “lifestyle choice” and/or have children in other contexts. Finally, just as childbearing is increasingly delinked from marriage, it is also increasingly dissociated from among people’s life goals: America’s birthrate is in decline.
Kearney highlights consequences of these three trends, two of which deserve particular mention: the male problem and the parenting problem.
The male problem affects marriage and childbearing in various ways. Kearney’s focus is on the lack of “marriageable men.” She documents how economic trends, particularly since the 1980s, have economically marginalized working class men. Men with college educations have largely kept their heads above water; working class men, particularly those with only a high school diploma, have not. In 1971, Paul Revere and the Raiders (“Indian Reservation”) sang about how “all the beads we [Cherokees] made by hand//nowadays are made in Japan.” The truth is, all the clothes and furniture we made in Carolina//nowadays are made in China. I remember in college being struck by my friend from Detroit—a girl with a lot of sisters—said that her brother was not college-bound because he had a good job (like his father) with the Big Three automakers in Motown. In 1977, that was true. It is not today.
“You can’t buy love”—but love can’t buy a house or pay the rent. And while we tend, as a society, to downplay economics in marriage, Kearney’s book is clear testimony to the economic impact marriage has. And when men struggle to find or keep good paying jobs, their appeal as long-term (dare I say “lifelong”?) marriage partners wanes, contributing to the decline of marriage. But that long-term appeal might not cancel out the sexual attraction of tonight, whose consequences may, however, be long-term (dare I say “lifelong?).
Furthermore, the “male problem” becomes trans-generational. Perhaps the most important consequence of the economic marginalization of many men and the dissociation of fatherhood from marriage is its disproportionately baneful impact on boys. Part of the phenomenon is related to the disappearance of fatherhood, originally among black but now a phenomenon among many American families outside the more affluent or college-educated. What future Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan described in his Negro Family (1965) came to describe poor and working class whites in future Senator J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016). Kearney cites multiple studies to show how the absence of a father, while always baneful, is particularly bad for boys. She also makes clear that such deleterious consequences are not limited just to the particular family: the lack of a critical mass of men in a community retards the overall quality of life across that community. Ethos matters.
Kearney also identifies the “parenting” problem. Among her insightful gems is “parenting is hard.” Part of the reason are current parenting expectations. Active and intense two-parent involvement in children’s lives has become the American social norm. Its time and financial implications are “stressful” on families not in upper earnings tiers, exceptionally so on single parents (usually single mothers). Those stresses become chronic, diminishing quality parental involvement with children and launching a vicious cycle.
Again, a personal observation: among my peers’ social media postings, a not uncommon one is a few kids walking down the street with a stick and a ball and the caption, “We knew we had to be home for dinner and our parents didn’t play with us!” Helicopter parenting is not just the province of the suburban playground of monads playing alongside each other under the suffocating supervision of soccer moms guarding against scraped knees and microaggressions. It’s become the social norm for all parenting, against which those not affluent in time or money are hard-pressed to compete.
How do we solve this mess? Not surprisingly, economist Kearney is not adverse to spending money to tackle some problems. She recommends spending for social benefits (e.g., healthcare, broader educational and enrichment programs) and income supports for lower income/single parent kids, arguing that empirical evidence does not support claims that such programs actually encourage single parenthood. (Her argument is that, as they exist, U.S. social welfare benefits are too modest to be the cause of the social problems whose consequences they marginally relieve).
