The Two-Parent Responsibility and a Note on the Gurian Summer Institute Just Two Weeks Away
“Family life was and always will be the foundation of any civilization. Destroy the family and you destroy the country” (Erin Pizzey).
Before reading this week’s article, I hope you will join me for the Gurian Summer Institute’s Virtual Conference on June 27 - 28 with Recordings and Videos Available through July 12.
This event is Co-Sponsored by the Santa Fe Boys Fund, the Kellen Cares Foundation, and the Farrell Family. This conference is an eye-opener for parents, educators, policymakers, coaches, social workers, counselors, and those involved with helping children and families thrive.
The Two-Parent Responsibility: The Politics of Boys and Men, Part 2
I boarded a plan to Seattle and was seated next to a young woman in her mid-to-late twenties. She was young enough to be one of my seven nieces, so I certainly enjoyed it when we exchanged pleasantries and engaged in a conversation after she saw me reading Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege: How America Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind.
She was exceptionally bright and very open during our conversation. When she saw the title, Two-Parent Privilege, she said, “it really is a privilege to have two parents.”
I asked her about her parents, and she talked openly about them. They came from India decades ago and raised a family, doting on their children and helping them succeed in life. She truly loved her parents and everything they have done to help her find success.
After 30 minutes or so and as the conversation continued, I said the title of the book irked me a bit because parenting is not a privilege; it’s a responsibility. She titled her head like a curious student, so I continued.
“Everything you shared with me about your mother and father suggests incredible love, responsibility, and sacrifice. Children really are a responsibility and a blessing. The word privilege, in our modern sense, has come to mean an unearned, systemic advantage and has been inappropriately aligned to all sorts of things, even parenting. Changing diapers at 2:00 AM or cleaning poop off the wall when a child decides to remove a diaper and fling it at the wall is hardly a privilege.” We both laughed and agreed that parenting is a responsibility born from love and endless commitment.
What we can learn from decades of unwed births
Births to unmarried women have risen drastically over the last several decades, and our cultural sense of parenting as a responsibility has changed with it. Some will argue that this is the way of the modern world. People will have babies first and get married later or not at all. Others will argue that the nuclear family represents the greatest chance of health and success. Others will ask about gay parents who adopt or have children through some type of surrogacy or in vitro fertilization. Others will ask about single adults who adopt children. I will forgo these last two examples because they do not fall into the category of single-parent births which come from impulsive pregnancies or unplanned pregnancies.
Decades of data has shown that children who come from two-parent homes are best set-up to succeed in life. Brad Wilcox’s Get Married: Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization provides valuable insight. It’s the type of book that should have a place in our modern high school education system, especially freshman or sophomore year in high school. Those arguing against this type of educational inclusion will likely come from the perspective that it marginalizes the unmarried, is a relic of the past, and does not address today’s challenges—often with limited evidence to refute the statistical realities or why we should avoid teaching the advantages of the success sequence.
Educating young people in our modern classrooms—about the pathways to stability and happiness found in thriving families with two-parent homes—can liberate young people (especially those from poor communities) to think differently about life and family.
Our classrooms would not think twice about teaching financial literacy but baulk at the notion of financial independence and mental and physical well-being for children and adults who engage in family formation as a sequential process. That’s not to say there won’t be bumps and bruises along the way, but healing, love, and commitment will rule the day.
In every racial group with children, married couples with children are the least likely to end up in poverty by significant margins, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Historical Poverty Tables: People and Families - 1959 to 2024 (Table 4).
The black community has seen a steady increase in births to unwed mothers and—along with it—increased poverty, something that has been known for decades, as discussed by Senator Patrick Moynihan in 1963. The Moynihan Report quantified a troubling trend. In 1940, approximately 16% of black children were born to unwed mothers. By 1963 that number increased to 23%. Sixty years later and that number has increased to around 70%. Births to unwed white mothers in 1960 was approximately 2%. Sixty years later and that number has increased to around 28%.
Notably, births to unwed mothers have been on the rise, regardless of race. And racial differences are not a result of systemic prejudices in our institutions; although, one could argue that the policies that followed the Great Society movement—which aimed at reducing poverty— accelerated the problem along with other movements that made family seem like an oppressive entity and social experiments as the answer.
Dr. Shelby Steele, once an early proponent of the Great Society movement, would go on to see the movement as an abject failure that allowed a great purging of the traditional family unit and a cultural transformation whose result was a “grievance elite” that found solidarity in victimhood and government paternity as a solution (see Steele’s White Guilt).
A recent article by Hannah Spier, MD, is an engaging look at the way Female Grievance Prevents Adulthood and family formation. Spier’s words are a lyrical, social reformation—an awakening.
