The power of the two-parent home is not a myth (2020)

The power of the two-parent home is not myth.

Among several disturbing elements of Christina Cross’s New York Times op-ed, “The Myth of the Two-Parent Home,” is the author’s seeming belief that unless growing up with married parents has the same effect on black children as on white youngsters, it is not worthy of endorsement. Otherwise, asserts the Harvard postdoctoral fellow, “blindly promoting the merits of marriage and the two-parent family is not the answer.” Her purpose appears to be to show how black families do in comparison to white families, as opposed to what the absolute impact of strengthened family structure would be on black children. Take this excerpt:

Although in general, youths raised in two-parent families are less likely to live in poverty, black youths raised by both biological parents are still three times more likely to live in poverty than are their white peers. Additionally, black two-parent families have half the wealth of white two-parent families. So, many of the expected economic benefits of marriage and the two-parent family are not equally available to black children.

Yet the research Cross herself cites from the National Center for Education Statistics tells a far more hopeful story about the impact of family structure. Consider what we see in figure 1:

Family breakdown is unarguably bad for black children. But what is happening with other Americans? Again using birth data for 2018, table 1 shows the non-marital birth information for women age twenty-four and under. Yes, it’s staggering that 91 percent of the babies born to black women under age twenty-five were outside of marriage. But what of the 61 percent of babies born outside of marriage to white women age twenty-four and under? Their more than 238,000 children dwarf the numbers in other racial categories.

Here Harvard inadvertently fingers progressive politician-led states and cities for exacerbating racial educational inequity, rather than promoting equity as they claim. Again, reality belies the rhetoric and virtue signaling.

Key except from the Harvard report:

The striking and important finding was that remote instruction had much more negative impacts in high-poverty schools. High-poverty schools were more likely to go remote and their students lost more when they did so. Both mattered, but the latter effect mattered more. To give you a sense of the magnitude: In high-poverty schools that were remote for more than half of 2021, the loss was about half of a school year’s worth of typical achievement growth. . . . Over the last 30 years, there has been like a gradual closing in both the Black-white and Hispanic-white achievement gaps. . . . Our results imply that when those [NAEP] results come out later this year (likely in October, before the midterm election) there will be a decline nationally, especially in states where schools remained remote, and gaps will widen sharply for the first time in a generation.