Where she begins to falter is moving from value (spending) to values (ethics). She clearly is not comfortable there. She regularly checks the box of not being judgmental but operating on the basis of “data and evidence.” A regular Joe Friday “Just the facts, ma’am”:
The conventional mores in the United States today are to treat matters of family and family formation with a dedicated agnosticism, avoiding any suggestion that one type of family might be somehow preferable to another family type. As well-meaning as this intention may be, it has given rise to a massive blind spot in how policy observers and many advocates talk about—and indeed, feel permitted to talk about—matters related to the home. These sensitivities are particularly acute when the scientific ideas are critical, e.g., when arguing that some household formulations tend to be more beneficial than other formulations. … I look at the data and evidence that have piled up over decades and across disciplinary fields, [and] I am convinced that it is a conversation people in the US need to have. (p. 168, emphasis original)
As a Catholic, I insist that culture is upstream from politics and even economics. Accordingly, I maintain the solution to these problems has to begin with the culture, i.e., the venue in which Kearney treads most gingerly. These problems are not going to be fixed by tinkering with the Earned Income Tax Credit (though, in fairness, Kearney does not believe that, either).
There are ideas responsible for this state of affairs. Kearney occasionally pulls their threads, clearly guardedly. For example, she carefully broaches the concern that perhaps the reason American fertility rates have remained depressed since 2007 is that the modern American woman is increasingly detached from motherhood. “Are adults today choosing to have fewer children—or remain childless—because they perceive that the whole thing just isn’t that great, or at least not better than the alternative? Evidence points in favor of this explanation” (p. 156).
As a theologian, I am often amazed that ideas civilizations once understood as elementary—principles the Church still officially holds and teaches—need to be justified to moderns, almost as if “2+2=4” requires proof (as, in some modern circles, it seems to). So, let’s identify some of the ideas poisoning the culture, whose infection bequeaths us these social problems.
The first is the redefinition of marriage. Kearney’s core argument is not that childbearing is happening outside of marriage but that marriage as an institution has declined: her subtitle is “how Americans stopped getting married” and started going downhill, at least socio-economically.
Well, perhaps the problem lies in the redefinition of marriage, a topic even more verboten than the “dedicated agnosticism” surrounding family formation. Its roots lie in the Sexual Revolution, when cohabitation was hawked as a legitimate alternative to marriage. “Why do we need a piece of paper to prove our love?” was the narrative. But when every relationship becomes intellectually equal to every other one, why should we be surprised that any distinctive understandings of marriage came to be hollowed out? With cohabitation, it was the nexus to sex and, therefore, potentially procreation.
The upshot was out-of-wedlock childbearing that came to be socially approved, a phenomenon Kearney admits. (She observes that once childbearing comes to be dissociated from marriage, reconnecting the dots is difficult. Because she seems fixated on the idea that male economic decline inhibits marriage though not necessarily sex, she notes that even where men’s financial prospects temporarily boomed, e.g., in Rust Belt towns that benefitted from fracking, there was no effect on marital status or cohabitation rates). Obviously, she doesn’t dare touch the question of childbearing in the post-Obergefell redefinition of marriage, whose sterile same-sex relationship will necessarily involve extra-“marital” parties in child production.
The second problem is the dissociation of procreation from marriage. Their nexus has been broken, first by contraception and now by definitions of “marriage” that consider that nexus at most accidental, though perhaps for some serendipitous. Marriage has ceased to be the locus for the giving of life and the perpetuation of the family. Procreation has a “personal interest” and “personal choice,” legal absurdities given the basic biological fact that making babies is not a solo sport.
The Church herself bears no small share of responsibility for this state of affairs, muddling the relationship of procreation to marriage by confused talk about the ends of marriage and no small degree of tolerance to those who rejected Humanae vitae.
The consequence of the marriage-procreation disconnect is that marriage has ceased to have an intrinsic relationship to the next generation. It is instead a place where two people cultivate their “adult relationship” (whatever they think that means) within the shell of a name that affords civil sanction and certain rights/benefits. Any connection to kids is purely accidental.
Now, as a Catholic, I think a book like this is extremely valuable. It affords those who want to think as Catholics insight into the (admittedly, largely negative) “signs of the times” that a pastoral Church, rather than pretending to “welcome” would, as a good field hospital, aim to cure.
But I do return to my Mark 9 versus Matthew 12 dilemma: is Kearney really for me or against me or—rather lukewarmedly—somewhere in the middle? That’s what first and foremost continues to bother me about this book: its studied ambiguities in the face of politically correct orthodoxies.
