Do Single-Parent Households Actually Hurt A Child’s Future?

what are the differences and outcomes for kids growing up in a single parent versus a two parent household so we can we can start by seeing that in the immediate term let me let me emphasize some like basic things if a kid only lives in a household with you know a one parent or an unmarried mother which is mostly the case there's a f you know there chance of living in poverty are five times higher part of that reflects the fact that you know moms from low-income backgrounds are more likely to become single moms but even if you just look across moms of the same level of Education same background characteristics it's not surprising that kids from Married parent households live in households with more income okay income is a big part of the reason why these kids do better why because their parents can spend more on housing in better neighborhoods they get access to better schools we see that you know these parents spend more on their kids and enriching activities and educational activities they basically have more opportunities you can see this in the most you know simple way like it's really expensive to play for Co pay for club sports or music lessons so kids from Mary parent homes have different opportunities it translates into better outcomes they are less likely to get in trouble in school and let's come back to that finding because that's a really interesting one they're less likely to get in trouble in school for boys in particular they're less likely to get suspended part of this comes from the fact that you know here I'm drawing on development psychology when when boys are sort of suffering internally they're more likely to act out and what psychologists refer to as externalizing Behavior girls are more likely to internalize it so I don't want to see that girls are necessarily not struggling as much but boys are more likely to act out which means they're more likely to get in trouble in school and they're more likely to get suspended and that Cascades then we also see that they're more likely to be involved with the criminal justice system so it's just again getting back to like the idea of oh let's stop pretending like two parents are beneficial there's no way to look at the data and the studies and not feel like oh wow kids from gar homes are much less likely to get in trouble in school they're much less likely to get in suspended they're much more likely to be engaged in crime they're more likely to graduate high school they're more likely to graduate college they're more likely to have higher earnings as an adult they're more likely to be married as an adult less likely to be a single parent themselves this is again why this is so crucial for us to address because we are by allowing this class divide in family structure to continue it's accentuating inequality it's undermining so it's undermining social Mobility because there are both short and immediate term effects in childhood they have lasting effects on sort of someone's lifetime trajectory and then these compound across the generations have you been able to analyze whether the children of single parent households are more likely to become the parents of single parent households that is something that lots of people have documented that's well established so you also you almost have this kind of recursive feedback loop that makes it ever more common 100% And also to get back to the conversation we were having about like what's up with men that so many of them either don't view themselves as somebody who should commit to a family or the women don't view them as somebody who's worth committing to as a family we actually there's a there's there's a lot of really well done studies from the past 10 years showing that boys are particularly disadvantaged by the absence of a dad from their home okay some careful work done by um The Economist Marian berran and Jessica Capon tries to get at why that is like what what's driving that in the household the interesting thing that their research uncovers and again this is using really large scale nationally representative data sets is that boys get less investment parental input nurturing parenting they're more likely to you know have their mom spank them or be harsh to them again that's not me judging single moms it's really tiring to parent it's really hard to maintain your temper when a kid is misbehaving if especially if it's a boisterous boy especially if it's a boisterous boy and you don't have someone else to be like could you could you take over I need a break right so we just see they see in the data in these data sets that record like do you spank your kid what how connected do you feel with your kid how much time do you spend with your kid you see that boys from single mother homes get less of that but what's really interesting is that boys are particularly responsive to that so let's say the differences in the parental inputs or Investments are small how they respond to that is large right another way to think about this is I have a daughter and a son if I you know sort of ignore my daughter whatever she's probably not going to go to school and get in trouble if I am like harsh with my son if I don't put in as much time in him if he's really struggling he more likely to go to school and get in trouble right like that sort of what he's missing in parenting is more likely to lead him to act out in a way that gets him suspended and then all the snowball effects so boys are particularly disadvantaged by not having a dad in the home and you know how that affects them there's another study that came out of the opportunity insights Lab at Harvard this is the lab run by Raj chedy and colleagues that has you know access to millions of tax records so they know exactly where kids grew up and then they follow them into adulthood the single biggest predictor of whether a black boy sort of climbs the economic Ladder into adulthood at a neighborhood level so what neighborhood characteristics are most predictive of economically good outcomes for black boys can I guess go ahead the proportion of single fathers the presence of black dads in the neighborhood y so beyond just having a dad in your house if you have if there's a bunch of you know if the households around you black households around you also have dads single biggest predictor of whether you do well economically in adulthood and and so there again who's being helped by us denying that black boys in particular as if like all of the Discrimination we know they face all of these other barriers like those boys are are being harmed by not having dads around and so this gets back to the intergenerational nature of this the more boys we have growing up without dads in their house the less likely they are to sort of Thrive and be their best eles when they grow up which means the less capable they're going to be to be supportive reliable married dads and again this is just like we've got to break this cycle yeah it's this uh oroborus of like ineligibility and irresponsibility and that then creates another generation that creates another generation that creates another generation so have you read anim the the life of Dad no this is something something that you should absolutely read so she's an evolutionary Anthropologist she came out of Robin dunbar's Lab at Oxford and um I just had her on the show I'll send you the episode you can listen to great um and she talks about the importance of fatherhood um from from a a developmental perspective and she looks at it through an anthropological lens she looks evolutionarily does some evolutionary pychology one of the really interesting things that she folded in and you're right um Ruff and Tumble play especially for boys especially in early uh childhood is very important because it teaches them the role of fathers is largely to both play but to set rules um that you can climb that tree but you know you can't you like go don't go higher than that as opposed to Mom would have not let them go up the tree at all and this uh understanding allowing of risk-taking behavior a little bit more is good now the interesting thing the really interesting thing I learned from her that I think you would love to fold into some of your work is what happened to adolescent girls without a father yeah now when you get into teenage years it is absolutely crucial that a adolescent girl has father around when the boys are there a little bit more that it seems like their acting out Behavior it's more crucial for the boys earlier on but for the girls it seems to be during that that later period and you get like all sorts of weird sociosexual nudges yeah here and there you get all sorts of Strange Behaviors I know like Daddy Issues is kind of meme but it it almost seems to have Arisen in the data you know this is like a really sappy thing for me to say and I again like to be clear all of the conclusions I draw in the book from very rigorous analytic work with data but this was really sort of salient and top of Mind recently because of course I think about all this and I'm thinking all the time about the class gaps in this and how how can we not be honest about this and I was at a graduation dinner my son just graduated at high school and so there were a bunch of families there and almost every dad that got up to toast his boy also toasted his wife everyone in this room was married okay and and would say things like and these boys are great boys because they have strong moms and there was and I was like what an example this sets to both our teenage boys and our girls right this is what you should expect when you grow up you you like celebrate your wife and you treat her well and girls this is what you should expect right and so again it's just sappy but it I was like this is such a perfect microcosm of this privileged class of kids getting exposed to this positive example um which is just not nearly as widespread or prevalent and also by the way when you read the interviews with like these unmarried couples who go to some of these you know not well-funded um programs in the communities that work for strengthening families and so you know social scientist and I used to be one of them sort of poo pooed the bush initiatives that like healthy marriage initiatives because like doesn't even increase marriage but then when you read the interviews with the folks they keep showing up to these relationship classes and they say things like you know I didn't come from a two parent family I don't really might you know I don't really know that many married people they don't have an example of how to make it work right um so it's it's again this these anecdotes all sort of confirm what we see as Trends in the data every single morning for over three years now I have started my day the exact same way which is with element in water element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and 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