How the Breakdown of the American Family Fosters Racial Inequalities

In the 1960s radical groups, including many feminists, conspired to tear down the traditional, married family; little did they know they were simultaneously igniting some of the worst racial divisions America could imagine.

According to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau on living arrangements analyzed by Nicholas Zill, 58 percent of U.S. children live with their married birth parents, followed by 23 percent that live with their birth mother (only), 5 percent that live with a birth parent and stepparent, 4 percent that live with cohabiting birth parents, and 4 percent that live with their birth father (only). Radical groups are slowly, but surely, falsely positioning marriage as a patriarchal ritual of the past.

Despite how passionately radicals argue that mothers do not need husbands or that romantic partners are fine cohabiting, marriage remains an indispensable institution that holds together the social fabric of our nation. Unfortunately, however, this fabric is fraying disproportionately across the races, as Zill illustrates.

According to the 2014 Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey, 80 percent of Asian children live with their married birth parents, followed by 68 percent of White children and 52 percent of Hispanic children. Only 29 percent of Black children lived with their married birth parents in 2014. On the opposite end of the spectrum, 50 percent of Black children lived with their birth mother (only), followed by 27 percent of Hispanic children, 15 percent of White children, and 9 percent of Asian children.

The large variation in living arrangements across the four major race/ ethnic groups has deep-seated and far-reaching consequences on racial gaps. To begin, family structure is closely related to government dependence—roughly three quarters of welfare assistance goes to single-parent families. Family structure is also associated with educational achievement, the gateway to future economic success. Four times as many individuals who came from intact, married families received a Bachelor's degree than individuals who came from always-single parent families. Those in single-parent families are more likely to engage in risk behavior, commit criminal acts, drink, and use drugs.

Because there is such a clear-cut difference in the living arrangements of the races, social outcomes are quite easily predictable across these four groups. While Asian families are able to exercise individual agency in flourishing environments, many Black families tend to be at the mercy of the government in dangerous environments. While most Asian parents begin their child's life by developing and cultivating their talents, many Black parents spend their children's early years struggling to make ends meet.

There certainly is an unjust inequality among the races, but it is not the inequality of outcome that most media outlets discuss. Rather, it is an inequality of opportunity, even a lost opportunity, for many children to experience the irreplaceable married love of their mother and father.

Abortion and Family Structure: Two Inseparable Issues

Abortion and family structure—two leading social issues of our day—are sometimes pitted as mutually exclusive issues. However, statistics mined by the Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI) challenge this hypothesis. The National Survey of Family Growth (a large survey conducted by National Center for Health Statistics division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) showed that, among women aged 38 to 44, having had multiple abortions was least common among those raised in an intact family with two married biological parents.

MARRI’s “Mapping America” highlights two noteworthy points. First, women who were raised in married families with their mother and father present were least likely to have had multiple abortions than women from all other family structures (see Chart 1). The average American agrees, at the very least, that abortion is not a good to be sought after. Still, some liberal propagandists claim that it is not possible to decrease abortions and increase the number of intact families. According to them, unmarried women will inevitably get pregnant, and, unless the woman aborts her child, she will be a single mother. However, this logic is missing a key point: if more women were raised in intact married families to begin with, then fewer women would get pregnant out of wedlock. Decreasing abortion—a commonsense goal regardless of one’s stance on the sanctity of life—necessitates an increase in the number of intact families.

Chart 1

A second compelling point Mapping America highlights is the inherent value of marriage and the insufficiency of cohabitation. Chart 2 shows that roughly the same number of women raised by their biological father alone and with no father figure at all had multiple abortions. Most interesting, multiple abortions were least common among women raised by their biological father married to their biological mother, and most common among women raised by their biological father cohabiting with their biological mother. In fact, four times as many women with cohabiting parents rather than married parents had abortions. Although both groups of women were raised by their biological mother and father in a close relationship, the nature of the relationship contributed to very different outcomes. 

Chart 2

Far from being unrelated to abortion, family structure contributes to sexual mores that impact the rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and abortions. An intact, married family is a social good that must be sought after in all instances.

Support Marriage- Promote Women's Health

Adding to the discussion on women’s health, a recent survey reported that 40.2 percent of women - compared to 29.5 percent of men - reported an unmet medical need due to costs within the last year (*note, however, this is a biased figure and the disparity is actually lower). There is much speculation on the causes for this disproportionate need of women, but identifying a driver is quite simple: the deterioration of marriage. Marriage lifts women out of poverty. Divorce and cohabitation keep women in poverty.