Take the title. The Two-Parent Privilege. In what sense is having two parents a “privilege?” In a narrow economic analysis, it is a “privilege.” Such children are beneficiaries of additional resources one-parent kids just don’t have. And Kearney is both an economist and social commentator, of which both fields eschew normative (in the sense of axiological rather than statistical) evaluations.
But, in a broader cultural and moral analysis, two parents are not a privilege. As Kearney notes, “Children have no say into how they are brought into the world” (p. 172). But that doesn’t mean they don’t have rights, and having two parents—a mother and a father—is a right, not a privilege. The redefinition of marriage into an adult affair only accidentally connected to procreation has numbed our consciousness of that violated right, not negated it. Recovering that awareness is probably the first step to tackling the problems Kearney makes so clear.
The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind
By Melissa S. Kearney
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Hardcover, 225 pages
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So far just scanned the article, but for now want to focus on the idea of government’s role in the destruction of the family, particularly in the black community. The welfare program is responsible for this, what started out as probably a good idea to assist the black family has become a mainstay of the Dem. Party to keep their vote. Anyone who pushes back is a called a racist, which is an excellent method to stop the discussion.
Will also mention, that I am going thru the second time Rev Robert Barron’s book “the Great Story of Israel”, which I learned about from CWR, that has some appropriate points regarding the family. Anyways on page 61 on the topic of the 6th commandment he writes “violations on the area of sexuality are particularly destructive of human well being, at both the individual and communal level”. The family is the core of society and Satan has used the Government, Politics, Entertainment, etc. to bring about the family’s demise.
Dear ‘Grand Rapids Mike’: “. . Satan has used the Government, Politics, Entertainment, etc. to bring about the family’s demise.”
That concurs with Dr John M. Grondelski’s emphasis on men being financially secure in order for women to want to build a family with them. Whilst that is certainly a factor, we also need to remember the decay of Catholic Christian education & resolve.
In a society where novelists, playwrights, television, & Hollywood have, from before the 1950’s, assiduously & increasingly asserted the pleasures of pre-marital sex, of adultery, divorce & re-marriage (and worse), young minds have been warped across the nations.
James Bond & Indiana Jones & countless other ‘role-models’ have indoctrinated the gospel of the joy of free sex. We don’t even need to mention ‘Playboy’ & its devilish porn media offspring.
If The Church had countered that from the start by programs of New Testament & Catechism education, emphasizing (as strongly as for example the Amish do) how DIFFERENT we Catholics are to the over-sexualized society around us (see Philippians 2:15), we would have cultivated men skilled in discerning & eluding the traps of Satan.
An upright, Christ-following man has infinitely more appeal to a good Catholic woman as able to cherish her and their children over a lifetime of faithful marriage. Good women want & have a God-given right (Mark 10:9) to a husbands’ exclusive & permanent devotion.
When that godly ideal is polluted by a torrent of male lust & lascivious promiscuity, of course Catholic marriages will decline. Good women seek a life-long faithful, Christ-obeying husband, not a flibbity-gibbet, polyamorist.
If we build Catholic youths who are steeped in the values of The New Testament & of The Catechism of the Catholic Church; who protect their eyes & minds against the tsunamis of sexual immorality, we will see an immediate blossoming of good marriages & godly Catholic families.
It is The Presence of Christ in marriages that makes them successful in every way.
Always in the grace & mercy of King Jesus Christ; love & blessings from marty
Dear Dr. Rice. I believe that Kearney’s study adresses all society, not just Catholics.
God bless
Thanks, dear ‘morganD’,
One does appreciate the distinction. Only a proportion of Catholics comprehend that ours’ is a very different sociality to that of the world.
Might it be that the primary disease in PF & his cronies is their imagining that we Catholics are primarily of secular sociality & only secondarily servants of King Jesus Christ?
