Ep 7: How Important is Marriage?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Raising Parents with Emily Oster
Episode 7: How Important is Marriage?
Date: October 30, 2024

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Overview

In this episode, Emily Oster tackles the historically charged and still-confusing question: How important is marriage for raising children? Exploring the intersection of economics, social policy, and culture, Oster brings together economists, sociologists, policy advisors, and parents to examine trends, data, class disparities, moral arguments, and policy shortcomings regarding marriage. The discussion strives to move beyond ideology, using evidence to ask whether marriage itself, or the resources and stability it often brings, truly matters for children—and what society might do about it.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Cultural Evolution of Marriage

• Fairy Tales, Movies, & Social Norms: Growing up, Oster observed that American culture mythologized the "happily ever after" of marriage and child-rearing. (01:20)
• Changing Realities: The 1960s brought systemic changes—no-fault divorce, the pill, feminism—that altered marriage’s role, especially when viewed by class and race. (01:38)

2. The Moynihan Report & the Political Taboo

• The Moynihan Report (1965): Daniel Patrick Moynihan identified a decline in marriage and a rise in single motherhood among Black families, warning of its social impact. His findings were smeared as racist, resulting in a liberal political reluctance to revisit the topic. (02:31, 03:14)
  • Quote: “I’m not responsible for the fact that he can’t read.” – Daniel Patrick Moynihan (03:35)
• Policy Neglect: The issue defaulted to conservative circles, leaving open, data-driven dialogue stifled for decades. (03:54)

3. The State of Marriage & Single Parenthood in America

• Staggering Decline: US marriage rates have dropped ~60% over 50 years; the share of children raised by single parents tripled since 1950 (from 10% to 30%). Among Black mothers, it’s ~63%. (04:32)
• Child Wellbeing: Single-parent families face three times higher poverty risk; associated with lower academic performance and adult earnings. But: distinguishing correlation from causality is challenging. (05:21)

4. Personal Stories: Family Structures in Practice

• Varied Family Choices: Real parents share their decisions—from cohabitation to single motherhood, from planned partnerships to going solo by choice or circumstance. (06:59-09:16)
  • Quote: “The most important thing for a kid is not if their parents are formally married or not. It’s the kind of love that they grow up with.” – Parent 1 (06:59)
  • Quote: “For the first time, [being a single mom by choice] didn’t sound like a tragedy…It was like, that’s actually a beautiful option.” – Parent 2 (08:02)

5. The Core Data: Is Marriage Beneficial for Kids?

• Framing the Debate: Oster and guests focus on broader patterns, not individual exceptions: On average, is marriage beneficial, and why? (09:37)

With Melissa Carney (University of Maryland, author of The Two Parent Privilege)

• Trends by Education Level: Decline in marriage isn't from more divorce or teen pregnancy (both are down), but from fewer adults marrying before having kids—especially among the “middle education” group (high school/some college). (11:23-13:58)
  • Quote: “A decoupling of being married from having and raising kids.” – Emily Oster (12:37)
• Class & Race Split: Marriage remains common among college-educated and Asian mothers; less so among Black, Hispanic, and “middle education” mothers. (15:18)

Why Does Marriage Matter? Resource & Stability Effects

• Poverty: Single-parent households are multiple times more likely to be in poverty. (17:12)
  • Quote: “Kids who are growing up with a single mom are five times more likely to live in poverty than kids growing up with married parents.” – Melissa Carney (17:13)
• Broader Outcomes: Even when controlling for observable differences: two-parent homes yield better behavioral, educational, and adult income results; the mechanism is not just more money, but also supervision, engagement, and time. (17:52-19:16)

6. Policy Implications: Government Role & Marriage Penalties

With Abby McCloskey (Policy Advisor)

• Neutral Policies: Government should not discourage marriage—but often does, particularly through transfer programs (SNAP, Medicaid, TANF) where getting married can mean losing benefits—a clear “marriage penalty.” Estimated to reduce marriage rates among low-income mothers by up to 14%. (23:37-25:55)
  • Quote: “There are disincentives to marry. … Tens of thousands of marriages that are discouraged just because of how we’ve decided to structure our tax and government programs.” – Abby McCloskey (24:36)
• Other Barriers: Lack of paid parental leave and support for new parents drives financial hardship and discourages family formation. (25:95-26:54)

7. Pushback and Critique of the “Marriage Agenda”

With Philip Cohen (University of Maryland, sociologist)

• Historical Context: The 1950s’ near-universal marriage rates were not voluntary; the following generation rejected it with rising divorce and declining marriage. (29:26-31:53)
  • Quote: “It was a one-generation phenomenon.” – Philip Cohen (31:06)
• Effectiveness of Marriage Promotion: “Never worked anywhere, ever.” Advocating marriage to boost child resources is not evidence-based—better to address underlying material conditions. (29:07-29:17, 36:04)
  • Quote: “As marriage rates have fallen…and fallen…and fallen, rather than everybody stopping… they just keep saying, ‘We need more marriage.’” – Philip Cohen (36:03)

8. The “Success Sequence” and Educating Youth

With Ian Rowe (Vertex Partnership Academies, AEI)

• Informing, Not Shaming: In low-income schools, Rowe teaches students about the “success sequence”—finish high school, get a job, then marry before having children for a 97% chance of avoiding poverty. Students want this information; pushback usually comes from elites, not affected communities. (36:57-40:15)
  • Quote: “Let us know, you tell us so that we can decide what is the right thing to do.” – Student to Ian Rowe (39:40)
• Structural Change: Rowe argues for removing barriers to good jobs and education as preconditions for marriage—linking resources and family formation. (40:52-41:19)

