Melissa S. KearneyThe Two Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling BehindUniversity of Chicago Press, 2023, 240 p. , 25. 00.

The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind starts, from the title, with a bold claim. The book's jacket copy calls it "surprising" and "provocative," and Kearney embraces this hint of controversy, promising as early as the first page to bring numbers and facts to bear on topics that are "uncomfortable" to talk about and titling the first chapter "The Elephant in the Room." The suggestion that Kearney is revealing hidden truths is puzzling. The main empirical associations described in the book—that children of married parents have access to more resources than children in other family structures, and that this difference, combined with differences in marriage rates, contributes to growing economic inequality in the United States—are well-known in the social science literature. For example, Sara McLanahan's PAA presidential address on the "diverging destinies" of America's children has been cited over 2000 times (McLanahan 2004). These stylized facts are also at the core of much US family policy: The 1996 welfare reform bill that still defines the forms of cash assistance available to families includes an explicit statement that "Marriage is the foundation of a successful society," especially when it comes to promoting the interests of children (as cited by Kearney in Chapter 4, p. 99). The "success sequence" of education, work, marriage, and childbearing (in that order) is promoted as a pathway out of poverty both by scholars at the center-left think tank the Brookings Institution and by their counterparts at conservative institutions such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Kearney's claim about the importance of marriage is part of a longstanding conversation among both academics and policy makers. Yet the book makes little effort to contextualize this claim in terms of broader scholarly, policy, or cultural debates. Kearney makes two primary arguments in The Two-Parent Privilege. First, she argues that children are better off if their parents are married, and that the declining proportion of children growing up with married parents contributes to economic inequality in the United States. Kearney's second argument is a meta-narrative that constitutes the motivation for the book. She believes that social scientists and policy makers are reluctant to talk about the benefits of marriage for children, and that greater public discussion of these topics is necessary in order to increase marriage among parents and reduce inequality in the United States. Thus, her goal in the book is not so much to uncover new knowledge but to push for greater recognition and visibility of this knowledge beyond academia. Kearney develops her arguments in six chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion. She describes trends in the distribution of children's family structure and demographic variation in these trends; explains why children of married parents are advantaged, drawing on economic theory and empirical evidence; considers the role of men's social and economic challenges in explaining declining marriage rates; outlines the importance of parental resources for children's outcomes; and argues that the involvement of fathers is particularly important for boys. In the final empirical chapter, which feels somewhat tangential to the core arguments, she shows that the declining proportion of children living with married parents is a product of changing marriage behavior, not increased nonmarital birth rates. The book concludes with a chapter of policy recommendations. The prose is clear and direct, with technical language kept to a minimum and figures to illustrate key findings. In the sections of the book focused on developing the first argument, about the benefits of marriage for children, Kearney draws on newly compiled descriptive statistics from US surveys as well as findings from her own and others' published work. Her broad empirical conclusions are well-established and largely uncontroversial. It is clearly the case that children of married parents have access to more resources than children of single parents; that marriage has declined more among the most disadvantaged parents; and that the combination of these two facts contributes to growing inequality in the United States. There is more room for disagreement about the details. For instance, there is less consensus about how much the returns to marriage for children vary by parental characteristics such as race and education, the importance of positive selection into marriage in explaining marriage benefits, and the degree to which marriage change is truly a cause of growing inequality as opposed to an indicator. The Two-Parent Privilege touches on these issues but does not address the finer points of these disagreements; as Kearney frequently reminds the reader, this is a book for a general audience, not a scholarly treatise, and she sticks to the big picture. For the most part, she is explicit and fair about the details she leaves out and their implications for understanding the associations between family structure and children's outcomes. Kearney repeatedly points out that increased marriage rates would not benefit all children equally or address all social problems; that underlying economic conditions contribute to both growing inequality and declining marriage rates in the United States; that some parents and children are better off without marriage; and that effective social policy requires a range of programs to support all children and families, regardless of family structure. Given these conclusions, it is unclear why Kearney places so much emphasis on her second argument, that talking more about the benefits of marriage would be an effective way to improve children's well-being. Nowhere in the book does Kearney address the question of how much increasing marriage rates would improve children's outcomes relative to other possible levers of change, such as providing more economic support to families, increasing the minimum wage, or making it easier for parents to be employed. This is a big omission. US