The plain Apostolic Truth is that true Catholic sociality is 100% of Jesus Christ, for the very cogent reason that our sole reason for being here is to save as many souls out of secularist society as are desiring eternal life with Christ.
Hoping that makes sense to you, dear fellow believer.
Always following The Lamb of God; love & blessings from marty
Thanks. Much needed commentary. Perhaps we, as Christians, try too hard to reconcile our beliefs with the general culture. It might be better to step aside and teach and practice our convictions without an apology as a witness to the light in this dark world. If we practice what we preach we will teach.
Bingo. To deliberately deprive a child of married biological parents, I.e., a real mom and a real dad, is an act of injustice. No justice, no peace.
Haven’t read the book but I wouldn’t be too hard on it. It’s a step in the right direction.
Mary Harrington and Louise Penny seem to be heading the same way.
You could have asked why young women think motherhood stinks and advocated policies to fix those problems. Instead you do the typical Catholic thing and blame women for not wanting to be weak, stupid doormats like your church orders them to be.
Teresa of Avila was not a weak stupid doormat and neither am I or millions of others like me.
Most young women I know actually love babies but they put off marriage & childbearing until it’s almost too late biologically. That’s the primary reason our fertility rates are falling.
Another factor is that young people are forming fewer face to face relationships & becoming more socially isolated. But it’s not about motherhood “stinking” or women becoming doormats. That attitude’s becoming more of a generational thing from the last century.
Lest you missed it, the article is Dr. Grondelski’s review of someone else’s book. He provides commentary on the observations and conclusions therein. If you believe the question of “why young women think motherhood stinks” and what policies (if any) could be advanced in response, it seems to me your comments would be more productively directed to the book’s author.
As to your charge that the Catholic Church “orders” women to be “weak stupid doormats”…well, a charge such as this does nothing to invite reasoned dialogue or search for shared understanding. I can only recommend you explore the writings of the great women doctors of the Church, specifically St. Teresa of Avila, St. Catherine of Siena or St. Therese of Lisieux as a starting point. For something more current, you might also read some of Dr. Alice von Hildebrand’s writing, or perhaps a biography of Mother Angelica, the latter of whom created a global television network. Mother Angelica’s story is really something. The television network was the third successful venture she started for her convent. With the television network, she was infinitely more successful than the attempts of the feckless U.S. bishops who not only tried to beat her at her game, but threatened to take control of her entire operation. On multiple occasions. With Mother Angelica prevailing each time.
I think you’d really respond to Mother’s story. Look into it.
Since when and in what documents has our church ‘ordered’ women to be weak, stupid doormats? Definitive Answer: Never and No where. Your statement arises from a very loose connection to reality.
Pls enlighten me what it is about modern motherhood that is problematic. Or is motherhood by its nature “weak” and “stupid?” If the latter, sorry, but I am not about to say that generations of women who found fulfillment in the female side of parenthood were ignorant of the blessings that only today’s woman have discovered in their flight from maternity.
Prof Grondelski makes some excellent points, but one not mentioned that needs to be shouted from the roof tops is: Divorce. Divorce. Divorce. Before there was wide-spread use of the pill or cohabitation, there was Divorce in the society. It was hawked in Hollywood in the 1930s. It is the original cancer. It was at the front end of the Protestant revolt from the Church. It was heralded by John the Baptist as an evil; it was specifically condemned by Our Lord. (Matt 5, Mk 10). Divorce is the lynchpin, since it involved Institutional recognition of a broken vow. If the Church recognizes the breaking of a vow (as Pope Francis wants us to do) then the most fundamental bonds of a society become loosened. Divorce teaches children that they do not need to be faithful; it teaches them that adults cannot be trusted; it leaves them to live in fear and without commitments. Divorce encourages the use of contraception, as the adult suffering from the effects of their own parent’s divorce do not want to pass along the pain of betrayal to their offspring; so, enjoy yourself, and save your kids the pain of betrayel.
