PAUL PETERSON, HOST:
This is the Education Exchange with Paul Peterson. I am the Director of Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. Thank you for joining us. Two-thirds of children under the age of 18 live in a family with two parents married to one another. That means one-third are not living in a family with two parents married to one another. Eighty-eight percent of children lived with two parents in 1960. But that fell to 70 percent in the 1990s, and it’s never recovered. Although there may be some signs that things are looking up. Now, I don’t want to say that this is always terrible. There are heroic single parents that have raised their children to be fine, upstanding citizens. We read about heroes who have lost their lives in wars. The family has held together, and children have prospered, nonetheless. And everyone’s heard of a superstar who came from a single-parent family. But on average, it’s a great privilege to have a mom and dad, if you’re a child, having a mom and dad at home every morning and every night. So that’s not so frequently discussed in public life. And that’s the theme of a paper recently released by the American Enterprise Institute entitled “Family Structure, a Key Factor Hidden in Plain Sight”. The authors are Ian Rowe, Brad Wilcox, and Grant Bailey. And I’m pleased to have Ian Rowe, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, with me on the Education Exchange today. Thank you, Ian, for joining me.
IAN ROWE: Hello, Paul. Thank you so much for having me and thank you for highlighting what you just described as the shift in family structure over the decades and the impact, as you said, on average, it normally has. And I think it’s worthy of discussion, particularly as it relates to academic outcomes for kids.
PETERSON: Well, you have just released some analysis of some data from a government survey called the National Survey of Children’s Health. And you have reported out some of the impacts of the absence of a two-parent family on a child’s health and well-being. So, what do you find?
ROWE: Yeah. So first of all, let’s first define terminology because sometimes that gets lost in translation. So, we did look at the National Survey of Children’s Health and we looked at what we call intact families. And an intact family is defined as a family in which a child is being raised where the biological or adoptive parents are together and married in the same household. So that’s the anchor against which we then compare other types of family arrangements. And what we find, and much of what I’m going to describe is what most people would say makes sense. It’s common sense. That kids raised in intact families are far more likely to thrive in school and in life than their peers from other households. And I’ll read to you exactly from the study. We find that children in non-intact households where children are living with stepfamilies, cohabitating parents, single parents, or foster or kin-based families, such as living with your grandparents, those types of non-intact households are 13 percent less likely to receive A’s and B’s than those raised in an intact married parent home, they’re 47 percent more likely to have their parents contacted for problems at school and more than twice as likely to be depressed. In general, in this instance, we found that family structure is a more powerful predictor of school problems, academic performance, and depression than are race and poverty and the reason that’s important is that typically when we’re looking at outcomes in academics or healthcare or crime there are certain categories or subcategories that dominate the analysis with race, economic class, gender being what I call the usual suspects but you almost never see this data disaggregated by the family structure within which the child is being raised.
PETERSON: So, you say it’s the single most important factor in terms of the background of the child that’s affecting what’s happening to them in school. And you call this family structure. And so, it comes up in your report. And I don’t disagree. It’s a good term, but it’s a little sociological if I may use that word it’s…why do you use the word family structure?
ROWE: That’s a good question. Partly that has become the accepted term in literature but in its simplest form we are saying who are the adults in the lives of a child over time, and the structure part of that is usually indicating, is it a married situation? Is it a stepfamily situation? Is it the foster parent? Is it a grandparent? And so, we use the word structure to indicate essentially the relationship between not only the child and the adults, but the relationship between the adults. And so, it’s kind of a catch all, a catch all phrase.
PETERSON: Yeah, it’s not exactly the same thing as saying you have two parents living together. It’s something intact. The married part of it is part of what you’re saying here. So intact, I really like that word. That gets at exactly what you’re talking about here. So why do you think that’s so important? I mean, you demonstrate it’s very important with the statistics here. But why? Why is this so important?
ROWE: Yeah, and even with the question that you just asked, there is an important distinction between cohabitation and marriage, right? Because you could say a child living with two parents, same thing. Well, as it turns out, the data is overwhelming that even if a child may have cohabitating parents early, significant evidence shows that that relationship has broken up within three to four years and there might be another adult in the home. Kathy Eden has done a lot of research in this front, where I think she’ll even call something the daddy go around, where there are cases of what’s called multiple partner fertility. So, it’s really important that the marriage component be isolated from just cohabitation, and the data bears it out. And why does it make a difference? Well, we think marriage in particular is important even prior to when the child shows up because the marriage commitment means that two people have voluntarily chosen to come together to have a life together and even before again, they’ve had children they’ve made a commitment to each other they’ve bonded with each other and made it then some point later made a conscious decision to have children and it is that joint commitment. And, of course, and as you said it earlier simply because a child is raised in a single-parent household is no guarantee that that child’s life is doomed forever nor is the child being raised in a married two-parent household a guarantee of success. So, it is very important to say that, but it is it is naive to ignore that on average, in the vast majority of cases, it’s simply better for kids to be raised in an intact, married, two-parent household. And again, of course, we’ve got to recognize in some cases that there is abuse in those situations. We’re not talking about those kinds of instances. But if we’re trying to figure out what are the factors, that drive student success to fully ignore family structure is leaving out an incredibly important factor.