9. Big Data, Nurture, and Intangibles

• Neighborhood Upward Mobility: Raj Chetty’s Opportunity Atlas finds that neighborhoods with more two-parent households have greater upward mobility, not just for their own children, but for the whole community. (41:19)
• Interpretation: Cohen cautions this association is not direct causation; stable marriage may simply reflect other, unmeasured forms of privilege or personal capacity. (43:05)

10. Marriage as Moral Obligation?

With Robert Woodson, Ian Rowe, Melissa Carney

• Practical and Moral: For many children (especially in low-resource settings), marriage modeled in families provides tangible psychological and practical benefits. (44:24)
  • Quote: “Kids need…fathering. … I had to find fathering in the homes of my close friends.” – Robert Woodson (44:36)
• Carney’s Nuance: She does not see marriage as a moral requirement, but believes parents have a strong moral obligation to nurture and care for their children—two parents is one way to meet that responsibility. (46:47)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• “The most important thing for a kid is not if their parents are formally married or not. It’s the kind of love that they grow up with.” – Parent 1 (06:59)
• “A decoupling of being married from having and raising kids.” – Emily Oster (12:37)
• “Kids who are growing up with a single mom are five times more likely to live in poverty than kids growing up with married parents.” – Melissa Carney (17:13)
• “There are disincentives to marry. ...That's tens of thousands of marriages that are discouraged just because of how we've decided to structure our tax and Government programs, that's pretty significant.” – Abby McCloskey (24:36)
• “It was a one-generation phenomenon.” – Philip Cohen (31:06)
• “Let us know, you tell us so that we can decide what is the right thing to do.” – Student to Ian Rowe (39:40)
• “Kids need...fathering. ...I had to find fathering in the homes of my close friends.” – Robert Woodson (44:36)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction & Cultural Framing: 00:46 – 01:38
• Moynihan Report & Taboo: 02:05 – 04:04
• Decline in Marriage / Data Overview: 04:32 – 05:55
• Parent Stories: 06:59 – 09:16
• Melissa Carney on Trends by Education/Race: 10:51 – 15:25
• Links to Poverty and Child Outcomes: 17:02 – 19:16
• Policy & Transfer Programs: 23:37 – 26:54
• Philip Cohen’s Critique of Marriage Promotion: 29:07 – 31:53, 36:03
• Ian Rowe & the Success Sequence: 36:57 – 40:15
• Neighborhood & Upward Mobility Data: 41:19 – 43:05
• Moral Dimensions: 44:24 – 47:55
• Summary & Oster’s Reflection: 48:02 – 50:01

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Conclusion

Marriage is, on average, associated with better child outcomes in the US, but the reasons are complex: resources, engagement, and social capital all matter. While marriage can be a pathway to child wellbeing, it’s not the only one—policymaking must acknowledge the diversity of family structures. Social and governmental barriers still discourage marriage and family stability for the most vulnerable. The episode closes by framing “privilege” not as a tool to shame but as a call for more equitable opportunities, aiming to ensure all children have the chance to flourish.

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Guests in Order of Appearance:

• Melissa Carney: Economist, University of Maryland
• Abby McCloskey: Policy Advisor
• Philip Cohen: Sociologist, University of Maryland
• Ian Rowe: Vertex Partnership Academies, American Enterprise Institute
• Robert Woodson: Woodson Center

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Host: Emily Oster—Maintains her characteristic blend of data-driven rigor, empathy, and humor throughout.

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For anyone considering the social, policy, or personal stakes of marriage in childrearing, this episode provides essential context, nuanced analysis, and a diversity of respected expert voices.

Transcript

[Emily Oster]

Hi, everyone. Emily here. And you're listening to Raising Parents, my new podcast in partnership with the Free Press, where we interrogate all of the big and pressing and confusing questions facing parents today. Before we get to the show, I'm so excited to tell you that this season is in partnership with Airbnb. If you know anything about me, you know how much I love Airbnb. I think I'm currently holding like six Airbnb reservations in my account. Airbnb has provided incredible experiences for me, my family, and our friends across the country and the world time and time again. More on that and how you too can use Airbnb on your next family trip later in the episode. For now, onto the show.

[Ian Rowe]

Marriage.

[Daniel Patrick Moynihan]

Marriage is what brings us together.

[Abby McCloskey]

And in the end, Carrie Bradshaw married John James Preston in a labelless dress.

[Emily Oster]

I do.

[Ian Rowe]

I, Edward Cullen.

[Emily Oster]

I, Edward Cullen.

[Ian Rowe]

Take you, Bella Swan.

[Emily Oster]

Take you, Bella Swan. We are gathered here today to celebrate the love between two people whose lives were ostensibly brought together by the fate.

[Melissa Carney]

Flap of a butterfly wing.

[Emily Oster]

When I was growing up, movies, books, childhood fairy tales that I loved, they all pushed the idea that happily ever after involves two people often overcoming great odds to find each other, get married and raise children.

And this was largely how America used to be once upon a time. In this country, women were essentially forced into marriage because of money and stigma. And then around the 1960s, that changed for a lot of reasons. No fault. Divorce, the pill, feminism, all of this affected different classes and races differently. We could already see that back in 1965, or at least a certain senator from New York.

[Daniel Patrick Moynihan]

Did you say that 44% of the children in Harlem are illegitimate? Now, how do you know that? Those are statistics in New York City Department of Health, 10 health districts in central Harlem. The area with having undergone a massive deterioration of the fabric of society and its institutions and right under our prosperous noses. That happened, that hasn't existed for 50 years. That's happened in the last 15 years in this America.

[Emily Oster]

This is Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democratic senator from New York, speaking in 1965 with NBC following his now infamous Moynihan Report.

