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The Two-Parent Privilege:

How Americans Stopped Getting
Married and Started Falling Behind

THE TWO PARENT PRIVILEGE: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind (University of Chicago Press) makes a data-driven, research-based argument in favor of marriage as a crucial tool to reverse the great economic disparities found today in the United States. Drawing upon decades of research (including her own), Kearney shows clearly that a decline in marriage rates has also meant a decline in prosperity for American men, women, and children. If we can, as a society, work to strengthen families and increase rates of marriage, especially between adults who have children together, not for moral or religious reasons but for economic ones, she argues, we can improve the lives of families across the nation.
 
In THE TWO-PARANT PRIVILEGE, Kearney says what the experts know but often don’t want to utter aloud: that the rise in the share of children living in one-parent homes has not been good for children or society, and that increasing the prevalence of two-parent homes would deliver an invaluable economic boost to the next generation and the nation.

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 PRAISE FOR THE TWO-PARENT PRIVILEGE


“An important book. … We liberals often perceive the world through prisms of privilege, but we rarely discuss one of the most important privileges of all — and it’s the title of Kearney’s book, The Two-Parent Privilege.” —Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times


“Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, has amassed reams of evidence on the rise of single parenthood and the way it has put lower-income children at an even greater disadvantage to their high-income peers over the past four decades. Her book shows that marriage itself matters; it is not just a correlate of other factors, such as wealth and education.” —Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic

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“The evidence is overwhelming that the decline of marriage over the past few decades has been very bad for children and, by extension, for society. For various reasons, however, this truth is too often left unsaid. In her new book, The Two-Parent Privilege, University of Maryland economist Melissa S. Kearney lays out all the dispiriting facts.” —Megan McArdle, The Washington Post


“Marriage is, writes University of Maryland economics professor Melissa S. Kearney, with clarifying bluntness, 'the most reliable institution for delivering a high level of resources and long-term stability to children.' She marshals the voluminous evidence in her new book, The Two-Parent Privilege.” —Alyssa Rosenberg, The Washington Post

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“[Kearney] does not suggest, like some cultural critics before her, that the increase in out-of-wedlock birth rates is a signal of moral decline in America, or of a willfully individualistic flouting of tradition. Rather, she points to how the decline of manufacturing in the United States—and the rise of lower-paid, more precarious working conditions—has made it much harder for blue-collar males to sustain an adequate and reliable standard of living, rendering them less inclined to marry or to stay married, and less appealing as marriage material in the first place. In some of the most compelling passages in her book, Kearney explores research on the impact of financial strain on cognitive functioning; there’s evidence that the children of parents who are poorer and more consumed by stress may be shortchanged not only materially but emotionally.”―The New Yorker


“Kearney makes a compelling case that we should be concerned about the rising rate of single-parent households, at least from the perspective of child well-being. … Kearney’s proposals will be good not only for children but for parents as well."
―The Wall Street Journal

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