PETERSON: Well, there are studies out there that show that if the marriage is an unhappy marriage, it’s not as good for the child as a happy marriage. So actually, those are the papers that get published in the journals, the journals that show that unhappy marriages are not particularly good for children. So, are you saying that unhappy marriage might be better than divorce?
ROWE: Well, you know, let’s just put it in. We didn’t get into that level of detail in our study. But of course, we’re not advocating for anyone to be in a family situation, which is dangerous, or harmful in some way, that’s horrific. I mean, it’s also true, unfortunately, that there’s lots of evidence that children raised in single-parent households are more susceptible to domestic violence, more susceptible to viewing partner violence. The idea of having men in your life that are not connected to you biologically, there’s lots of evidence that that creates, it can create very dangerous conditions for kids. So, none of these situations are attractive. What we’re trying to focus on is to say that we collect a tremendous amount of information about what helps kids. And the point that we’re trying to make in this study is that we’ve got a big glaring factor that’s essentially ignored. And I think we understand some of the reasons why, but even those reasons why, as well-intentioned as they may be, don’t justify completely ignoring this factor.
PETERSON: Well, you know, I’ve been noticing over the years how our genetic structure makes us so terribly concerned about our children. The Darwinian principle that we want to keep our genes going into the indefinite future means that we really care about those that are the product of a marriage and our own children. Now, I know adopted children, parents do care about very deeply as well. So I’m not saying biology is everything, but biology is part of the story, I think.
ROWE: Yeah, I mean, I happen to be a parent of both biological and adopted children, and we certainly love our children equally. But the key that we’re trying to first establish is that what makes the difference is that there are two people and that there are two people committed in marriage even prior to having children. That is what we’re saying is worthy of study and certainly worthy of inclusion when we’re looking at factors like race or class or gender or geography or any of what I call the usual suspects why would we ignore the fact that there again there’s such overwhelming evidence that it matters a lot
PETERSON: Now, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, as it’s called, the Nation’s Report Card, collects a lot of information about student achievement and does this when they’re at 9 years of age and 13 years of age and fourth grade, eighth grade, twelfth grade. And I learned from your paper that they actually collect information on family structure, whether you have two married parents or not. But it’s never reported. And so, in the publications that they put out, they don’t talk about it. So, you say they should. So why do you think it’s important that they report this information?
ROWE: So again, good question. So, by law, the National Assessment for Educational Progress as you said it’s the Nation’s Report Card it is considered the gold standard every two years many of us in the education community and education reform look to NAEP to get some sense of how are our kids doing in what is arguably the only consistently applied measure? So, we can look at data in 2026 and compare that to results of NAEP in the year 2000 and feel confident that it’s a comparable measure. So it’s very, very, very important. And when the NAEP was established by law it was mandated to disaggregate reporting by certain categories. And that includes gender, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability status, English learner status. So those are the required categories by law. But that law doesn’t preclude NAEP from adding other categories that it might view as important. And as you said, in the year 2013, and frankly, it’s still a little bit of a mystery we’re trying to find out. Someone said, hey, guys, I think we’re ignoring a factor. Shouldn’t we ask about the family structure? Let’s ask our students, as you say, at 4th grade, 8th grade, and 12th grade, who lives in your family? And so, they added a question to the questionnaire. And it simply says, who lives with you? And you’ve got mother as an option, father, stepmother, stepfather, a few other options. And so the idea is that you can construct family structure from that question.
PETERSON: You know, I actually think that’s a very good question, in part because children know the answer. They know the correct answer. They’re not going to put down misleading information. Oftentimes we ask them, you know, what’s your father’s education, what’s your mother’s education? Well, you know, somebody 9 years of age may not know that.
ROWE: Right.
PETERSON: And so they may just answer it—In fact, I think there’s a great deal of over-reporting of their parents having a college degree. When I look at the data, I say, it can’t be that many parents have a four-year college degree. But I think every child probably knows that they have a mom and dad at home.
ROWE: Well, no exactly the simplicity of the question is what makes it such an attractive instrument for collecting information because a 9-year-old will be able to say, oh yeah, I live with my grandmother or I live with my mother or I live with my father. And so, we’re able to look at those answers and then basically we can construct, as I mentioned, oh, there’s a mother and father at home, there’s a grandfather, you know, so we can construct somewhat reliably the data that we’re getting. So again, someone was courageous enough back in 2013, or probably 2012 or 2011, to get it onto the 2013 student survey at 4th grade, 8th eighth grade, and 12th grade. And then there’s an actual archive of all of the student questionnaires over the years, and you can see it. That same question, essentially the same question was asked in 2013, 2015, every two years. But it’s never been reported.