[Daniel Patrick Moynihan]

And we've been sitting around thinking things have been getting better and they haven't been getting better for those children, I would hope, certainly I'm willing to face the disapproval of a few white liberals from Boston who think I shouldn't raise the subject because it's impolite.

[Emily Oster]

We'll get into this pivotal moment in detail in today's episode, but the short of it is this. Senator Moynihan, who was working at the Department of Labor at the time, wrote a memo about the decline in marriage and the rise of single mother households among the black urban community. But when the press got ahold of the memo, he was smeared as a racist.

[Daniel Patrick Moynihan]

Here's a quotation, for example, from a recent article by William Ryan, a Harvard psychologist who criticizes your report. Quote, the implicit point is that Negroes tolerate promiscuity, illegitimacy, one parent families, welfare dependency, and everything else that is supposed to follow. Now, that's the criticism he makes of your report. Now, how do you answer those questions? I'm not responsible for the fact that he can't read.

[Emily Oster]

And ever since then, no good liberal has wanted to go anywhere near the subject. Instead, the topic of home and family life in America remains staunchly in the domain of Republicans and social conservatives.

[Ian Rowe]

The easiest way to stay out of.

[Emily Oster]

Poverty is to encourage marriage.

[Ian Rowe]

Marriage is a fundamental building block of our civilization, and certainly it's the ideal model from which we raise children.

[Emily Oster]

We need to make sure that we stand up for the least protected amongst us, those children whom statistics will tell you that have the best chance of growing up and being productive citizens in a normal family with a mother and a father. And so the subject has suffered from neglect, though not of the benign sort. Here we are in 2024 and things have gotten way, way worse. Just look at.

Over the last 50 years, the marriage rate in the US has dropped dramatically by nearly 60%. The share of children in America growing up in single parent families has tripled since 1950, from 10% to 30%. And among black moms specifically, that number is about 63%. Children in single parent families are three times as likely to live below the poverty level. And on average they have higher likelihood of poor academic performance and higher dropout rates from high school. Those translate into lower earnings in adulthood. It is very difficult to separate correlation and causality in these data, and it's hard to say whether single parenthood matters beyond poverty. But there is no question that the associations are very strong.

So on today's episode, we're going there, we're going to talk about what happened to marriage in America, how the trend divided along class lines and contributed to the widening economic gap. And we're also going to talk without fear about whether having two parents is actually better for kids than a single parent and what advantages growing up in a married family actually confers upon kids. Because in the research world, these questions aren't partisan. They're questions that can Be answered with data.

I'm Emily Oster and from the Free Press, this is Raising Parents.

[Abby McCloskey]

Emily Oster, an economist by trade, has gathered the data, crunched the numbers, and.

[Emily Oster]

Is now debunking some of the most controversial myths about parenthood. I think what everyone is most interested in, like pregnant women, they're like, can I drink? You know, you shouldn't have, like, a lot. Where is this data coming from? The fundamental answer is we get data on people by asking people about their behaviors and what they do and by collecting information on how their kids do.

[Ian Rowe]

Oster doesn't shy away from other charged topics.

[Abby McCloskey]

People are using your database as an example as to why schools should reopen.

[Melissa Carney]

What kind of reaction did you get to that?

[Emily Oster]

I imagine that was a little controversial. It was a little controversial, yes. You're an economist, you're not a doctor. I mean, what do you think people are going to take away from what.

[Ian Rowe]

You'Ve written in this book?

[Emily Oster]

All that I'm trying to do here is really show women. Here is what the evidence is and why don't you think about some of these decisions for yourself?

Episode 7 How important is marriage?

[Parent 1 (Guest)]

Having our first child made the idea of a wedding or being officially married or not all feel pretty insignificant. I feel like the most important thing for a kid is not if their parents are formally married or not. It's the kind of love that they grow up with.

[Emily Oster]

There are a lot of different ways people choose to raise children.

[Parent 2 (Guest)]

I had my daughter while I was married. We'd been married for about two years. She was born and we were together for another two and a half years after that and then decided to split up.

[Emily Oster]

Parents who were deciding whether to stay in a relationship or not.

[Parent 2 (Guest)]

I was in a long term relationship and I was doing the thing where I was like, should I stay in the relationship because I want to have a kid and try and make it work.

[Emily Oster]

Single parents.

[Parent 2 (Guest)]

Sometimes I call myself a single parent and that feels wrong. And sometimes I call myself a solo parent to be more respectful to actual single parents. And then I'm like, that doesn't feel really right because I do co parent. And so we like do all the things that regular parents do. We're just not married and we don't.

[Emily Oster]

Live together some by choice.

[Parent 2 (Guest)]

And so I remember being in the midst of that, having this just sort of quiet thought of like, I could be a single mom by choice. And for the first time that didn't sound like this, like tragedy. It didn't sound like this horrible outcome. It was like oh, that's actually a really beautiful option.

[Emily Oster]

Others, not so much.

[Melissa Carney]

I don't think I would have ever tried to be a mom on my own.

[Emily Oster]

Never once crossed my mind.

[Melissa Carney]

I was just looking for the romantic relationship that would end in marriage and then eventually have children. This is not ideal.

[Emily Oster]

I would not have chosen it. Parents who decided to have kids before they got married.

[Parent 1 (Guest)]

I didn't really feel like getting formally married was high on our list of we needed to do. We were getting our life together, we were getting older, and so we decided we wanted to have kids. We were ready for that, and we wanted to leap right into that.

[Parent 2 (Guest)]

Our role as parents hasn't changed and our relationship to parenting and each other hasn't necessarily changed, but the definition of your family sort of changes. And eventually we parted ways and I found a donor. And within a couple tries, I was pregnant and have a beautiful, amazing little toddler. And my life is a bajillion times better. And I am so happy.

