Single Parenthood and Its Consequences for Children (w/Kay Hymowitz)

Single parenthood has risen dramatically in the United States over time. Today, 34% of all children live in a single parent household, up from 9% in 1960.

There are regrettable negative consequences of these statistics, as The Bulwark’s Mona Charen notes:

“[C]hildren in mother-only homes are five times more likely to live in poverty than children with two parents. And children in father-only homes were twice as likely to be poor as those in married-couple homes. Poverty is not conducive to thriving, but even for kids who are not poor, those who grow up with only one parent fare worse than others on everything from school to work to trouble with the law. And the consequences of fatherlessness are more dire for boys than girls. Boys raised without fathers and/or without good adult male influences in their lives are less likely to attend college, be employed as adults, or remain drug-free.”

And as the Manhattan Institute’s Kay Hymowitz writes:

“Kids in single-parent homes have lower educational achievement, commit more crime, and suffer more emotional problems, even when controlling for parental income and education. Not only do young men and women from intact families (regardless of race and ethnicity) get more education and earn higher earnings than those raised with single mothers; they also do better than children who have a stepparent at home. Children growing up in an area where single-parent families are the norm have less of a chance of upward mobility than a child who lives where married-couple families dominate (regardless of whether that child lives with a single parent or with married parents). The evidence that the prevalence of single-parent households poses risks to individual children and communities goes on and on.”

There are large variations in single parenthood rates by race/ethnicity, with 63% of Black children, 50% of Indigenous children, 42% of Latino children, 24% of non-Hispanic White children, and 16% of Asian American children living in single parent households.

University of Maryland economist Melissa Kearney has published important research on how family structure impacts American children, including her new book, The Two Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind:

“The most recent research, much of which incorporates advanced statistical techniques, continues to show that children who are raised in single-mother households tend to have lower levels of completed education and lower levels of income as adults, even after statistically accounting for observable demographic characteristics (for example, where the family lives or the mother’s level of education)” (p. 52).

In Table 1, Kearney shows how children of single parents differ in their life chances compared with children of married parents. For children of college-educated mothers, for instance, 57.0% have a college degree by age 25 if their mother was married, but only 28.6% of those raised with a college educated single mother.  

In Figure 1 you can see, as Mona Charen alluded to, the strong correlation between the dominant family structure in a neighborhood and the upward mobility rate of children raised there.