Marriage provides a number of (intuitive) economic benefits to women. Married women share income with their husbands, and are able to optimize the division of labor for a household. Married couples enjoy, on average, larger incomes, greater net worth, and greater year-to-year net worth growth. Not surprisingly, marriage raises the long-run family income of children born to single parents by 45 percent.

Divorce does the opposite. Divorce causes women to disproportionately bear the brunt of poverty. Family income falls by 41 percent and family food consumption falls by 18 percent in the year following a divorce. Divorce is the main factor in determining the length of “poverty spells,” particularly for women whose pre-divorce family income was in the bottom half of the income distribution.

Although it might seem that cohabitation can provide the same economic benefits as marriage, it in fact cannot truly alleviate the feminization of poverty.  Cohabitation is temporary (with a roughly 50% failure rate), and the men in cohabitation are less attached to the labor market than married men. Cohabiters share fewer resources, since their bonds are less assured. Cohabitation, therefore, lacks all the natural gains of marriage (security, labor market benefits such as insurance, and the pooling of resources). Preferring cohabitation over marriage in our policies means preferring a modality of life that cannot deliver the benefits to women’s health coverage that marriage can.

If we want to promote women’s health, we really must discourage divorce and cohabitation. and encourage marriage.  Studies have already shown that married women rate their health better than divorced, separated, widowed, and never-married women do. Married women’s ability to cover their medical costs is one of the many reasons why. 


*According to the Urban Institute: “Questions on unmet need for contraceptive prescriptions or other family planning services were only asked of female respondents. Respondents may report an unmet need because of cost for more than one type of service, so sums may exceed the share reporting any unmet need because of cost.”

Wonk Wong

By Henry Potrykus

The Washington Post recently posed the question of how we should react to the “unbelievable” finding that marriage is dissolving and single parenthood is rising in America.  The Post makes “clear:” “none of the findings [on which it relies] mean that children would necessarily be better off if their biological parents married.”

From that point of clarity, the Post (and the researchers on whom it relies) goes on to advocate that for the sake of postponing motherhood, more educational and career opportunities must be created for lower-educated women.  This, says the Post, should go along with the rather broad policy of improving the economic prospects of “suitable partners” those women are “searching for.”

First off, it’s downright un-American to be against more education.  This we must all stand for, even if a degree does not confer human capital as we expect (human capital: the skills, capacities, and know-how of value in the labor market), and even if the newly minted grads simply end up part-time baristas with a fat bill to pay.  So, for this rebuttal, let me put the policy aside.  Soundly critiquing such policies requires a more thorough examination of economic sociology.

Here, let me rebut the Post’s logic.  The Post is wrong when it says two sociologists’ work - the statistics of McLanahan and Jenks - mean the problem of non-marriage demands a solution “far beyond marriage.”

Now, the Post relies on work by McLanahan and Jenks, who caveated their findings:  Recall the laden term “necessarily” quoted above.

The real issue is what do statistics say for policy, and, specifically, what does research on marriage in America say for policy? 

Here’s the easy part: statistics are about the general - usually average - case.  So of course they don’t speak to something necessarily affecting any given individual.  They speak to what generally happens.  Governance is also best construed around the general, so statistics do have a use there.

Here’s the harder part, which is about the methodologies employed by researchers nowadays.  That is, it’s about science:  Researchers have more or less three classes of tools to study a phenomenon like marriage.  One is descriptive statistics, the second is called regression, and the third are - sometime occult - analyses of “natural” experiments.

Let’s put aside descriptive statistics (even though the work of McLanahan and Jenks has many nice figures); work by McLanahan and Jenks and other sociologists should be considered at par when they involve so-called multiple regression analysis.  These analyses show the simultaneous influence of different factors on some outcome.  Informally, if you say a group’s workforce participation level (a pro-social activity of interest to the Post and McLanahan and Jenks) is to be found irrespective of that group’s proclivity to be married you contradict this second type of analysis.  These analyses say that marriage influences partners’ workforce participation.

Of course, we are not interested in whether marriage and working are merely correlated.  Maybe only the guys already with jobs get the girls (in marriage of course).

This is where the hard part comes to a head:  Sophisticated analyses of the third type can show that the dissolution of marriage actually does affect behaviors and prospects, and does affect the outcomes of the children the Post wants helped.  Sophisticated analyses do uncover a positive effect of marriage on social outcomes.  These analyses confirm the more basic, second kind of analyses.

Let me reiterate that: The workhorse, more basic analyses of sociology tend not to be wrong-headed.  In fact, good analysis of the second type does point to causal relations.  It is just not in itself completely conclusive.  It nevertheless tends to align correctly - and even quantitatively - with the much more difficultly arrived-at causal analyses.  (There are reasons for this.)