[Parent 1 (Guest)]

I mean, Sophia, from the moment she was born, has been in a family with two loving parents. We might be crazy and you know, all the ups and downs of domestic life, but I don't think it was ever an immediate question for her. Like, what was my parents marital status for the first two years of my life?

[Emily Oster]

It is clear from these and a million other voices that there are a lot of ways to raise happy, healthy, productive, kind kids. One parent, two parents, four parents, an extended family. The question for today is less about these individual choices and more about the impacts of marriage on average. This is a question for data. Is marriage on average beneficial for children? If so, why? Is it just resources or is there something more? This matters precisely because of the trends we talked about as marriage rates have rapidly declined. Is this hurting kids? Is it affecting some class and racial groups more than others? And finally, what is the right policy? Should government policy step into these very personal choices? Or should it focus only on the resource question? Should we both as a society and on a policy level encourage marriage or stay out of it? And to answer those questions, I turn to, of course, another economist.

[Melissa Carney]

What has happened over the past four decades is about a decrease in marriage among adults and a decrease in marriage among adults who have kids together?

[Emily Oster]

This is Melissa Carney. She's an economics professor at the University of Maryland and the author of the Two Parent Privilege, in which she suggests that while marriage might be seen as an outdated ideal by some, the presence of two married parents provides children with more resources and stability, which leads to better educational and economic outcomes.

[Melissa Carney]

So when I talk about the decrease in marriage, it's really among adults without a college degree. It's important to keep that in mind because the way we did not get here is through an increase in divorce. Divorce is actually down among people who are married. And we didn't get here through an increase in births to groups of women who have traditionally or historically had high rates of single parenthood. It's actually quite remarkable when you look at the increase in non marital birth share and the overall reduction in births. So this is a surprise. This has happened really, despite the fact that teen childbearing is way down over 70% from the mid-90s. Basically births to all demographic groups under the age of 30 or down. Trying to project out from the 90s what would have happened to share of kids living with single moms or being born outside marriage. If you just told me what was going to happen to birth rates, I would have predicted a decrease in the share of kids being born outside marriage. But what happened was despite the fall in births, despite the fall in divorce, there was a huge decrease in marriage. And essentially what happened is a decoupling of being married from having and raising kids.

[Emily Oster]

To me, the last thing Melissa mentioned is the most interesting. A decoupling of being married from having and raising kids. It's an intriguing piece of the puzzle to observe the rise in single parent households, especially as traditional factors such as divorce rates and teen pregnancies are actually on the decline.

[Melissa Carney]

I think a really big surprise here is what has happened to the group that I categorize as the middle education group. So let's put moms in three buckets. Those with a four year college degree, those with a high school degree or some college, and those with less than high school. So what's happened over time is we've gone from like 11% of moms having a four year college degree to about 30%. Right? But despite the fact that that group has become so much bigger and so much more varied, rates of non marital childbearing or single parenthood is still quite low among that group. But the middle group, where the majority of moms are moms with a high school degree or some college, basically the likelihood that they now have kids outside of marriage, that they now are single moms raising kids in an unpartnered setting, that has basically converged down to the least advantage, the least educated, the lowest resource moms. I think that's the big story here.

[Emily Oster]

This combination of facts is surprising. More moms now have four year degrees and for that group, the Rate of having kids outside of marriage has barely increased. What's happened is this middle education group, moms with a high school degree or some college, they've seen a big change. They're now just as likely as the least educated moms to have kids outside of marriage or raise them as single parents. This shift shows this big change in family patterns across different education levels.

[Melissa Carney]

So among that middle group now 52% of their births are outside marriage. The share of their kids being raised in a married parent home has fallen from 83% in 1980 to 60% in the more recent years. So that's where the large story is in sort of the let's think of them as the middle class, right? The middle group, the largest group of moms in terms of education category. That's what's really driving this. So it's really interesting to realize the share of non marital childbearing, the share of single motherhood has gone up despite the fact that moms are much older and more educated than in the past. And again, the reason why is because marriage has decreased and there's been a decoupling from marriage and having kids.

[Emily Oster]

Melissa also says that these educational differences are further complicated by significant racial and ethnic factors.

[Melissa Carney]

So in the 60s and 70s, there was sort of decline in, you know, well observed and documented at this point, decline in marriage and rise in single motherhood. Among black families, those shares have increased. So now 70% of children born to moms who identify in the, you know, in the records as black are born outside of marriage. Only 38% of kids, again whose moms identify in the census as black are living in married parent homes. Now, within black families, there is this college divide I'm talking about. So among those children, if their mom has a four year college degree, 60% of them live in married parent homes as compared to closer to 30among the other two education groups. The only group for whom there's not this. There really hasn't been a large increase over time in the share of births outside marriage or single parenthood. And there's really not much of an education divide is among children whose moms identify in the US Census as ethnically Asian. Their rates of marriage are still pretty, you know, staying high. And share of non marital births is less than 20%. So that group stands apart as a bit of an exception to the trends that I'm otherwise describing. So you really want to think of this as a major change among middle educated groups and among whites, blacks and Hispanics alike, but with higher levels of non marital Childbearing and single parent households among black and Hispanic households as compared to whites and Asians.

[Emily Oster]

So you talk about this declining marriage rates as driving a lot of economic problems. Can you talk a little bit about that link? Why would we care about this?

