Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY — In the U.S., more women are deciding to have children and remain single with almost half of all babies being born to unmarried women in 2019, an increase from 1960 when only 5% of births were to unmarried mothers.
The trend is not a direct result of divorce — the overall trend in the divorce rate since 2008 remains downward despite the slight increase from 2021 to 2022. In fact, the trend of unmarried mothers indicates that today's mothers are more likely never to be married.
Has society stepped away from the institution of marriage? Economist and scholar Melissa Kearney presented her data-driven case arguing that the institution's decline has created economic issues for not only individual households but the nation in her book, "The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind." The author discussed her findings and participated in a panel discussion Wednesday sponsored by the University of Utah's Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute.
Kearney argues the most significant impacts of marriage are economic: When two adults of any gender marry, their financial and household lives improve, offering a host of benefits not only for the married adults but for their children as well.
The economist first framed today's current situation with a number of statistics:
- Over the past 40 years, the share of U.S. kids living with married parents has fallen from 77% to 63%.
- The decline is not being made up for by a very large increase in the share of kids living with long-term cohabiting parents. Only 8% of kids in the U.S. census live with what is categorized as cohabiting parents.
- 21% of U.S. children live with just their mother, with no father figure or second parent in the house.
- 9% of U.S. children are living with a partnerless father or no parents at all — the children could be living with grandparents, a relative or in foster care.
"This is the situation in the U.S. today, and that puts U.S. children in a unique position of being more likely than kids in any other country in the world to live with just one parent," said Kearney, pointing to a Pew Research Center survey of 130 countries that found 23% of U.S. kids live with one parent while the international average is 7%. "This isn't exceptionalism; that isn't something we should be proud of."
What did Kearney's data reveal?
"One common reaction to this is, 'Well, women in the U.S. are richer. You're more likely to be able to afford to make it on their own,' but really, crucially, it's not the most economically successful women in the U.S. who are doing this on their own," said Kearney.
Over the past 40 years, there's been a large increase in the share of mothers who have a college degree, but the decline in the share with their kids living in married-parent homes has only fallen from 90% to 84%.
"The group really standing apart today are the college-educated. And that's in part why I lean into this idea of privilege. It's really the most advantaged group in society are the ones that are still holding on tight to this institution, this very beneficial, advantaged institution of raising their kids in America two-parent home. And it's sort of another way in which the college-educated class in America is pulling away from everyone else," said Kearney.
Kearney asserts that the widening family gap in the U.S. has contributed to income inequality in a very mechanical sense.
"College-educated workers have done really well over this past 40 years, their earnings have gone up; the middle-class earnings have been fairly stagnant, and at the bottom they sort of dipped and then returned," explained Kearney.
"But on top of this, the fact (is) that college-educated adults are still getting married in large numbers, and what you see is households have tremendous resources pouring into their kids. In the middle, your combined stagnant earnings with a 23% increase in the likelihood that those households have only one adult — one potential earner in the house — and this has very mechanically contributed to the erosion of economic security for this house," she concluded.
But what could be driving the trend?
"The way to think about what's happened in the past 40 years is that outside of the college-educated class, there's been a deep bundling of the institution of marriage from having a reason," said Kearney. "We've had a relaxation of social conventions around marriage, and marriage, combined with these changing economic incentives to get married, and we're now getting into social care. We're in many communities and many population groups, having kids outside the parent has become a new social norm."
How does the new social norm impact children? Kearney found that:
- Two parents have more capacity to bring more income into the household, which can expand resources for children.
- National data revealed kids who live with married parents have the benefit of more parental time.
- Kids growing up in two-parent households are less likely to get in trouble in school, they're more likely to graduate from high school, and they're more likely to go on to be married and have higher earnings as adults.
- There's evidence that two-parent households are beneficial at a neighborhood level. They're highly predictive of higher rates of upward mobility for kids growing up in those households.
"I don't see how a government checker program is ever going to make up for all of the resources the second parents bring into the home. So that's sort of the starting point of the conversation in my mind about where we go forward," said Kearney. "What can we do to help more families achieve a stable two-parent, healthy relationship? And at the same time, what are we doing to strengthen the situation of families for whom that's not available? That's the conversation I'd like us to have in all sorts of policy settings."