We are at the end of the critique of the Post’s logic:  Children in general would be better off if their biological parents married.  Just because sociology’s baseline method (regression) is not totally conclusive, one cannot infer that that method shows things that are not there.  Saying “this fact is uncertainly arrived at, so it is false” is a bad inference!  (Marriage is important to social outcomes even if all that science we fund through NSF grants shows it!)

Even without delving deeper into the science, we can nonetheless conclude that the Post cannot make the inference it wants: none of this body of evidence means the problem of non-marriage demands a solution “far beyond” marriage itself. 

Quite the contrary: Solutions are found within marriage.  Sophisticated studies indicate marriage causes positive behavior changes that are [very] difficult to affect otherwise. 

The good analyses of the second type which line up with the causal studies show the same.  If the Post wants the economic prospects of “suitable partners” to improve, I suggest it stop looking “far beyond” an empirically proven means of doing so.

To close, I want to confess my own befuddlement in the Post’s choosing to call the last few decades’ flight from marriage “unbelievable.”  The calamity follows on the heels of the sexual revolution.  According to the Post, one behavior doesn’t beget another?  No, we should be about as bewildered by this - yes, seismic  - shift away from marriage as we would be in observing people buying more bananas once the price of bananas falls. 

And that elementary point should be what we pivot on to get back to good policy.

The Root of Wealth Inequality: Race or Family Upbringing?

According to a recent Pew report, the racial/ ethnic wealth divide has widened since the Great Recession. Commentators have already begun to speculate plausible rationales for this gap: inability for minorities to replenish savings, differences in financial assets, or disparate accumulations of wealth. But each of these explanations evades the two root issues at hand: family structure and frequency of religious worship.

Family structure. The intact, married family consistently produces the best economic benefits and averts financial woes. Pew’s report measured race/ ethnicity without controlling for family structure. Because the rate of family intactness is higher among whites (54 percent) than blacks (17 percent) and Hispanics (41 percent), “whites” as a racial class seemed best off.

However, as Chart 1 shows, family structure cannot be ignored. Marriage is associated with lower rates of poverty, independent of race. So, for example, the poverty rate for single white mothers is three times higher than the poverty rate for married black families. Further investigation will likely show that the true wealth divide following the Great Recession is between intact and non-intact families, especially single mothers on welfare. As Sheldon Danziger concluded back in 1986, families on welfare are stuck in a perpetual cycle of poverty because their income is disconnected from the market-based economy. Even if the economy improves, the welfare recipient’s income remains stagnant.

The importance of family structure in an improving economy is conveyed in the Iowa Youth and Families Project, widely regarded as having the richest archive of life record data on rural families and children in the United States. Over a series of decades, researchers collected data on two-parent families during and after the Iowa Farm Crisis—the worst decline in America since the 1930s. They found that the children from two-parent families from Iowa farms, despite faring worse than any other group, improved the most due to their strong family relations, productive roles, ties to grandparents, ties to their community, and resourcefulness. Recovery from the Great Recession is linked to similar familial and community factors.

Frequency of religious worship. The intact married family may fare well following economic recessions, but the intact married family that worships frequently will fare best during and after these times of difficulty. Couples whose marriages lasted 30 years or more reported that their faith helped them to deal with hard times, and was a source of moral guidance in making decisions and dealing with conflict. Adolescents whose mothers attend religious services at least weekly display better health, greater problem-solving skills, and higher overall satisfaction with their lives, regardless of race, gender, income, or family structure. An increase in religious practice is associated with greater hope and a greater sense of purpose in life, and religious affiliation and regular church attendance are among the most common reasons people give to explain their own happiness.

Beyond personal hope and well-being, religiosity confers many benefits on society as a whole. Religious attendance is associated with direct decreases in both minor and major forms of crime and deviance, to an extent unrivalled by government welfare programs. Religious individuals are 40 percent more likely than their secular counterparts to give money to charities. Compared to their secular counterparts, religious individuals are more than twice as likely to volunteer. Recovering from a depleted economy requires communal support; this support is most readily available in communities with high levels of religious participation … something that is free to anyone who wants it.

Pew’s study of wealth inequality is certainly thought-provoking; however, it is futile to discover such gaps in society if we fail to cure their causes. Reviving all of society following the Great Recession mandates an immediate attention to restoring the intact married family that worships frequently.   

Abandoning Monogamy, the Certain Road to Inequality

The natural order of sexual relationships is ingrained in the very creation of the world: “The Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone.  I will make a helper suitable for him’…For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2: 18 & 24).” 