A lie is easier to believe when it flatters an existing wound. It is easier to tell a woman that marriage will trap her if she has already been trained to see dependence as humiliation. It is easier to sell the idea that motherhood will erase her if she has already been trained to see sacrifice as exploitation. The grievance framework didn’t only give women new ideas. It changed the emotional conditions under which those ideas became believable and are now so hard to erase.
The movement toward non-traditional families and delayed family formation, or no family at all, was born from an academic and political industry that untethered paternal structures under the auspice of liberation. Those who support these movements tend to gaslight and marginalize those who support traditional families through various types of emotional grievances, often with attacks on western principles of family formation and the false claim of patriarchal hierarchies that simply see women as walking ovaries. Part of Spier’s argument around grievance does not explicitly address the post-modern movement and the 1960s notion of patriarchy, but it gets at the grievance framework that allows male nature, the notion of patriarchy, and marriage to be positioned as oppressive forces. This framework would go on to become a grievance industry.
Politicians may not succinctly associate patriarchal dogma with the nuclear family because that would be political suicide, but they have an army of institutions who do it for them. Academics and the media can denigrate the traditional family as an institution of the patriarchy, using patriarchal-oppressor narratives to create an atmosphere where women and men are seduced into isolation as liberation. Media personalities will promote, for instance, the notion that women don’t need men to have a family without any reference to the fact that single-parent homes are the ones most likely to fall into poverty. To the progressive mind, the traditional nuclear family becomes something that must be deconstructed from its social importance and presented as a barrier to independence, even as women, men, and children benefit from this structure more than any other.
Feelings Over Logic and Truth
Families from single-parent homes are the ones most likely to fall into poverty and troubling life outcomes across all demographic groups. This reality does not dispel the hard work of single mothers and single fathers who have managed to raise children into healthy adults. We still, however, must look at the data objectively—not only as a way to encourage social expectations but as a way to minimize single-parent homes and help children in those situations learn, grow, and thrive as adults who create new visions for themselves and their future families.
It is equally important to look at the race-based poverty outcomes as the product of family dynamics foremost and not as a product of systemic institutional practices. In most instances people have control of their own destinies and should learn about having control of their own destinies.
Every year from 2003 to 2024, “white, male-headed, single-parent families have had a higher poverty rate than black married-couple families…” (Thomas Sowell, Social Justice Fallacies). In 21 of the last 23 years, Asian families with a male householder with children under 18 years and no spouse present, had a higher rate of poverty than black married couple families. In a review of data from 2015 to 2024, my research showed that white families with a male householder with children under 18-years and no spouse present, have had a rate of poverty nearly double that of black married couple families and were behind every married couple demographic group.
American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) and Hispanics of Any Race who are married with children under 18-years are more likely to experience poverty than any other married couple group with children under 18-years. Their poverty rates, however, are lower when compared to male and female family households with children under 18-years and no spouse present across every demographic group accept one, Asian males—where Asian males averaged 11.6% below poverty compared to AIAN married couples at 12.7%.
There are, however, some challenges with the data on AIAN populations, “about a quarter of Native Americans live on reservations or other trust lands, many of which have their own governments that exist alongside state and federal governments and can enact and enforce laws and regulations” (Pew Research Center). These reservations and lands represent the highest concentration of AIAN poverty.
It should also be noted that the Hispanic Any Race categories are likely conflated data, as data was not present for those who identify as Hispanic Alone, an option in the other racial groups. None of this should downplay the poverty, yet it must look at the leading cause.
Female family households with no spouse present represent the group most likely to experience poverty. Some will argue that this is the result of “dead-beat-dads,” a false stereotype that scapegoats the greater problem of lack of family formation, failed court systems, and inconvenient facts regarding child support payments and the child support system. While mothers are more likely than fathers to miss “All” or “Any” child support payments, it’s important to recognize that state agencies benefit most because they take significant portions of child support funds that funnel away from families and to the courts.
The greatest threat to increased poverty is lack of family formation, dismissing ways to keep families together when possible, and the decision to push grievance over expectation.
After all, the best way out of poverty and into stable and healthy families and communities is marriage, according to the Institute of Family Studies.
This Institute for Family Studies report finds that strong families are associated with less crime in cities across the United States, as well in neighborhoods across Chicago. Specifically, our analyses indicate that the total crime rate in cities with high levels of single parenthood are 48% higher than those with low levels of single parenthood. When it comes to violent crime and homicide, cities with high levels of single parenthood have 118% higher rates of violence and 255% higher rates of homicide. And in Chicago, our analysis of census tract data from the city shows that tracts with high levels of single-parent-headed households face 137% higher total crime rates, 226% higher violent crime rates, and 436% higher homicide rates, compared to tracts with low levels of single parenthood. We also find that poverty, education, and race are linked to city and census-tract level trends in crime. In general, in cities across America, and on the streets of Chicago, this report finds that public safety is greater in communities where the two parent family is the dominant norm (Institute for Family Studies, “Stronger Families, Safer Streets: Exploring Links Between Family Structure and Crime”).