[Melissa Carney]

It means that kids are more likely to grow up in poverty. I mean, if we just take the basic descriptive facts, kids who are growing up with a single mom are five times more likely to live in poverty than kids growing up with married parents. Kids growing up with a single dad are three times as likely to grow up in poverty as kids living with two parents. So poverty rates are higher, but if you just look at median household income, it's about half as high. That all matters. It affects the neighborhoods kids can live in, the kinds of extracurricular, educational, enriching events they can participate in, their parents can pay for. It affects their health outcomes. In all the work that really tries hard to uncover a causal effect of family structure, like how do those kids outcomes differ? Of course it's really hard. We can't randomly assign kids to be in different family structure. But the, you know, the careful work that people have done to sort of control for all of the obvious observable things we can see about households, the age of the at which the mom initiated childbearing, how many kids are in the household where they live, the race ethnicity you just see over and over again in dozens of studies. Kids who grow up in two parent homes are less likely to have behavioral challenges, they're less likely to get in trouble in school, they're more likely to graduate high school, they're more likely to graduate college, they're, they're more likely to be married and have higher household earnings as adults. I mean, those descriptive differences really are quite irrefutable. And then I think that raises the question of like, what are the mechanisms?

[Emily Oster]

Why for me it raises the question of are those mechanisms places where other policies could also matter? Right. So the pitch of like, well, it's good people don't have enough money and resources and time. Well, why don't we give them more resources? Sort of abandoning people and telling the only way to achieve this is to marry somebody even if you don't want to, because that's the only way to have resources. When we could imagine a better social safety net.

[Melissa Carney]

Some people want to say, well, it's like the difference is obviously income, so let's give these households more income. Emily for like 20 years I've been advocating for a stronger safety net. So I'm all for it. And eventually it gets to the point where, like, wait, let's be a little bit honest about the fact that all of us who want stronger safety nets for kids, who, who want better support systems in schools, a lot of what we're doing is advocating for policies that are aimed at making up for deficits that kids experience in their home life. I think it's long past time that we actually also, also not either or, but also say how can we help more families achieve resource rich, stable, healthy families, family arrangements, rather than just continuing to talk about ways that schools and the government can help make up for those deficits. Even if you close those income gaps, you're still going to have differences. Why? Because parents do more than just spend money on their kids, right? They spend time with them, they supervise them, they engage with them in all sorts of ways that are productive to their development.

[Emily Oster]

My conversation with Melissa didn't delve into data on same sex pattern parents or if her research all goes out the window, if these parents are in a stable relationship but not legally married, advocating marriage is the universal solution gets complicated. It prompts us to think about the people who might be overlooked as well as the extent of government involvement in our personal lives. Moreover, can we really say that simply marrying off parents will guarantee every child's success? More after the break. We'll be right back.

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[Abby McCloskey]

Talking about family structure and marriage is a sensitive topic. And we're just now really being able to talk about it in a more free and academic sense. In 1991, we had a National Commission on Children. It was created by Congress. Members are appointed by the president to say, what's the status of children and parents in our country?

[Emily Oster]

This is Abby McCloskey. She's a policy advisor and has researched family policy for the last 15 years. I think one question many people have in thinking about this correlation, this sort of what Melissa, what Melissa Carney would call the two parent privilege, is how much of that is in fact a two parent privilege and how much of it is the flip side is the we're not being supportive of families. In a sense. It's not marriage. It's the social safety net. It's the all of the other things. And so we're focusing on marriage and saying, oh, let's get everybody married, which can feel judgmental but also may feel like actually it's focusing on making it the person's problem, when in fact it should be the government that is being supportive of any structure of family that one chooses.

[Abby McCloskey]

I'm not exactly sure that we should have a federal government that is preferential to certain types of family structures. But one thing that everyone can agree to is that the government shouldn't be discouraging marriage, especially when it comes through so clearly in the data when children are involved as the biggest factor for upward mobility. And the government used to discourage marriage in pretty egregious ways, like only having welfare benefits go to single mothers if there was no man in the household. We don't do that anymore. And yet throughout our tax and we call it transfer programs, but government benefit programs, there are disincentives to marry. This is true all across the income spectrum. It's especially true for low income moms. It's hard to imagine people thinking of the tax implications of their decisions to get married or not. But the numbers that they come up with the Federal Reserve in this study is that they think it discourages marriage among low income mothers by 14%, which is, you know, we can do the math. That's tens of thousands of marriages that are discouraged just because of how we've decided to structure our tax and Government programs, that's pretty significant.

[Emily Oster]

I actually think the government programs part of this is quite important. So we talk about the marriage penalty, which hits across all parts of the income spectrum on the tax side. So, you know, I mean, not literally all the way to the top, I think, but like, very far up in the income distribution, your taxes are affected by your choice to get married. However, I do suspect that people are right, that if you are a person earning $200,000 who's thinking about getting married to someone else earning $200,000, probably your marriage decision is only very marginally determined by taxes. But the transfer program aspect of this, which hits for a very large share of households, much larger than many people expect, is very visible. So the like, if we get married, I lose this SNAP benefit, or if we get married, I lose Medicaid. If we get married, I lose my tanf. I mean, these are very large transfer programs, which you don't have to wait till the end of tax season to see those. When you lose your Medicaid, you lose your Medicaid. And I think that's really visible.

[Abby McCloskey]

That's right. To me, Emily, what this is symbolic of is this is an example of kind of our tax code and benefit programs that discourage marriage. When you zoom out, so many of our structures in society seem to actively work against family formation. We can see it in the data. A quarter of women, after they have a baby, going back to work within two weeks. We see things like women who earn under $30,000 a year, half of them will go on public support after they have a kid. And once you're on public support, that's a whole other kind of thicket of things, as we just talked about, to get on or often a vast majority take on personal debt. And it doesn't have to be this way. Paid parental leave, in particular, of all of the problems that families face is a relatively inexpensive one to fix, with tremendous benefits, not only economic, but the health and attachment benefits of parents and kids being able to be together in the early part of life.

