A Dissenting View on Bifurcating Families

Nicole Sussner Rodgers writes,

according to a recent analysis of new census data on family structure, education and income from the Council on Contemporary Families (CCF). It found that financial security helps children more than does any particular family structure. Marriage is not a panacea for poverty: There are almost as many poor or near-poor children in two-parent families as there are in single-parent ones.

I believe that the analysis to which she refers is by Shannon Cavanagh. If you can find anything analytical in the piece, let me know. The last paragraph says,

Financial security, even more than household composition, shapes children’s everyday experiences in ways that contribute to growing inequality. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-2000s, the difference between what the richest 20 percent and the poorest 20 percent of parents spent on enrichment activities for their children nearly tripled (Duncan & Murnane, 2014). Today, a 20 percentage point difference in participation in extracurricular sports exists for children in families at or above 200 percent (42.5 percent) compared to those children in poverty (22.5 percent). The difference between children of two married parents and children with a single parent is only 10 percentage points (Hofferth, 2015). Although having a second parent in the household may be important, having financial resources may be even more important, and having a second parent by no means guarantees such resources.

I think that merely saying that “there are poor children in two-parent households, too” is not really the best strategy. I think that the long-term outcomes for children of two-parent households are demonstrably better than those for children of single-parent households. Robert Putnam is as forthcoming on that as anyone.

Instead, if you want to question the conservative advocacy of traditional families as a solution for poverty, I think you have at least two good arguments to make.

1. Correlation is not causation. That is, the greater presence of bad outcomes for children of single-parent households does not necessarily reflect a causal role for family structure. Of course, my suggestion that the correlation may be genetic is not exactly the sort of argument the left would like to use.

2. We know how to alleviate poverty by providing cash and other benefits. We do not know how to fix families.

But

9 thoughts on “A Dissenting View on Bifurcating Families

  1. Marriage might not be a panacea for poverty, but it’s still pretty helpful for avoiding it. If you’re in the lower two income quartiles, a hearty portion of your income goes to paying the rent and utilities each month. Splitting those costs with someone has a huge marginal effect. I think this is pretty well established and not really debatable.

    Also, if this is simply a matter of “financial security,” we ought to see better outcomes for the children of single mothers in places with more generous transfer payments, like Massachusetts, than we do in places with less generous benefits programs, like say, Texas. Is that the case? I really don’t know, but I’m guessing it isn’t, once you control for other factors.

  2. I think the best evidence that family structures are epiphenomenal is from VJ Hotz, Teenage Childbearing and its Lifecycle Consequences, http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/XL/3/683.abstract , which treats miscarriage as an instrument for randomly varying whether teenage mothers bear children. This isn’t the same thing as comparing single parenthood throughout the lifetime to a stable marriage and I don’t know whether miscarriage is exogenous. But if you wanted to look for evidence of the null hypothesis — we’re basically who we are by the age of 16 and our choices then on are pretty immaterial — I’d start with Hotz’s paper.

  3. Financial security, even more than household composition, shapes children’s everyday experiences in ways that contribute to growing inequality.
    So she would say that those poor children that I see in the Chinese restaurants where I bet there parents work for less than minimum wage are doomed to drop out of school early and live in poverty. I doubt that, I bet their parents will push them hard and they will mostly do well values matter more than money.

  4. “Today, a 20 percentage point difference in participation in extracurricular sports exists for children in families at or above 200 percent (42.5 percent) compared to those children in poverty (22.5 percent). The difference between children of two married parents and children with a single parent is only 10 percentage points (Hofferth, 2015). ”

    Single parenthood equates to half the difference between those at poverty level and blow and those at DOUBLE the poverty level.

    I’m not sure “married” as a homogeneous factor is a valid assumption. Some marriages are just speed bumps on the way to divorce and poverty. Serial marriages are financially draining.

  5. If the cure for poverty was just handing out money, then Johnson’s War or Poverty would have cured a billion times over. It has not.

    But

    • Something smart has to be done with resources to receive a positive return. This notion is scalable as well.

      Spending on enrichment and organized sports is not an outcome either, it is an input. It also costs little to take the lids off basketball goals (do you understand to what I refer here? Some places actually have parks with hoops and don’t let kids play). Also why spending on organized sports is a proper proxy variable I haven’t a clue.

      • It’s probably just the extra curricular with the largest delta between her dividing line.

  6. The western world already bifurcated into morlocks and eloi over the 19th and 20th centuries. The eloi are provided food, housing, entertainment from the production of the morlocks and in return serve as voting cattle. The only remaining step in the process is for the morlocks who do not wish to be ranchers to split away into their own group.

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