From the moment of creation, man and woman shared an inimitable complementarity—man was created for woman, woman was created for man. Sexual monogamy was the pre-ordained moral standard. However, man and woman transgressed this norm and initiated a culture of polyamory (having more than one romantic relationship simultaneously). In his presentation at the International Interreligious Colloquium of the Complementarity of Man and Woman hosted by Pope Francis, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks explained how this deviation gave rise to societies clad in inequality. “Polygamy,” he said, “is the ultimate expression of inequality because it means that many males will never have the opportunity to have a wife and child.” In a polygamous society wealthier and more prominent men will accrue the majority of eligible women, thereby denying those of lower status to the fundamental right to an intact family. Because marriage is scientifically linked to better educational, economic, behavioral, and health outcomes, sexual mores that allow the rich to marry at the expense of the poor will exacerbate social inequalities.

Some have argued that the Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament implicitly supports polygamous relationships by praising men like Abraham and Jacob who had multiple wives. However, Rabbi Sacks pointed out that overt tensions between Sarah and Hager or Leah and Rachel instead teach the destructiveness of polygamy rather than condone it. This is further proven by the Tenth Commandment: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife [singular]” (Exodus 20:17). Notably, polygamy is never once explicitly approved of in the Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament. In the New Testament, Jesus reiterates God’s moral mandate: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together let not man separate” (Matthew 19: 4-6).

Today, serial polyamory is on the rise, and many sexual partners have jettisoned the idea of marriage altogether. As Rabbi Sacks predicted, this has yielded great social inequalities. In 2012, the poorly and moderately educated were 35 percent less likely to be married than the college educated. In 2011, roughly three fourths of federal and state welfare assistance went to single parent families, most of which were led by women who gave birth out of wedlock. Neighborhoods with more single parents, an indicator of sexual non-monogamy, tend to have higher crime rates and more problematic behavior among children.

Sexual monogamy also provides a number of benefits in addition to the social ills it prevents. “[The family] is where we first take the risk of giving and receiving love,” said Rabbi Sacks. Beauty and life do not exist in any one entity in itself, but rather in the unity. By uniting man and woman into a lifelong marriage, the pre-ordained institution for the sexual act, the two complementary halves unite into one and better reflect the complete nature of God the Father.

Non-monogamous relationships vitiate God’s perfect order with structural injustices—they victimize innocent members within the family and impose disorder on society. If left as is, families not built on monogamy will accelerate America’s road to serfdom.

Remember to Thank God for your Family

At the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims and Native Americans came together to thank God for the abundant blessings bestowed upon them, especially for their families. Unfortunately today, though family still remains, God is being pushed out some by Black Friday sales and other materialistic frenzies. But as the bedrock of society that best cultivates future generations, the intact married family that worships God weekly cannot be forgotten—it was and is one of the most important things we all have to be grateful for. 

Although most Thanksgiving festivities are winding to a close, the intact married family produces a number of benefits for individuals and society, and should be celebrated everyday of the year. MARRI has consolidated 20 social science reasons to give thanks to God for your married family:

1. Men raised in married families have more open, affectionate, and cooperative relationships with the women to whom they are attracted than do those from divorced families.  
2. Families with either biological or adoptive parents present have the highest quality of parent-child relationships.
3. Married men and women report having more enjoyable sexual intercourse more often.
4. Those from married families are less likely to see religion decline in importance in their lives, less likely to begin attending church less frequently and less likely to disassociate themselves from their religious affiliation.
5. Children of married parents are more engaged in school than children from all other family structures.
6. Children in intact married families have the highest combined English and math grade point averages (GPAs.)
7. Adolescents from intact married families are less frequently suspended, expelled, or delinquent, and less frequently experience school problems than children from other family structures.
8. Men’s productivity increases by 26 percent as a result of marrying.
9. Intact married families have the largest annual income of all family structures with children under 18.
10. Married couples are less likely to receive welfare.
11. Married men are less likely to commit crimes.
12. Marriage is associated with lower rates of domestic violence and abuse, compared to cohabitation.
13. Married women are healthier than never-married, divorced, and separated women.
14. Married men and women are more likely to have health insurance.
15. Married men and women have higher survival rates after being diagnosed with cancer, regardless of the stage of the cancer’s progression.
16. Married people have lower mortality rates, including lower risk of death from accidents, disease, and self-inflicted injuries and suicide.
17. Married people are least likely to have mental disorders.
18. A larger fraction of those raised in an intact family consider themselves “very happy” than those raised in non-intact families.
19. Married parents spend more on education and less on alcohol and tobacco as compared to cohabiting parents.
20. Married mothers enjoy greater psychological well-being and greater love and intimacy than cohabiting or single mothers.