This observation does not mean children from single-parent homes are doomed, yet we must acknowledge that it presents challenges in all sorts of institutional structures. Policymakers purport to be kind and compassionate but too easily perpetuate problems and drive-up costs without measured results and without building self-reliance in ways that Gaad Saad would call a type of suicidal empathy. An institutional example would be an education system that does not recognize male and female differences when it comes to learning but continues to spend millions of dollars on curriculums that do not drive better results, something discussed in Boys, A Rescue Plan
Children from single-parent homes or homes without a father can ill-afford to receive a lesser quality education, and the same could be said of any child. Our intended empathy in education can easily become a cycle of dependency that ignores expectations and skill acquisition and overemphasizes feelings of accomplishments and identities as accomplishments instead of actual academic accomplishments. In Boys, A Rescue Plan, Michael Gurian and I discuss ways K-12 schools should look at data to improve student outcomes without compromising rigor and skill acquisition.
But when ideological shifts transgress traditional values, like sex difference, two-parent families, ideology over achievement, and ideology over basic truths, things fall apart and the academic elites, policymakers, and media types who often remain insulated from their failed approaches simply march on to the next ideological shift and the funding that comes with it.
Fathering is an Action; Fatherhood is an Institution
The modern use of the word fatherhood often refers to parenting in an institutional sense. The term has taken on an unnatural connotation when parents with children separate, divorce, or becomes parents from unplanned pregnancies and impulsive pregnancies. Raising children, in the progressive sense, means moving toward the institutionalization of fatherhood instead of seeing fathering as a spiritual, social, and primordial tether to all of civilization and a right endowed by our creator. Fathering is an act not an institution.
There are, however, some positive aspects to the fatherhood argument, such as advocating for shared parenting and a massive reform of the court system to keep resources with children and parents instead of sending resources to the multi-billion-dollar divorce industry that too often leads to less father involvement, see the documentary Erasing Family by Ginger Gentile.
Proposed policies, such as paid family leave for fathers, and other policy initiatives designed to keep fathers engaged with their children are well intended and have merit, but they are more likely to help those from higher incomes families that tend to get married first, have children, and stay married. Couples with higher levels of education are much less likely to get divorced and use the success sequence mentioned above.
But with over 40% of births now happening out of wedlock, the idea that government will institute policies to build intimacy with parents and children seems eerily similar to the Great Society initiatives that contributed to the epidemic of single parent homes and cultural breakdowns.
The progressive argument rests essentially on the notion that there is a lack of father involvement in single parent homes so let’s fix it with government policies that will not consider promoting the nuclear family, will increase the number of social programs, and will likely not improve outcomes for children in school and life. The progressive mindset that wants to fix the problem is the same progressive mindset that orchestrated a cultural revolution the led to dramatic increases in abortion, decreases in family formation, poorer educational outcomes for boys, and a judicial system that alienated men from families.
Modern liberal and progressive policies, for the most part, are calling for an institutional order where government operates as a type of loco parentis. This promulgation seems Orwellian at the least and magical thinking at the best. The greater truth seems to be that progressives are fearful of encouraging citizens to employ cultural expectations and traditional, historical values around family, parenting, and economic independence while simultaneously creating barriers that prevent greater liberties, like school choice. The best thing for some children, but particularly those from single-parent homes, may well be school choice—something I will discuss in a later essay.
Conservatives have their challenges too, and they seem too quick to jump on the dead-beat-dad bandwagon and are afraid to initiate shared parenting policies and serious consequences for parents (mothers or fathers) who engage in parental alienation and use the courts to keep fathers and mothers from children without real cause.
Conservative policymakers need to take on the family court system with the urgency it deserves instead of simply scapegoating the cultural myth of the dead-beat-dad and failing to promote the identity of the father as sacred, essential, traditional, and worthy of protection. Policymakers, however, are generally afraid of the feminist lobby, which should not be confused with equal rights for women, something further discussed in Boys, A Rescue Plan.
The family court system is woefully behind the times—a behemoth of regulatory processes still in need of reform and a relic of the early National Organization of Women (NOW) movement that saw fit to dismiss fathering in American culture and begin shifting criticism toward fathers and fathering. Gloria Steinem promoted the rights of women over the best practices for children. NOW, in the 1970s, was more concerned about its membership than the children who would become products of divorce and single-parent homes. The organization decided to forgo the shared parenting approach to keep its membership happy; utilizing political power to wield decades of policies that marginalized fathers. Membership mattered more than child well-being. (See Warren Farrell’s section in the Boy Crisis, “Moms Have the Right to Children, Dads Have to Fight for Children.”).