[Emily Oster]

Paid parental leave feels like a gimme. Like, it's bizarre and it's appalling, but it's just difficult to understand how we don't have this. I am always tempted to blame the gop, to be honest, but maybe it's just Congress in general. Like, what is your sense of why this has not gotten over the line when. I do think it's pretty widely popular?

[Abby McCloskey]

It is extremely widely popular in the polling. It's popular across political parties to some extent. Both Sides have had some grandstanding on it. So I agree that paid parental leave feels like the single most important and widely supported change that we could make that would dramatically change reality facing families in this country. When I was writing about it at a more conservative leaning institution a decade ago. And still the response from conservatives can be something along the lines of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Or think of a conservative talking head of being like it's going to be a gigantic new entitlement. It starts small now, like we've seen this show before, we're never going to be able to roll it back, et cetera. So there's kind of grandstanding against don't give an inch. Because if you do, then all of a sudden we're into socialism or communism, whatever term they're going to use. But then on the political left, there has been a bit of grandstanding too, which is to say why would we just give paid leave to new parents? We should give paid leave for elder care. You should have paid leave if you have a relative who's not part of your primary family. We need medical leave in addition to sick leave, medical leave, long term medical illnesses and all this. And you do get to a really large government investment with the potential for dramatic interruptions to work in the economy. And so both sides, it's kind of been this all or nothing standoff. I think that's beginning to break. First and foremost, we should be in the business of eradicating marriage penalties in our tax and transfer programs and make government neutral to marriage, because we're not there right now. Our programs actively discourage it.

[Philip Cohen]

The idea that the way to get children more resources is to increase marriage has no basis in policy reality. It's never worked anywhere, ever.

[Emily Oster]

This is Philip Cohen. He's a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on the demography of families and inequality.

[Philip Cohen]

It turns around the direction of history, which is the decline of marriage, the delay in marriage and decline of marriage. I do think it's great that women have the option of having children without being married, that we have some semblance of a welfare state that can make that possible, that women can get jobs and that they have legitimate alternatives. In the 1950s, you had 90 some percent of women married before age 25. That's essentially not a voluntary marriage system. And over 90% of the teenage mothers in 1950s were married, most of them between the pregnancy and the birth. That was a terrible system. You had a lot of people getting married who did not want to be married. So the Question is, what's the right level? In other words, if it was really voluntary, if people really had the choices, including the choice of partners, you know.

[Emily Oster]

What would they do in 1950, if you got pregnant as a single teenager, you know, who was 18, the social pressure would be get married and try to build a life with them. Even though perhaps that isn't really what you would have chosen in a fully unconstrained way. And now that would not generally be the expectation you have. Single parenthood feels like a choice there in a way that it was not in the past. And so one way to structure some of Melissa's argument is to say the existence of that pressure was in some ways good, that it had good elements because it encouraged family formation. And not every one of those families survived, but some of them survived. And for kids, for some period of time, they were living in a two parent household that was stable. And we should have more of that norms and religious people have more of those norms. And that's better in various ways?

[Philip Cohen]

No, I don't think so. I mean, if you look at the generation of people who got more, 90% got married before age 25, that didn't reproduce itself for even one generation, the children of those marriages did not reproduce that childhood that we supposedly think was so great for their own children. It completely collapsed. It was a one generation phenomenon.

[Emily Oster]

You don't think that would benefit kids? Like, let's put aside the people who are getting married. Do you think it would benefit their kids?

[Philip Cohen]

The kids themselves? The only time we've seen that in history, the kids themselves opted out of it at extremely high rates.

[Emily Oster]

You mean the sort of 1970s children of those kids or whatever?

[Melissa Carney]

Yeah.

[Philip Cohen]

When did divorce start rocketing up was in the 70s. That's the children of the people who were, you know, forced to get married when they were 19, in 1955. It didn't work. Nobody wanted it.

[Melissa Carney]

Look, we used to live in a world 50 years ago where women had essentially no choice. Melissa Carney, again, financial choice, social choice. But to be married if they wanted to have kids and stay married to really terrible partners. And obviously it is wonderful that that is no longer the case, that women can be financially independent. They don't have to stay in relationships just to have, you know, a man take care of them. I am all for that. I celebrate that we can hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The financial independence of women, the destigmatization of single moms and their kids has been a good thing. The fact that in so many communities, the prospect or possibility or premise of forming healthy, strong, lasting marital relationships, even among adults who have kids together, that that has eroded has not been a good thing in particular for kids, but frankly also for the many single parents who find themselves in the very hard position of raising kids by themselves. So I think there is a huge middle ground here between both legal and social structures that essentially made it impossible for someone to leave an unhealthy marriage or be a single parent. And complete agnosticism about how people raise their kids and a lack of willingness to acknowledge that two parents bear responsibility for kids and two parents owe each other a responsibility.

[Emily Oster]

Generally, this doesn't make it much into the national conversation. I'm curious whether you think that's because there isn't a place for the government in our marriage bedrooms or whether you think it's because of some other sort of resistance to this idea.

[Melissa Carney]

I think the greater reluctance to talk about family structure is perhaps a bit of a lingering reaction to, to what happened to Daniel Patrick Moynihan when he brought this up in the late 60s. For those listeners who don't know the Daniel Patrick Moynihan episode, he this was the late senator from New York, lifelong Democrat. In the late 60s, he was working at the Department of Labor, wrote a memo about the decline in marriage and the rise of single mother households among the black urban community. He sort of emphasized the need to improve, improve job opportunities for black men in cities in order to sort of restore the family. At the time he was writing about a quarter of births to black families were outside marriage. As I said, that's now 70%. At the time he was writing, fewer than 5% of white births were outside marriage. That's up to closer to 30%. But his memo got leaked and he was branded a racist. And, and basically this followed him his career. And this became a very loaded, charged discussion.

