Dr. Melissa Kearney: Making Strong Families a Priority

Dr. Melissa S. Kearney, the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and author of The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, delivered an address at BYU’s Tuesday forum entitled “Making Strong Families a Priority.”

She began her address by poking fun at her long career of education and research focused on family, which concludes that “family is critically important.” She recognized that her Latter-day Saint audience would find that obvious and went on to say, “I can hear my Italian grandma with her 8^th-grade level of education teasing me from heaven, ‘Melissa, that’s what you went to all that school and did all that studying to learn? I could have told you that!’”

At her recognition of the patency of her talk’s conclusion for her audience, she went on to explain that in many groups, the idea that family is important and deserves support is controversial and often not prioritized in policy discussions, even among those who agree that family is paramount in society.

Scathing reviews and articles pushed back on her book profusely, but Dr. Kearney also spoke fondly of letters she received from single parents, divorced parents, and grandparents helping raise their children’s children. These are those who want their story told, and she did that, in a general sense, through her research and writing. 

Professor Kearney wanted to clarify that she does not blame these single parents. It’s not a single parent’s fault that one person can’t fully fulfill the roles that are much more easily done by two people. She also briefly compared divorced parenting to single parenting. While recognizing that divorce is certainly worse for children than two parents staying together, she also showed data that indicates that having divorced parents is better than never having had married parents. Furthermore, she demonstrated that those of lower economic class are more likely to be single or divorced parents and come from a single or divorced-parent home. In short, “Marriage has become something of a luxury good.”

All of this led to her discussion of the conclusion that not only do social changes, like the normalization of single parenting, divorced parenting, and co-parenting, lead to significant economic changes and movement, but they eventually lead to a new social paradigm. She showed a 4-part pattern of change: 1) broad changes seen in society and law, 2) economic forces decreasing earning potential for non-college-educated men, 3) decoupling of marriage from childbearing and childrearing, and 4) a new social paradigm.

Dr. Kearney stated: “For a long time I held the view that if we could just improve the economic position of men without a college degree, we would see a turnaround in the decline of marriage and the rise of non-marital childbearing.” But, after doing further research with Riley Wilson of BYU, she found this to no longer be the case, thus demonstrating the genesis of a new social paradigm that does not recognize marriage and the parenting of children as inherently connected.

As she concluded, Dr. Kearney gave a list of actionable items that can help change the social paradigm to be more supportive of marriage and family:

Do:

• Foster a norm of a two-parent home for children
• Improve the economic position of men without a college level of education (improve “marriageability”)
• Meet families where they are. Scale-up programs that show promise in strengthening families and improving outcomes for parents and children
• Have a stronger safety net for all families

Don’t:

• Accept a new reality where the two-parent family is a thing of the past for less-educated, lower-income Americans
• Stigmatize single mothers or encourage unhealthy marriages
• Bemoan women’s economic progress
• Keep government assistance meager to incentivize marriage

Professor Kearney ended by asserting that “two-parent families are beneficial for children.” The welfare of America’s children is the impetus for her research and her advocacy. She bemoaned the ignorance of the facts she set forth among so much of American society and concluded with the imperative that “strong families need to be a national priority.”

Written by: Jacob Fisher

Senior Contributor at the Cougar Chronicle

The Cougar Chronicle is an independent student-run newspaper and is not affiliated with Brigham Young University or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Cover Photo Source: https://www.socialsciencespace.com/2023/09/melissa-kearney-on-marriage-and-children/