The past two weeks have produced a boomlet in scholarly and journalistic revelations of facts that establish heavy disadvantages afflicting children not raised by two parents, who are more prevalent in the United States than any other nation.

This is a controversial topic and has all kinds of links to debates about religion, morality and culture.

Consider this from a lengthy New York Times op-ed Sept. 20, with this explosive headline: “The Explosive Rise of Single-Parent Families Is Not a Good Thing.”

The evidence is overwhelming: Children from single-parent homes have more behavioral problems, are more likely to get in trouble in school or with the law, achieve lower levels of education and tend to earn lower incomes in adulthood. Boys from homes without dads present are particularly prone to getting in trouble. …

This article, by University of Maryland economist Melissa S. Kearney, was based on her new book “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind” (University of Chicago Press). The Religion Guy has yet to read this book, which has won media praise as “important,” “compelling” and “a great service,” with a “top scholar” offering “reams of evidence.”

By coincidence, the same day the book was released, University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox and three Institute for Family Studies colleagues posted a piece (.pdf here) headlined “Do Two Parents Matter More Than Ever?” Their answer: Yes. It’s the latest such documentation from the Institute and the university’s National Marriage Project, which Wilcox directs. (Note: these social scientists are not saying spouses should remain in physically or emotionally dangerous marriages.)

These writings do not center on religious arguments or sources, but Christian, Jewish, Muslim and other clergy, and members of their congregations, will respond: “Duh!” The obvious influence of religious involvement, teaching and role modeling in fostering stable two-parent marriages and helping youths’ life outcomes is too often ignored, not to mention whether religions’ decline worsens Americans’ growing loneliness epidemic.

This leaves a huge hole for journalists to fill as they cover this important new conversation.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof boldly addressed (behind paywall) a major aspect of what’s been going on here. He says liberal academics and media have ignored vital facts lest they seem “patronizing” toward hard-pressed single moms or alternative family configurations, or “racist” due to bleak statistics for many African-Americans.

Kearney agrees on this wariness. So does Black Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, who (behind paywall) accuses liberals of “intellectual cowardice” and ignoring eight prior books that made a similar case.

Kristof contends that “you can’t have a serious conversation about poverty” if the startling increase in single-parent households is ignored.” Yes, many single moms raise happy and successful children, but they beat considerable odds.

Consider: Families led by single mothers on average are five times as likely to be economically poor compared with families led by married couples. Their children are less likely to graduate from high school, are less likely to obtain college degrees, and are more likely to become single parents, perpetuating the cycle.

The bottom line: There’s major impact when only 38% of African-American children are raised by married parents, compared with 77% for whites and 88% for Asian-Americans.

Kearney emphasizes that all this worsens America’s economic class divide. Affluent college-educated Americans by and large observe the old moral expectation of bearing and raising children within two-person marriage. (Traditionally this meant a mother and father; there’s ongoing debate on the track record for same-sex marriages.) The “normalization of one-parent homes” is concentrated among those with less wealth, she observes.

A conservative response to the book in Commentary magazine noted that “the elites who are still getting hitched at virtually the same rate they were 50 years ago are the ones who promoted the expendability of marriage.”

Solutions? Potential news hooks?

Kearney hopes government and community programs might alleviate problems but admits it’s “highly unlikely” they “could ever provide children from one-parent homes with a comparable amount of the supervision, nurturing, guidance or help that children from healthy two-parent homes receive.”

Wilcox and colleagues compound worries with the latest data showing that the situation has been getting worse — even though marriage “seems to matter more than ever.” Between 2006 and 2020, adults who say that they believe it’s “important” for unwed couples that have a child before they get married fell from 76% to 60%.

Yet a major longitudinal study found with the Baby Boom generation that 26% of those with two-parent upbringing graduated from college compared with 12% of others. In the succeeding Millennial generation, the gap grew to 40% from two-parent homes versus 17% from the “non-intact families.” A New York University study concluded that such a gap in educational achievement more than tripled over the decades following the late 1960s.

And so forth and so on, world without end.

There’s a future news peg next February when Broadside Books releases Wilcox’s bluntly titled “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.”

Contacts: For Kearney, 301-405-6202 or  kearney@umd.edu.  For Wilcox, 434-924-0588 or wbw7q@virginia.edu or via National Marriage Project office 434-321-8601 or marriage@virginia.edu. For a review copy of Kearney’s book: 773-702-7740 or press_publicity@uchicago.edu.

FIRST IMAGE: Anonymous illustration with “The Power of the Two-Parent Home” feature at the Clearly Reformed website.