There are trade-offs, however, when there are radical shifts in cultural practices, particularly those regarding parenting and children. Steinem’s vision—not of women’s independence in the workplace—but of women’s yearning for children and the maternal are in conflict with universal survival and happiness as well as Steinem’s own personal philosophy. To Steinem, this is an experiment in disrupting cultural tradition under the auspice of liberation and with no understanding of its future outcomes. Today, that looks like a country where 40% of children are born out of wedlock and a place showing a rapid decline in population growth. The progressive mind seems to be always looking outward so far that it fails to see the immediate step ahead and the edge of the cliff below its feet.
The early discriminatory practices by NOW have become embedded into decades of public policy and non-profits. My sense is that modern progressive policies, for the most part, will do much of the same by helping children of educated married-couple families more so than children of low-income single-parent families. Single-parent families from low-income households will continue their dependency on a loco parentis government subsidy system instead of making shared-parenting the law of the land and family formation and marriage the gold standard.
The best way out of poverty and healthy child-development is two-parent families and the type of education that leads to the type of employment that allows families to thrive, whether the breadwinner is the mother or the father.
While there needs to be a concern for single parents, spending resources on keeping families together is also necessary to decrease poverty instead of spending on lavish social programs that encourage and perpetuate single-family types and punish two-parent families. I say this, of course, with the understanding that divorce will happen, where some parents will navigate the landscape in a way that puts children first and parental grievances on the back burner. There are also divorces where one parent continually speaks ill of the other to their children and to their family and friends in various ways to encourage parental alienation and create a lifetime of psychological concerns, financial challenges, and a grievance industry in media, academia, and government that benefits at the expense of children.
Sadly, children are too often exploited by various industries that benefit from the fracturing of the family unit. Children easily become the collateral damage of failed family systems, failed court systems, and ideological policies the drive wedges between mother, father, and child.
Social Expectations
The progressive framework seems unwilling to employ social expectations that facilitate and encourage personal growth and responsibility through a process—including the type of education that prepares individuals to control their own destinies. It was Oliver Wendell Holmes and later President John F. Kennedy who challenged us to ask not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country. The best thing one can do for a country is raise a healthy family, and the best thing a country can do for its citizens is enforce equality under the law so all people can do more for their family, their community, and their country.
The grievance crowd has largely abandoned the practice of equal protections under the law. This might be most visible in the social science academic-types that have abandoned biological difference as well as traditional values proven over centuries.
Thomas Sowell wrote that “social processes also take time and have costs.” There is a lot of money to be made in social policy that often proves unfruitful for families but very fruitful for the special interest groups that have continued in the tradition patterned by Gloria Steinem in the 1970s and 1980s, the movement first and the family second. Nearly 80% of custodial parents are mothers, while fathers make up about 20%. Though moms are still more likely to have custody, the share of custodial dads has been steadily rising, up from just 16% in 1994. Somehow, this is presented as progress.
Academics, media-pundits, and policymakers are the ones who often do not need to live by the rules they impose on others. And in doing so, they promote cultural dependency and sell it as liberation. Many progressive policy-and-academic-types too often offer solutions that do not result in change but a legacy of dependency and unsettling family structures that are a good voting block but not good for decreasing poverty and improving family formation and all the cascading benefits that come with it; lower poverty, less crime, better educational outcomes, better mental health, and so on.
This is where the progressive left struggles. The progressive policy-and-academic types are easy to spot because their solutions are like impulsive pregnancies—excitement in the moment with no eye toward the future.
We see them across all types of government institutions. Our educational institutions, for instance, have struggled to improve educational outcomes for decades for America’s most vulnerable children—in part because national policies have failed to encourage and promote the reality that home life precedes school life, school life precedes work life, and work life precedes family formation.
And in instances when home life is more difficult, there is an extra burden on schools to ensure educational progress; another reason we cannot afford ideological efforts that do not improve education and instead focus on identity politics, produce a greater grievance industry, promote social activism over learning, and increase dependency on the government as loco parentis.
If we cannot accept that boys and girls are different, how can we ever move forward? Yet policymakers do find males and females differences when it suits policy decisions that often work against family formation and males. If we cannot accept that children need a mother and father in their lives, how can we ever move forward? Yet we spend billions on a divorce industry that alienates instead of unites. How do we get couples on the right path when the success sequence has been broken? Yet we encourage and promote single-parent families and much less encouragement for traditional family formation.
Some will argue that the solution cannot happen without the support of the feminist lobby. Some of the arguments, however, need to happen in the courts and policies that enforce equality under the law and in the institutions that encourage and promote family formation. The issue is not about feminists or men’s rights activists.
It’s about the golden rule and understanding that generations of healthy family formation have merit over policy wonks with very little to lose, special interest bias, and an inability to see into the future but with an incredible ability to unravel it.