As Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard Reeves tells it, we now live in “a world where mothers don’t need men.” Almost 40% of births take place outside marriage, up from 5% in 1960. Reeves would like you to believe these are “marvelous developments.”
Decades of social science research have found that children, but especially boys, have a better chance of succeeding if they are raised with a married father in the home. Boys from single-mother homes are more likely to be suspended from school, more likely to get in trouble with the law, less likely to graduate from high school, less likely to go to college, and more likely to be jobless as an adult.
This problem is not confined to black families anymore. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote The Negro Family: The Case for National Action in 1965, he was alarmed that the percentage of black children born to unmarried mothers had risen from 15% in 1940 to 25% in 1963. But that trend has spread. The percentage of white children born out of wedlock has risen from 15% in 1990 to 30% today. Two out of every five children are now born outside marriage.
“The strongest predictors of upward mobility are measures of family structure,” the researchers write, “such as the fraction of single parents in the area.” More than income, more than race, the presence of fathers in the home is the biggest predictor of whether children will grow up to be productive adults.
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