Prof Grondelski says: “childbearing is increasingly marginalized: only 63% of American children today, she says, are being raised in homes with married parents.” The church rules for marriage may be too tough for the weakest of us. My thoughts…
> Virginity has been disgarded.
> Test drives, tradeins, recalls are the norm.
> Parents not practicing Catholics.
>Too much Information demands for Marriage: “Form to be completed”. Holy Comforter Parish Example: ” Baptism Certificate (An original complete with church seal from your baptismal church that has been issued within 6 months of the date of the wedding; copies are not accepted.)”
> Pre-Cana is required. Couples may be asked to submit particular paperwork, participate in more church events, and go through an intensive marriage preparation.
“’till death do us part”?
I’m completely on board with your first three bullets. The for the final two – information demands and Pre-Cana requirements – I have much less sympathy for those who complain about these. They didn’t seem to be much of an impediment to marriage in the pre-internet past when it was harder than it is now to obtain and communicate about these items. I strongly doubt the couple would complain about providing more extensive original documents for their passport applications prior to their overseas honeymoon.
More fundamentally…this is a lifetime commitment we’re talking about. If fulfilling documentation and Pre-Cana requirements are threshold issues for whether a couple enters into a sacramental marriage, I would argue we need more, not fewer, of these requirements to increase certainty of their commitment to the marriage vocation.
An additional consideration, one occasioned by a reading of Jessica Grose’s recent critique of the “nuclear family” in the New York Times (a critique which is not without some justification in places) is that we Moderns have reversed the teleology of family and children. Grose’s overt assumption in her general attack on family normalcy, is that families exist for the benefit of the children. In reality, the reverse is true. Children exist for the benefit of the family.
In the first place, just because of their very existence and hoped-for future successes, children are a benefit to the family. THEY are the very continuation of the family, the tribe, etc…, hopefully additionally occasioning the family with welfare and honor.
If such things as family, tribe, etc…, are of null value, then the underlying impetus for children across a society is defenestrated. If a two-parent household is a “privilege” in the Modern era, then children are the Modern era’s “luxury,” existent only for the self-fulfillment of one, or maybe two, persons. Such an attitude is not viable for a society in the long-term.
I missed an important fact. Most of the comments deal with our Catholic faith and the disconnect with Christ. The Kearney book addresses all of society.
I remember from long ago an English television series of comparitive sociology. Each program compared at some aspect of society in different places, one English working class, one English middle class, one African, one Arabian, one Indian tribal, and a couple of others. So there was polygamy and polyandry as well as nuclear and intergenerational families. In almost every case people had the same view of purposes in all these different cases, for example that the object of forming a bond was to raise children. Except that the English middle class did not know that. They spoke in a vague waffle of mutual support/comfort/delight. The same confusion arose over the purpose of work, education, and all the other topics addressed in different programs. That was more than forty years ago, perhaps over fifty years. Since then of course the political classes have embraced this miasma and largely destroyed the working classes. NB it didn’t matter whether it was polygamy, polyandry, or nuclear, whether women worked or were housebound people, with the one exception, knew what the purpose was.
In his critique, Dr. Grondelski alludes to the redefinition of “marriage.” So, we read about cohabitation—but not that author Kearney’s “two-parent” family can easily be used as an opening for homosexual and lesbian two-parent (!) “families.” And, clearly superior to the faithful one-parent (biological) family struggling to make ends meet!
And, about economics, might we recall that the much-revered John Maynard Keynes (all genuflect!) was bisexual, although married to a Lydia in later life? But she miscarried and they had no children….So, about children and an intergenerational focus, and for whatever reason, guru Keynes famously announced that “in the long run we are all dead.” Authoritative justification for unending annual federal deficits, fiat currency, and an astronomical national debt foisted onto the next generation!
And, fueling the broader culture of nihilism, personal apprehension, escapism, and narcissism that now spawns a pandemic of anti-binary sexual intimacy. A fiat “community” of alphabetical militants, with front-of-the-line adoptions by redefined “husbands” and “wives.”