[Ian Rowe]

I think there's no question it hurt our ability to responsibly have just a civil conversation about what to do about this challenge.

[Emily Oster]

This is Ian Rowe. He's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and also the founder and CEO of Vertex Partnership Academies, a virtues based international baccalaureate public charter high school in the Bronx.

[Ian Rowe]

For some people, when you're talking about, for example, about issues related to poverty or racial discrimination or bad educational outcomes or high incarceration rates, any of those, and you introduce the topic, well, what role did family structure, single parenthood play in contributing to those outcomes? And for some people it's an immediate shutoff. You're Blaming the very people that you're seeking to help. Rather, we need to keep our eyes focused on the real problem, systemic discrimination, racial barriers. And it's not that neither one of these causal factors are not true. There's truth to both. But I think it has tended to silence conversation.

[Emily Oster]

Here's Philip Cohen again.

[Philip Cohen]

There's a continuous supply of this argument that is really unbroken. Kearney made the argument that, you know, the Moynihan report killed research on marriage because it's, because it made research afraid of being called racist. That's completely not true. The research never stopped and the marriage promotion never stopped. And as marriage rates have fallen and fallen and fallen, rather than everybody stopping and saying, oh, wait a minute, you know, five generations of this pontificating hasn't done anything to change the situation. Maybe we should try something different instead. They just keep saying, oh, this problem is still going on. We need to, we need more marriage. It's a legacy of unreflectiveness that is very perplexing to me.

[Emily Oster]

Ian explained to me how he is trying something different when it comes to marriage and building healthy relationships at his school in the Bronx, which serves predominantly low income black and Hispanic communities.

[Ian Rowe]

So someone like me who runs schools, the way I try to navigate this is to say, well, what is it that we should be teaching young people who now have very different attitudes towards marriage and family formation? What is it we need to be teaching young people about? What is the likelihood of success? A few years ago, before I launched the high school that I'm leading now, I was visiting some really high performing public high schools across the country. And it was around the time that we were introducing a topic in our schools around family formation. And I was getting a lot of pushback on it. And I'll say to you, what I said to this class of ninth graders in New Orleans, very low income district, this entire class, almost all black, Hispanic, some Asian kids, but almost all low income students. And I said, you know, I'm visiting from New York and I'd really love your advice. If you knew that there was data that says that 97% of the time that young people just like you made a series of decisions in their life. After following that series of decisions, 97% of the time they avoided poverty. Would you want to know what those decisions are? And the students looked at me and they're like, yeah, of course. Why, why wouldn't I, you know, why wouldn't I want to know? And I said, well, there's some grownups who think that I Shouldn't tell you that because you're from backgrounds, that may be these, these decisions that I'm about to share with you didn't really follow what you may have experienced in your own life. You might feel shamed in some way or embarrassed, so better not to tell you at all. And these kids looked at me like I was crazy. Like, what are you talking about? You let us know, you tell us so that we can decide what is the right thing to do. So I then proceeded to tell them about data associated with something called the success sequence. But the success sequence basically says among millennials, if you make a series of decisions, finish at least a high school degree, then get a full time job of any kind, so you learn the dignity and discipline of work. And then if you have children, if you get married first, 97% of millennials who follow that series of decisions, education, work, marriage, then children avoid poverty, and the vast majority enter the middle class or beyond. Now, it's not 100%, but it's not a guarantee. But we believe this is really crucial information. Our young people, particularly those who may not be seeing this as the norm in their communities, should learn. I get a lot of pushback in our schools from so called elites or what I call the gatekeepers who say, you can't teach this to kids. But whenever we talk to parents, particularly parents who didn't follow the success sequence in their own lives, they say to me as a school leader, thank God someone is teaching our kids this, because I wish we had taught those things in our school when they were growing up. So we have a class in our high school called Pathways to Power, and it's all about not only teaching the success sequence, but healthy relationships, how you build trust.

[Emily Oster]

I think one of the pieces of pushback is, particularly when it comes to marriage, we can say, well, kids whose parents are married do better. And the success sequence. But then the sort of second piece of that is, well, but actually the solution to this should be to give people more resources. Not to suggest that they get married, because that's forcing people into something that maybe they don't want. And it would be better, in fact, that really the key is that marriage provides resources. And it would be better to just provide those resources more directly so people could make whatever choice they wanted and not have to get married if that's not the choice they want.

[Ian Rowe]

So for those people who say, well, no, let's just give people more resources, I would say let's remove the barriers that make it hard, particularly for low income kids. To be able to get a high quality education, get a strong full time job, which by the way, then puts them in a much different category in terms of marriageability. You know, meeting the kinds of people that they'd want to get married to and then have kids.

[Emily Oster]

In 2018, a group of researchers at Harvard led by economist Raj Chetty published something called the Opportunity Atlas. The Opportunity Atlas is a tool. It's a map that lets you look at which regions in America are providing the most upward mobility for kids. Practically what it does is look at which areas have kids born into poverty, rising into the upper tier of the income distribution as adults. So what you can see is that some areas in America are very good at turning kids in poverty into adults that are on the upper part of the income distribution. Once the researchers have that, they're then able to look at what are the characteristics of the area that are most strongly associated with that positive upward mobility. And what they found when they look at these areas that turn poor kids into richer adults is the most strongly associated characteristic is the share of households in the area with two parents. Really importantly, it's not just that kids are influenced by their own access to two parents, but having other families with two parents in the area that matters for kids. Upward mobility, a natural conclusion from research like this, combined with the fact that over the past 50 years the share of two parent households in America has declined. It could be that the government should be doing more to encourage or subsidize two parent households, that we should be thinking about marriage or at least cohabitation in a consistent way with another person as something that is desirable for kids and for families, and that maybe we should make it easier for people to do that. I asked Philip his thoughts on this study.

