The Two-Parent Privilege Quotes

“If the mothers who are not married are not married precisely because the men with
whom they have fathered children would not meaningfully contribute positive
resources to the raising of their children, then the observed marriage gap in children’s outcomes is not a good approximation for what their children would gain
from parental marriage.”
― Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

“But at some point – a point I think we are well past, given the body of research – the
weight of the evidence is so strong that the most reasonable conclusion is that even
if there were some unobservable differences between single and married parents,
the thing staring at us from the data is overwhelming: having a second parent in the
home, with the added resources (money, time, etc.) that second parent brings, is, on
average, beneficial for children’s outcomes.”
― Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

“Family structure and parental relationship status are not randomly assigned – that
is, they aren’t designed for easy study. Even if researchers take steps to statistically
account for all the things that can be observed in the data that might be confounding
factors, there is still the possibility that there is something unobserved about single
parents, something that researchers can’t see in the data, that would make them
less well-equipped to be parents even if they were married, such that their children’s
outcomes would still be inferior to those of the children of married parents.”
― Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

“What I am doing is arguing, through an appeal to data and rigorous studies, that two
parents tend to be able to provide their children with more resource advantages than
one parent alone. And furthermore, that a two-parent family is increasingly becoming
yet another privilege associated with more highly resourced groups in society.”
― Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

“Marriage is the most reliable institution for delivering a high level of resources and long-term stability to children. There is simply not currently a robust, widespread alternative to marriage in US society. Cohabitation, in theory, could deliver similar resources as marriage, but the data show that in the US, these partnerships are not, on average, as stable as marriages.”
― Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

“Both waves produced consistent findings of positive impacts of BAM participation on student outcomes. Among boys who were randomly assigned to participate in the program, total arrests fell by 28–35%, violent arrests fell by 45–50%, and school engagement improved, as compared to boys in the control group. Follow-up data from the first wave showed that participation in BAM led to a 12–19% increase in the rate at which boys graduated high school.”
― Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

“fewer than 5% of Black children currently reside in census tracts with a low poverty rate (below 10%) and fathers present in more than half of homes. In contrast, 62.5% of White children live in low-poverty areas with fathers living in more than half of children’s homes. Here we can see the contemporary legacy of racial neighborhood segregation in the US, which was cemented by decades of the discriminatory and harmful practice of “redlining” in US mortgage and housing markets.”
― Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

“than 5% of Black children currently reside in census tracts with a low poverty rate (below 10%) and fathers present in more than half of homes. In contrast, 62.5% of White children live in low-poverty areas with fathers living in more than half of children’s homes. Here we can see the contemporary legacy of racial neighborhood segregation in the US, which was cemented by decades of the discriminatory and harmful practice of “redlining” in US mortgage and housing markets.”
― Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

“And 4.3% of children do not live in a home that includes a parent at all.”
― Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind