I began reading this convinced I would disagree with Mr. Hilger, but by the time I'd finished, he'd persuaded me. Two parents are clearly better than one, but in a sense the two-parent household is a halo effect from a constellation of other positive conditions, the most important of which is an income adequate to survive in our society and the education and skills to earn such an income.
If you want to affect childrens' educational outcomes, you should probably go the tutoring route.
A policy where every Ivy League school has a yearly requirement of 1 on 1 tutoring 100 hours for a disadvantaged kid could probably start making a dent.
It's a free babysitter in after-school hours, one-on- one attention, and help with school.
The family structure improvement would larger-than-nuclear, where a village, clan or community raises a child. Even two parents can get overwhelmed, but with ten it's easy.
(Two adults at a time can manage twenty children fairly easily, assuming they're free from other obligations and healthy. Ten adults in the pool makes this more likely to be consistent)
The obvious explanation for the mother education trend is that the share of women with bachelor degrees tripled during this time period. That means that the average caliber of woman getting a degree probably also dropped slightly, and the distributions of the partial college and high school and dropout also changed even more dramatically, in their cases losing the higher caliber members (who moved up). The net effect is that huge distributional changes over 50 years led to declines in every category.
I certainly agree that kids would be better off with two parents. I also agree that smarter, more balanced people with longer time frames tend to be better parents, are more likely to get and stay married, and are more likely to have kids sharing their favorable genetics. None of this implies that pushing the string of marriage or education or wages for low skilled labor will do much to help kids. The whole thing seems to just hope the causality works the way they want. Huge assumption that needs to be carefully critiqued before throwing money and government programs at it.
"Why is that? Getting married is a sign that people have their lives in decent shape more generally: stable careers, a leash on mental health problems, a clean criminal record, a supportive extended family, and so on. The research on causal impacts tells us that these background factors, rather than the presence of a second parent per se, drive a lot of the positive associations between two-parent households and good child outcomes. "
I think this is huge. I think when even good faith conservatives focus on this issue they kind of have the following model in mind:
1. Ppl who have low resources should be pooling them through marriage, because that's their best option.
2. Ppl who don't do that should not be having kids; that's the whole point of discouraging premarital sex.
3. Extended family and local/religious community should invest in/assist low resource couples and their kids, explicitly because they have demonstrated that they are willing to conform to local/religious mores by getting married. This perpetuates the community.
4. The goal is not to have kids better off in the abstract; the goal is to grow and strengthen the community/religion.
I wonder if there is actually strong political support anywhere for "make EVERY kid's life better"
Make EVERY (US?) kid's life better would be fairly costly.
The kind of costly that requires the more well-to-do, educated people to spend quantities of their personal hours on children who aren't theirs, on a 1:1 basis, and paying for public childcare for more than 9 hours a day
"These direct efforts all have something in common: they ask almost nothing of taxpayers." I'm not sure why this is a negative? Maybe the effects end up small, but why poopoo positive results that don't cost anything and are mainly a result of just removing misguided policy? I admittedly have little hands on experience with families navigating welfare programs, but even with the little I have I am personally aware of two people that were in a monogamous relationship with children and refused to get married because they did not want to lose benefits. And of course, they ended up separated after a few years for no apparently good reason. It's certainly possible (or likely?) that being married wouldn't have stopped them from separating. But even if it just delayed it for a couple of years because of the hurdle of going to see an attorney, that would have been two more years that the children received the benefits of dual parents and an intact household.
So we get some marginal benefit just by removing what seems like an absurd structure in the first place. That seems like a great place to start before talking about adding on another program costing hundreds of billions of dollars a year when we don't currently have an agreement on how to pay for our existing welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare in the reasonably near future.
I began reading this convinced I would disagree with Mr. Hilger, but by the time I'd finished, he'd persuaded me. Two parents are clearly better than one, but in a sense the two-parent household is a halo effect from a constellation of other positive conditions, the most important of which is an income adequate to survive in our society and the education and skills to earn such an income.
Great article.
If you want to affect childrens' educational outcomes, you should probably go the tutoring route.
A policy where every Ivy League school has a yearly requirement of 1 on 1 tutoring 100 hours for a disadvantaged kid could probably start making a dent.
It's a free babysitter in after-school hours, one-on- one attention, and help with school.
The family structure improvement would larger-than-nuclear, where a village, clan or community raises a child. Even two parents can get overwhelmed, but with ten it's easy.
(Two adults at a time can manage twenty children fairly easily, assuming they're free from other obligations and healthy. Ten adults in the pool makes this more likely to be consistent)
The obvious explanation for the mother education trend is that the share of women with bachelor degrees tripled during this time period. That means that the average caliber of woman getting a degree probably also dropped slightly, and the distributions of the partial college and high school and dropout also changed even more dramatically, in their cases losing the higher caliber members (who moved up). The net effect is that huge distributional changes over 50 years led to declines in every category.
I certainly agree that kids would be better off with two parents. I also agree that smarter, more balanced people with longer time frames tend to be better parents, are more likely to get and stay married, and are more likely to have kids sharing their favorable genetics. None of this implies that pushing the string of marriage or education or wages for low skilled labor will do much to help kids. The whole thing seems to just hope the causality works the way they want. Huge assumption that needs to be carefully critiqued before throwing money and government programs at it.
"Why is that? Getting married is a sign that people have their lives in decent shape more generally: stable careers, a leash on mental health problems, a clean criminal record, a supportive extended family, and so on. The research on causal impacts tells us that these background factors, rather than the presence of a second parent per se, drive a lot of the positive associations between two-parent households and good child outcomes. "
I think this is huge. I think when even good faith conservatives focus on this issue they kind of have the following model in mind:
1. Ppl who have low resources should be pooling them through marriage, because that's their best option.
2. Ppl who don't do that should not be having kids; that's the whole point of discouraging premarital sex.
3. Extended family and local/religious community should invest in/assist low resource couples and their kids, explicitly because they have demonstrated that they are willing to conform to local/religious mores by getting married. This perpetuates the community.
4. The goal is not to have kids better off in the abstract; the goal is to grow and strengthen the community/religion.
I wonder if there is actually strong political support anywhere for "make EVERY kid's life better"
Make EVERY (US?) kid's life better would be fairly costly.
The kind of costly that requires the more well-to-do, educated people to spend quantities of their personal hours on children who aren't theirs, on a 1:1 basis, and paying for public childcare for more than 9 hours a day
"These direct efforts all have something in common: they ask almost nothing of taxpayers." I'm not sure why this is a negative? Maybe the effects end up small, but why poopoo positive results that don't cost anything and are mainly a result of just removing misguided policy? I admittedly have little hands on experience with families navigating welfare programs, but even with the little I have I am personally aware of two people that were in a monogamous relationship with children and refused to get married because they did not want to lose benefits. And of course, they ended up separated after a few years for no apparently good reason. It's certainly possible (or likely?) that being married wouldn't have stopped them from separating. But even if it just delayed it for a couple of years because of the hurdle of going to see an attorney, that would have been two more years that the children received the benefits of dual parents and an intact household.
So we get some marginal benefit just by removing what seems like an absurd structure in the first place. That seems like a great place to start before talking about adding on another program costing hundreds of billions of dollars a year when we don't currently have an agreement on how to pay for our existing welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare in the reasonably near future.