The Two-Parent Privilege is a Feature of Inequality—Not A Fix

Listening to a recent episode of Bari Weiss’s Honestly, the following began to write itself in my Notes app, before demanding to be developed fully here. Weiss’s interviewee was Melissa S. Kearney, a professor at the University of Maryland and the author of new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind.

The crux of Kearney’s argument is thus:

“Children who have the benefit of two parents in the home tend to have more highly resourced, enriching, stable childhoods, and they consequently do better in school and have fewer behavioral issues. These children complete more years of education, earn more in the workforce, and have a greater likelihood of being married.”

The “two-parent privilege” of her title is what sets children up for success, she posits, while an increase in the number of (predominantly Black) kids being raised in single-parent (read: single-mother) homes, is a core driver of widening economic inequality. And well, it seems pretty clear to me that said two-parent privilege is a FEATURE of inequality—not a fix.

Setting aside the question of whether doing well in school, earning lots of money, and getting married suffice as markers of success and overall wellbeing (what an “enriching” childhood looks like in practice is not expounded on), Kearney’s message seems to be: potential parents should do their best to get married and stay married. Especially those in lower income brackets.

After all, it’s not exactly news that single parenthood is hard. Childrearing in general is an immensely resource-heavy endeavor, and it is simply common sense that having two adults contributing to a child’s wellbeing in terms of time, energy, attention, and money is going to be a good thing.

While “independent parenting” (the more empowering term, not used in Kearney’s book) is becoming more common, few women actively choose to embark on parenthood solo. Hence the advent of alternative approaches to childrearing such as “mommunes” and co-parent matchmaking services.

But another way to read Kearney’s book (and essentially what she’s saying) is that unmarried people should not have children in the first place. Which is where this all begins to dovetail with my work with Women Without Kids.

Avoiding the challenges inherent to solo parenting—not least because of the potential negative impact on the kids—is a major factor in more women either actively choosing not to have children at all or “leaving it too late.” Most often, this is due to not having found a suitable co-parent within one’s fertile window. When people claim economic reasons for delaying having kids or opting out full stop, it boils down to the same thing: what often makes childrearing economically viable is being able to do so with the financial support of a compatible and committed mate.

Seen this way, many women without kids are in fact custodians of what is undeniably a very real two-parent privilege. This equally applies to any women who chooses to terminate a pregnancy that results from sex with a man (who has likely ejaculated irresponsibly) who she does not deem dad-material. Kearney insists that she is not suggesting bringing back the convention of the “shotgun wedding,” but access to safe, legal abortion is the alternative here.

And then these same women are told: you are selfish, frivolous, and deluded; you don’t know how to love; you will regret not having kids; you are to be held accountable for imminent “population collapse”!

Meanwhile, with no “skin in the game” childfree and childless people’s opinions on family policy and formation are rarely seen as valid. This, despite our decisions not to procreate, and the factors informing these decisions, being integral to any conversation about what make for the ideal conditions under which to raise kids.

This is partly because pronatalism dictates that non-parents are not seen as valid, period. As evidenced by the fact that all four women featured in a recent Free Press debate on whether the sexual revolution was a mistake, were mothers.

Five, if you include host Bari Weiss. Quite an omission when the people to have benefited MOST from the decoupling of sex and reproduction are women for whom (as I write in Women Without Kids) choosing not to have kids is: “equal parts empowerment, self-preservation, and birth strike.”

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As I also discuss in the book, once a person has dependents, they need others they can depend on. In an ideal world, this may well be a spouse: that is, a person who is legally committed to sharing the financial and emotional load of homemaking and childrearing (regardless of whether this commitment is fulfilled).

But what statisticians like Kearney have a hard time incorporating into their theories, is that the world we live in is far from ideal and people are not numbers on graphs. We are wildly inconsistent, emotionally led, ever-evolving organisms.

Elsewhere, Kearney also states that having a violent or volatile parent in the home negates the benefits of the two-parent privilege. Which sort of negates her whole argument. And what about people whose marriages have failed due to infidelity? Or have ended due to illness, incarceration, suicide, or intractable incompatibility?

She repeatedly states that those most likely to marry and raise kids together are wealthy, white, and college educated—not least perhaps because marriage is an expensive business in and of itself. And how much of the “success” of these unions is because these couples can also pay for some degree of help? If you can’t afford a nanny/housekeeper, the job of homemaker—a full time role—falls disproportionately to women. A dynamic that places its own strain on a marriage.

As an aside, I have heard from several divorced women who claim that coparenting with an “absent father”—where he takes the kids half the time—turns out to be a better deal. Not least, because the homemaker role often also extends to caretaking one’s live-in mate.

Essentially, what Kearney is saying is that children do better in two-salary households, and that it benefits kids for them to be well resourced materially. She talks about the two-parent privilege being the “elephant in the room” in conversations about economic inequality—but the fact that this privilege is the result of more financial resource (not the marital status of the parents) being funneled into a home is the real “doh” moment here.

As she is keen to point out, the unromantic view of marriage is that it is an economic contract. An agreement between two individuals to combine resources to create a home together. As fate would have it, I am writing this on the 25^th anniversary of the day I met my husband, and I can attest from personal experience that there are huge benefits to this, regardless of whether you have kids.

