Much journalism on the painful lack of class equality in this country is well-intentioned and sincere, but often misses the obvious – that single-parent families are almost twice as likely to live in poverty than are intact ones. Here’s one example (The Atlantic, 7/17/19).
The piece is all about Harvard economist Raj Chetty who, as an Indian native, brings with him a certain sensitivity to the concept of caste. Chetty wants to understand patterns of inequality in the U.S. and how our society can help clear a path to upward mobility, i.e. the American dream. Good for him.
Chetty and his colleagues analyzed Internal Revenue Service data on the people’s incomes, where they were located and the impact of moving to an area of greater opportunity on their children’s incomes as adults. The data reveal somewhat significant effects. The younger a child is when his/her family moves to an area of greater opportunity, the more positive the effect on their income as an adult.
By now, readers may have had certain questions pop into their minds. For example, what does Chetty mean by areas of “increased opportunity?” What is “opportunity” after all?
The high-opportunity places, they’ve found, tend to share five qualities: good schools, greater levels of social cohesion, many two-parent families, low levels of income inequality, and little residential segregation, by either class or race.
And that of course raises another, more difficult question, “How do we move substantial numbers of the poor into those neighborhoods?” As the article cogently points out,
Opportunity bargains, however, are not an inexhaustible resource.
Indeed. Moreover, about 14.8% of Americans fall below the poverty line. That’s roughly 47 million people. No sensible public policy would try to uproot them from their homes and move them all into areas of opportunity. For one thing, the cost would be unsustainable. For another, if the past is any guide, large influxes of the poor into those areas would tend to convert them into poor areas as the more affluent moved away.
So, whatever the merits of Dr. Chetty’s research, they offer little in the way of policy alternatives. What’s more, The Atlantic article (and I suspect Chetty’s research) gives astonishingly short shrift to the role of single parenthood in the matter of poverty and poor upward mobility.
It takes the article some 4,800 words to broach the subject at all and when it finally does, this is all it has to say:
For example, the strongest correlation [with high opportunity places] is the number of intact families. The explanation seems obvious: A second parent usually means higher family income as well as more stability, a broader social network, additional emotional support, and many other intangibles. Yet children’s upward mobility was strongly correlated with two-parent families only in the neighborhood, not necessarily in their home. There are so many things the data might be trying to say. Maybe fathers in a neighborhood serve as mentors and role models? Or maybe there is no causal connection at all.
What the author means by a child’s upward mobility “in their home,” is anyone’s guess, but most importantly, that brief reference to intact families was the only one in an article of 7,000 words. Does the writer know about the plethora of research demonstrating from every imaginable viewpoint the value of two biological parents to children? This has been shown countless times. As long ago as 1993, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead thoroughly demonstrated the benefits of dual parenting in an article in, yes, The Atlantic (then The Atlantic Monthly). Twenty-six years – and much, much more research later – another Atlantic writer tosses aside all that information with a casual “maybe there is no causal connection at all.”
In truth, existing research in 1993 and today effectively considers the possibility that other factors such as race, income, education, class, religion, geographic location, etc. may explain differing outcomes for kids. And all of it returns to the same variable – whether a child lives with a lone parent or two biological ones – as the common denominator for child well-being or the lack thereof. Amazingly, this latest Atlantic piece makes no mention of that research. It deals with the notion of “social capital,” but never lets on that keeping two parents in a child’s life provides roughly twice the social capital as does a single-parent household. Among sociologists and psychologists, this is not news.
Plus, beyond the sociology and psychology, the neurochemistry of children’s attachments to their parents strongly urges us to realize the value of both parents to them. The simple fact is that, when kids suffer the loss of a parent, their behavior reflects it. Raj Chetty has done some fine and worthwhile research, but when we wonder why some kids do better than others, we need to start with what we’ve known for decades – that children thrive when both of their parents raise them and tend to do worse when they lose one or the other.
It’s not a difficult concept and one that must inform public policy.