PETERSON: Let’s assume that somebody takes a look at this information. What do you think they’ll find?
ROWE: So there are folks like Catherine Stevens who’ve been able to, you know, mine the data. And what was found is what one would assume is that on average, kids raised in married two-parent households, had better academic outcomes than kids in all of the other family arrangements. So you had Black kids raised in married two-parent households that were doing better than white kids in non-married parent households. And this is really important. And by doing this, we’re not seeking to demonize single mothers or to diminish the role of these other factors. But when you discover that there’s a factor that is potentially transcendent, that matters more than all of these other factors, we’ve got to take our head out of the sand and perhaps lead us to different sets of interventions than those that might be exclusively race-based or exclusively poverty-based. Again, it doesn’t mean that some of those ideas may still be worthy, but it opens up a whole universe of other interventions and different dialogue when we identify all the factors that really matter.
PETERSON: Now, in some work that I’ve done with Dany Shakeel and Angela Dills that we have, published in a journal article, we found that a greater density of two-parent families, that is intact families, a greater density of intact families was highly correlated with student achievement in a county. So, we find if you have a lot of two-parent families living in just one area, you’re going to get a higher level of student achievement. And actually, we find that’s more important than any other factor out there. So it’s very similar to what you just said.
ROWE: Well, it’s not only is it very similar, it adds an even greater dimension to the importance of family structure. So, you’re probably very familiar with the work of Raj Chetty and the Opportunity Insights team. You know, back in 2014, they looked at something somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 million anonymized tax records to try and answer the question is the American dream still real and what they were able to do was look at all of the children, every single child born in the United States, I believe was from 1980 to 82. And they looked at those kids that were born in the lowest economic quintile. So the bottom 20 percent, their parents were earning in the lowest economic quintile. And then what they were able to do is look 30 years later to say for those same children, what’s the likelihood that those kids would be earning in the top economic quintile? So born in the lowest 20 percent from a poverty perspective, and 30 years later, earning in the top economic quintile. So, it’s kind of symbolic of achieving the American dream. And he actually created a map of upward mobility across the country. And you can see, depending on where you were born, you had a much greater likelihood of 30 years later being in the top economic quintile. And so you can see there’s lots of variability in upward mobility in the country. So the question is, what makes the difference between an area that has high upward mobility versus those do not?
PETERSON: Yes, we did look at that data. We looked exactly at that data, Ian. And what we found, it was not that different from what Chetty himself found, which was that the family structure was the single most important factor that occurred in childhood as to what would happen in the long run to that person.
ROWE: Correct. And so the very powerful conclusion, because as you said, Chetty said, the single biggest contributor is the concentration of married two-parent households in the area. So the key insight from that is not only is a married two parent household important for the child in which, you know, in that exact household in which that child is being raised, it’s also important to all kids in the area, even if they’re not raised and married to, you know, if they’re in some other kind of living arrangement. That is a very powerful piece of information.
PETERSON: You know, another person who’s written about this is Melissa Carney. I don’t know if it’s Carney or Kearney. She’s written a book called The Two-Parent Privilege. And she says that, you know, we’re not talking about the importance of this. partly because it’s not politically acceptable. She talked about she went to a conference at Aspen with all kinds of fancy people there. And they were all embarrassed when she brought this topic up. And you can’t talk about it in the media. The media won’t cover it. Hollywood won’t talk about the importance of this. So that’s her claim. So do you agree with that?
ROWE: Yes. And not only do I agree with it, when you say people are embarrassed, I would take it further and say people are hostile to this idea. And this is where we get into the area of why isn’t this information reported. And for some people, they may either intuitively or through social science acknowledge that family structure matters. And perhaps it matters even more. than all the other things that we typically look at. But there is such a fear that by introducing family structure as a factor in assessing student outcomes, it becomes clear that one of the structures that is typically, again, on average, not as successful in producing successful children are single parents. And so the fear is that by introducing this data, we will start to do what Daniel Patrick Moynihan was accused of back in the 60s when he first wrote the report on the black family and he identified that single parent households were a real issue. And that’s when the term blame the victim was originally coined. And so I think fast forward to present day, there is a real fear that we will move back to a time that single moms will be demonized. They’ll be blamed. And better, we just don’t report it all because we want to keep the focus on what some people believe is the real culprit which is racism or poverty discrimination. And so I think there’s a real clash there and my hope is that for anyone who is genuinely, genuinely interested in improving the outcomes for children we should continue to look at race. We should continue to look at economic class. We should continue to look at all the categories that we have historically had. But we cannot ignore the factor that matters most. And—
PETERSON: You can’t force parents to remain married to one another. You can’t force people to get married. So what can you do to facilitate more intact families? So let’s say we agree we want to have children raised in intact families, if at all possible. And if the other factors are not somehow such that you can’t do it. What kind of public policies can you do?
