Is Single Parenthood the Problem?

The most heavily anticipated economics book of the year makes a radical argument: Having married parents is good for kids.

I know, I know. It seems like a joke, right? Of course having two involved parents living in a stable home together is good for kids. Anyone who has considered having children with a partner or was ever a child themselves must know that. But for years, academics studying poverty, mobility, and family structures have avoided that self-evident truth, the economist Melissa Kearney writes in The Two-Parent Privilege, released this week. And while the wonks avoided the topic, the rise of single-parent households in America exacerbated inequality and contributed to astonishingly high rates of child poverty.

[Melissa Kearney: A driver of inequality not enough people are talking about]

“The high incidence of single motherhood has spread to what we might think of as the middle class,” Kearney told me. “It has undermined the economic security of a much wider swath of the population.”

Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, has amassed reams of evidence on the rise of single parenthood and the way it has put lower-income