poverty rates are high (in international comparison) across many family structures and demographic groups, not just among single-parent families (see, e.g., Brady 2023; Smeeding and Thévenot 2016). As a result, it is not clear that simply increasing the number of children raised by married parents would meaningfully reduce poverty in the United States (Brady, Finnigan, and Hübgen 2017). In contrast, policies such as cash support for families and structures to support maternal employment have been shown to be effective in reducing poverty in single-mother families (Le Menestrel and Duncan 2019). In the United States, child tax credits and cash assistance provided during the pandemic succeeded in reducing child poverty to all-time low levels (Trisi 2023). Stronger social safety nets could have a greater impact on children's outcomes than increasing marriage rates. But even if the reader accepts the premise that increasing marriage rates is an important goal, Kearney does not provide evidence that talking more about the benefits of marriage would be an effective way to reach this goal. The book does not describe what Americans know about family structure and children's outcomes; what their beliefs and attitudes about marriage are; or how much public discussion there is about the benefits of marriage for children. (Kearney does cite conversations with cabdrivers and at backyard barbecues that confirm her beliefs on these questions; the lack of rigorous evidence is surprising coming from an author who leans so heavily on her credentials as an empirical researcher at other points in the book.) In Chapter 4, she argues that social norms matter for marriage, drawing on a single study of the impact of fracking booms in the early 2000s, but she does not consider the specifics of which norms matter, how norms shape behavior, or how it might be possible to change norms in desirable ways. Perhaps most importantly, in considering the stakes of her argument, Kearney leaves out any mention of the harms of encouraging marriage as a solution to poverty. US welfare policy allows states to spend federal allocations on programs to support and encourage stable marriage instead of direct cash support to families. As Kearney notes in Chapter 8 (p. 178), marriage promotion programs have been largely ineffective, and spending on these programs diverts resources from more effective approaches. To the extent that talking more about marriage means spending more on marriage promotion, it hurts children. And it hurts some children more than others—one recent analysis found that states with larger Black populations spend a lower proportion of their federal allocation on direct cash assistance, and that this variation accounts for more of the difference in poverty rates between Black and white children than marriage differences (Parolin 2021). The Two-Parent Privilege is part of a long lineage of research and policy that focuses on individual- and family-level processes connecting family structure to child outcomes. A growing body of evidence—some of which Kearney discusses and cites in the book—shows that the link between family structure and children's experiences is not universal. For instance, Black children experience fewer negative outcomes in single-parent families than white children, and the gains to marriage for Black families are smaller than for white families. While Kearney largely ignores the implications of these findings, other family scholars are using them as a starting point for rethinking the relationship between family structure and children's outcomes. In a recent article in the Journal of Family Theory Jim Crow laws and residential segregation restricted economic opportunities for Black people, and thus the economic returns to marriage; ongoing discrimination in the job market, housing, schooling, and the criminal justice system perpetuates these legacies. Structural racism also affects children's outcomes independently of family processes, through their experiences in schools, neighborhoods, and the criminal justice system. Cross, Fomby, and Letieq propose a conceptual model that acknowledges and incorporates the role of structural racism and heteropatriarchy in jointly shaping both family structure and children's outcomes. They point out that analyzing the impact of family structure on children without considering these macro-level forces risks mis-specifying models and, as a result, disproportionately fixating on individual behavior as the cause of inequality in children's outcomes. Kearney's lack of attention to the impact of structural racism on marriage, poverty, and policy in the United States, and to the growing body of work documenting these impacts, is a striking omission from the book. Kearney acknowledges that marriage is not the only way to reduce child poverty. But she does not engage with the large body of theoretical and empirical work that explicitly challenges the viability of marriage as a policy solution. This gap is a disservice to readers seeking a fuller understanding of either marriage or poverty in the United States. When Kearney considers the counter-arguments to her emphasis on marriage, she often assigns an emotional valence to these debates: people are afraid to talk about the benefits of marriage, lest they might hurt someone's feelings. But for many people, the reluctance to propose marriage as a policy solution is a considered judgement based on empirical evidence, or a principled stance about what happens when family relationships are used as a tool to achieve economic ends. Failing to consider these arguments on their own terms makes The Two-Parent Privilege a weaker book. Disagreement about the role of marriage in anti-poverty policy dates back to the founding of the US welfare state. This disagreement stems from both empirical questions about the impact of marriage and deeply held values about the role of government in regulating families and supporting children. A rich and robust, if occasionally contentious, scholarly literature explores these questions. The Two-Parent Privilege leans into the contention but adds little to the conversation either in new empirical findings or in conceptual clarity.