ROWE: So, the first thing I would do is simply start reporting it. Because if we at least reported student achievement results and by the way not only in education but health care, crime, poverty because family structure is a consistent factor across all of these outcomes but first of all the benefit of reporting it is that it just puts the conversation in the context that we…because what happens now is when the government only produces analyses by race or class for these other what I call the usual suspects that tends to lead analysts to believe that those are the only factors that matter They kind of suck the energy out of the room. And so even so you might—
PETERSON: You might even say it’s racist. You know, if you really want to think about it, you might say that ignoring this fact and then instead, you know, pointing out all the correlations by race and income. This…the way racism is it’s overused in our language, I know. But to me this has strong hints of that awful word.
ROWE: Well, and the thing is, when that is the all-encompassing answer to every disparity, first of all, it puts the onus on a set of people or a set of systems. And again, by saying family structure should be measured, we’re not saying we shouldn’t look at race, but perhaps if a person were to look at the data and see that there are a lot of black kids that are doing well in school who are being raised and married two parent households, maybe that might just expand the aperture to say, well, then what should we be focused on to improve outcomes for the future generation? And this is actually another point that I think is always important because when I share this analysis, people might say to me, well, okay, Ian, sure, family structure may matter, but you can’t change the family that a kid is in. I agree. But what we can do is help that kid think differently about the family that they form going forward. So for example, in our schools, you know, we teach something called the success sequence in our schools, which is another set of data that says if a young person follows a series of steps, getting at least a high school degree, full-time job of any kind, so they learn the dignity and discipline of work, and if they have children, if they get married first, that series of decisions, education, work, marriage, then children, the data says 97 percent of millennials avoid poverty, and the vast majority enter the middle class or beyond.
PETERSON: So, you know, one of the statistics that I find fascinating is that in 1960, nearly 90 percent of all Black children were being raised in two parent families. That’s in 1960. And today, 70 percent of all white children are being raised; 20 percentage points less of white children are being raised in intact families. So, I mean, if you think this is just a race issue, it’s not. This is a much broader issue. There’s been a big trend in the last half century away from the intact family, and that’s across all ethnic groups.
ROWE: It’s what i call the equal opportunity tsunami. You know I mean we make a little light of it but that’s the point this is not a…you know the Black community does not have the monopoly on this as an issue it happens to be a bit more acute I mean it is true that in the Asian community nearly 80 percent of Asian kids are being raised in married two-parent households and in the Black community it’s only 30, so there are differences in family structure within different racial and ethnic groups and that matters. I mean if the well-intentioned person were to be asked this question you know what do you think the impact is of having… being raised from age 0 to age 18 in a married two-parent household that’s intact, that’s low conflict. That versus, you know, the impact even of schooling of a couple good teachers in 4th fourth grade, 8th grade, 12th grade. That’s wonderful. But when you compare those two things for the presence relative to the engagement with a child, it’s intuitively obvious. But now we need to have the social science catch up.
PETERSON: So, Ian, this has been a fascinating conversation. And I think your report’s really a major contribution. And I do think you’re going to have an impact on the U.S. Department of Education. I think they’re going to have to really rethink what they are doing with the national assessment. And I wish you well on all endeavors to persuade them that they need to move beyond the politically correct world that is out there and to actually provide people with information that’s relevant to the issues that are before us today. So thank you very much for joining me on the Education Exchange.
ROWE: Thank you, Paul. And one last note is that we’re hoping that the federal government will change. And also there are now a few states, Ohio and Utah being first, that are looking at making family structure a category of reporting in their state education system. So the hope is that over time, both at the federal level and at the state level, we all benefit from having this additional information.
PETERSON: The state involvement in this is really important because they are the laboratory of democracy. That’s where we try out things and then eventually persuade the federal government to do the things that work.
ROWE: Yes.
PETERSON: I’ve been speaking with Ian Rowe, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is co-author of a just released paper entitled “Family Structure, A Key Factor Hidden in Plain Sight”. Now, on September 17th and 18th, the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard is hosting a conference that’s attracting homeschoolers who are usually married and intact families, but not always. But it’s attracting homeschoolers, and there a lot of them reporting on their experiences in various contexts at this conference. So I hope you will take a look at it. Daniel Hamlin, the dean of the University of Texas, and I will be the moderators. And you can learn more by going to the PEPG website, which posts the agenda for the conference. I’m Paul Peterson. This is the Education Exchange. Please join me every Monday when our weekly podcast is released on the Education Next website at noon Eastern time.
