September 18, 2023

The op-ed pages of this Sunday’s New York Times featured a revelation from author Melissa Kearney: “The Explosive Rise of Single Parent Families Is Not a Good Thing.”

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Flash to Melissa: a chubby Italian priest named Thomas Aquinas made the same observation about 800 years ago (albeit without noting the aberration was on an “explosive rise”).

Kearney undoubtedly wants to plump her forthcoming book which, based on reviews, seems to be intriguing some liberals.  I’m less sanguine, because I think its title, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, betrays a perspective that, in turn, bespeaks an agenda that  — unless disavowed — will never solve this “not good thing,” AKA crisis.   

The opening paragraph of the Times’ essay does not encourage me:

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There has been a huge transformation in the way children are raised in the United States: the erosion of the convention of raising children inside a two-parent home. This shift is often not publicly challenged or lamented, in an effort to be inclusive of a diversity of family arrangements. But this well-meaning acceptance obscures the critical reality that this change is hurting our children and our society.

Yes, there has been a “huge transformation” in child-rearing.  But part of that “transformation” comes from speaking of raising children in a two-parent home as a “convention” rather than norm.  If Kearney wants to fudge so as not a priori to alienate the chattering classes, well  — “norm” can be understood in a sociological (“the ‘norm’ is what most people do) rather than an axiological (“the ‘norm’ is what people should do) sense. 

But I’m not sure this isn’t just an effort to avoid preemptive tune-out.  Amazon describes the book as a

provocative, data-driven case for marriage by showing how the institution’s decline has led to a host of economic woes — problems that have fractured American society and rendered vulnerable populations even more vulnerable. Eschewing the religious and values-based arguments that have long dominated this conversation, Kearney shows how the greatest impacts of marriage are, in fact, economic.

There is a prior question here: is the rearing of children in families composed of two sexually differentiated parents married to each other merely an accidental “convention” that arose due to certain historical and cultural circumstances or is there something “normative” — that this is how things should be — about it?  Were history and culture mugged by the tag team of the discriminatory gender binary and the patriarchy?  Or, rather, is the ideological baggage of the sexual revolution and gender theory responsible for the deteriorating state of American children?

One can argue a “data-driven case” and, for some Americans for whom quantification results in an intellectual orgasm, that effort may be useful.  But describing the “good” (since the title says our current arrangements are not a “good thing”) from a data point of view generally inclines people to think of that good as a “useful good,” something measured in terms of its social utility.