[Philip Cohen]

So the Chedi data is big data with little mechanisms. Right. We don't know how it's working. We know that somehow Mobility is better 20 years later if they lived in a neighborhood with these characteristics. There's just a lot of steps in between. And the characteristics you're talking about are associated with lots of different kinds of privilege. So I would not presume to say what is actually causing these correlations. There's certainly all kinds of evidence that marriage is, is highly correlated with all kinds of privileges. And I don't mean that in the negative sense of like unjustified privileges. It's just things work out better for married people in all kinds of ways. And it could just be that people are really good at maybe the trick, the secret trick that the public has is that they're actually incredibly good at figuring out which marriages are beneficial much better than we are. So that wherever we go, we see that married people are doing better. And it might just be that those are the people who have it figured out. And we're just not measuring those variables because we're not even trying to measure those variables.

[Emily Oster]

Philip might be onto something. Perhaps there's an intangible quality in marriage that gives those couples and their kids an edge, something our society tends to overlook. Would you argue that marriage is a moral obligation to children?

[Robert Woodson]

I think so.

[Emily Oster]

This is Robert Woodson, a renowned civil rights activist, community development leader, and founder and president of the Woodson Center, a nonprofit dedicated to revitalizing low income communities.

[Robert Woodson]

It's practical as well as moral. I'm a practitioner. What is the practical benefit? Not an ethereal benefit, but what is the practical benefit? As someone growing up without a dad in my home, I had to find fathering in the homes of my close friends. And so, yes, I think that as a practical matter, kids need. I know these gang members that I've had them live in my house and my family, and I have ministered to them. But we minister to them by witnessing things, not preaching to them. So they go out to dinner with me and my wife and my children and my grandchildren. So because many of these young men have never seen anybody married, have never been to a wedding. But if you help young people to address the issue of character and their responsibility to others, marriage will be a byproduct of that. Without going out preaching marriage, I've had some ministries that we support where they take the worst drug addicts and help them get restored. And it's amazing the number of marriages that come out of that. Once people see they have an obligation not just to themselves, but to someone else, that takes expression sometimes in marriage.

[Ian Rowe]

I think there is a moral obligation to lead a quality life. Ian Rowe Again, like, if you're an adult, the first thing, are you operating in a way that benefits yourself, your family, your friends, your neighbors, your work partners? And so I think you have a moral obligation to be an upstanding citizen first. Usually what that means, if you're doing that, then you connect with another person who's also sort of morally driven. And the way it typically tends to work is that you find a mate, you find someone that you want to live out this life with. Because doing all these things, having a moral obligation, you know, doing well at work or doing well at any of the things that you enjoy is just better when you Have a life partner.

[Emily Oster]

Do you think that marriage is a moral obligation to children?

[Melissa Carney]

I mean, that's. That's a loaded one.

[Emily Oster]

Again, Melissa Carney.

[Melissa Carney]

That's certainly not the position I take on. On my. In my book or in the way I am thinking about this. I haven't even, like, posed that question to myself. So I guess the answer. I mean, I guess, like, my instinct is to say no because I don't have a moral bone to pick here. But I think no is a little bit too strong because I do think parents owe their kids a lot. And I think we should be okay and comfortable saying we have a moral problem with one parent just deciding they don't like this relationship, and so they're walking away from the family. And so I don't think it has to be marriage, but I do think there's, you know, I'm ultimately, I do think there's some. That kids have a moral claim on parental nurturing, responsibility, and care.

[Emily Oster]

So where does this leave us? How important is marriage when it comes to raising kids?

Looking at the data, as Melissa Carney explains, it's clear that marriage is highly correlated with better outcomes for kids, that it generally provides children with more stability and more resources. But it's complicated. Marriage is beneficial until it isn't, until the partnership upsets the household stability, until there's abuse or violence. And when you get close to the poverty line. As we talked about with Abby McCloskey, tax and welfare policies actually mean that marriage might give people less resources, not more. And none of these discussions account for the benefits of multigenerational living that you see in cultures outside the US or the idea that it really does take a village to successfully raise a child. Trying to make policy out of these practical considerations is close to impossible. It is optimistic, overly optimistic, to expect government policy to align with changing definitions of a traditional family. Policies tend to be either too rigid, too strict, leading to exclusions, or too loose, resulting in easy exploitation through things like tax loopholes. Still, despite all of this, we have a responsibility to kids. And that's where some of these cultural norms come in. In my view, the word privilege, as Melissa Carney uses it, is not a judgment that some families are intrinsically better or worse than others. It's not a word meant to guilt or shame a group of people. Quite the opposite. It's an aspirational word. It's meant to inspire policies, programs, changes, and social norms to even the playing field so we can do better for all of our children, and so that every child in America has the best word possible chance for flourishing, because that is what every child in this country deserves.

Thanks for listening. Raising Parents is a production in partnership with the Free Press. It was produced by Liz Smith and Sabine Janssen. Thanks as well to producer Tamar Avishai. The executive producer is Candace Khan. Last thanks to my guest today, Melissa Carney, whose book the Two Parent How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling behind is out now. And to Abby McCloskey, Philip Cohen, Ian Rowe and Robert Woodson. I'm Emily Oster. See you next time on Raising Parrots.