So why, as an economist, is she not pointing the finger squarely at an economic climate that has continued to exacerbate inequality along lines of race and class—creating the very conditions that have allowed her white, upper-middle class two-parent privilege to flourish?

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Kearney insists repeatedly that she is not shaming “unmarried mothers,” and yet sadly this is what she does. In the Honestly interview she also proudly proclaims that she purposefully avoids using the term “deadbeat dads” to describe men who may have ejaculated irresponsibly, and/or are unwilling or unable to play an active role (financial and/or emotional) in the raising of the children they have sired.

Not that it’s fair to blame what Kearney instead terms “unmarriageable men” for the number of kids being raised without adequate resources, either. In an economy where 44% of Americans do not make a living wage, the very role of “provider” becomes something of a joke.

Wages have stagnated and unemployment risen in the blue-collar sector since the 1970s, largely due to globalization and industrial automation (IA). Meanwhile, the looming AI apocalypse is on course to eviscerate the white-collar sector in similar ways. To be fair, Kearney does stress that we must “work to improve the economic position of men without a college level education so they are more reliable marriage partners and fathers.”

To do this, she endorses: “building skills so that people can command higher wages” and “a massive infusion of federal resources into public universities.” But this doesn’t get to the heart of what is happening here. Nor does getting a collage degree guarantee a lucrative salary.

All of which becomes irrelevant when weighed against the adoption of new technologies to improve workplace efficiency. Whether IA or AI, this is never about giving people back more hours in the day to work on their relationships and lavish attention on their kids, and always about reducing the cost of human labor to maximize shareholder profits.

An ethos that is the core driver of slavery. I had to double check the index of Kearney’s book for terms such as “reparations,” “family wage,” and “universal basic income,” none of which appear in the text, and which represent some of the most progressive thinking about ways to better set all humans up for success.

I particularly like the idea of a “universal inheritance”: a lump sum of money endowed to every individual at age 18 by the state. Not least because I count the generosity of my own father-in-law, who gifted my husband and I the down payment on our first home when we got married in 2003, as the bedrock of my current and future economic stability. Which does indeed bring it back to privilege.

A concept that is actually only relevant in the context of inequality: is it not possible for everybody to hold privilege, as the word/concept itself speaks to holding an advantage OVER others. Defined by the Merriam-Webster as: “a right or liberty granted as a favor or benefit especially to some and not others,” for some to hold privilege others must necessarily be “underprivileged”—a word that is routinely applied to the kinds of kids that Kearney is claiming to want to help.

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Another reason fewer people are getting married and raising children in two-parent homes? It could be argued (and I will) that the very technologies that are reshaping our economy are also having a devastating impact on people’s desire and ability to form the kinds of meaningful connections that might form the foundation of a stable environment in which to raise kids.

As I discuss at length in Women Without Kids, an app-led culture of convenience that is predicated on doing away with the need for human interaction almost entirely, continues to erode our capacity for the deeply vulnerable and inconvenient work of creating interdependent relationships with our fellow human beings.

For example, in a Free Press article on the impact of dating apps on people getting married and having kids, Suzy Weiss quotes a self-identified incel named Philip:

“Between social media and porn and podcasts and video games, you can live a low-quality simulation of what a fulfilling life would be. You can get social interaction from social media, the feeling of problem solving and being productive from video games, and sexual fulfillment from porn.”

Which brings us back to those deadbeat dads. If taking on the role of provider is increasingly intimidating, then what rewards might be found in fatherhood can be easily outweighed by the easy wins of video games and porn.

As for the people making the apps, the video games, and the porn? Widening economic inequality aside, if “population collapse” really is the biggest threat to our humanity (according to the likes of Elon Musk) then why are the tech bros not being held to account for this?

And then there’s the fact that without responsible, humble, and generous father figures to aspire to—INCLUDING, VERY IMPORTANTLY—responsible, humble, and generous role models in business and politics, then few boys will grow up to be ideal dad-material.

But it feels like “responsibility” is a bad word in today’s economic and cultural climate (which in turn dictates the political climate), where the Zuckerberg ethos of “move fast and break things” reigns. As in, break as many eggs as necessary in the making of your multi-billion-dollar omelet, and don’t worry about who (in this scenario, it becomes yet another task for single mothers) is going to clear up the mess.

In many ways, to bring it back to women without kids, women who choose not to become mothers under less-than-ideal conditions (with less-than-ideal support from a co-parent or weighing a less-than-ideal prognosis when it comes to climate change, for example) are showing the UTMOST IN RESPONSIBILITY towards future generations.

As Carter Dillard, founder of the Fair Start Movement, told me when I interviewed him for my book:

“people that don’t have children, and who also get involved in ensuring that every child who is born gets a fair start in life, are doing more to better the world than … (those) who have large families and don’t share their resources with families in need, don’t think about the impact that their choices will have on the future, and keep a myopic view of their children’s trajectory.”

If inequality is the problem, then the solution is not to try to propagate a two-parent privilege that in fact is born of inequality. It is to attempt to do away with the notion of privilege entirely, and to focus instead on granting each child being born today the right to Dillard’s fair start in life—regardless of their parents’ marital status.