Is the Benefit of a Two-Parent Family a Myth? Harvard Sociologist Explains

Next, rethinking widely held beliefs about racial inequality.

For decades, scholars have drawn a strong link between high rates of single parent households and the disadvantages faced by black Americans.

Well, our next guest is challenging that idea.

It's all in her new book, "Inherited Inequality."

Harvard sociologist, Christina Cross, joins Michelle Martin to explain how viewing systemic disparity through a different lens could help these disadvantaged black communities.

- Thanks, Christiane.

Professor Christina Cross, thank you so much for joining us.

- Thanks for having me.

It's great to be here.

- You know, your book is kind of a myth buster, I guess, if I could call it that.

Because you really challenge some of the things that we have just sort of come to accept as part of kind of social policy or family policy.

You say that, you know, you opened the book by reflecting on your own childhood in Milwaukee, where the two-parent family was kind of held up as the antidote to all manner of ills, like poverty and crime and so forth.

And one of the reasons that that struck me, just to begin with, is that I think that there's sort of an attitude that African-Americans don't talk about issues like this among themselves.

Like this is sort of an outside-in conversation.

And so the first thing that I noticed was, you say that this was kind of a commonly discussed theme in your childhood, at church, in your family members.

Can you just talk about that very briefly?

- Yes, so I, like you mentioned, I'm from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I grew up in a working class community there.

And many times I would hear folks at church, at school, within my neighborhood, sort of trying to grapple with many of the challenges that we were facing and trying to understand what really was driving some of the issues within my community.

And often family structure in particular, single parent families came up as part of the narrative.

A lot of times the story was that our community was better off when we had higher rates of two-parent households, and that unfortunately, there had been a change with an increase in single-parent families, which was among other things, a really important factor in driving some of the challenges we are facing.

But here's where your book takes an interesting turn.

You write that Americans have great faith in the power of the family, and in particular the power of the two-parent family.

We imagine this domestic idol to be a haven from the harsh realities of the outside world.

And the way we wrap Sadek, it's easy to assume that most Americans see the two-parent family as a great equalizer.

And you say you were raised to believe in this.

And growing up the adults regularly invoke this family structure as a solution to a host of problems facing our low income African American community.

So that's the first thing you say that look, there's a reason that so many of us continue to hold fast to that the idea that, you know, two parent families are advantageous.

It's true.

I mean, it's just common sense.

But one of the central findings here is that the negative effect of single motherhood on child outcomes is weaker for African-American children than for white children and the well-being of black youth from two-parent families is substantially lower than that of their white peers.

When is the first time that that finding became clear to you?

Well, it was about a decade ago for me when I was working on my dissertation research.

Like any good graduate student, I wanted to explore what we already knew about the topic of family structure before designing a project of my own.

And one of the things that I found relatively hidden in the data was this striking finding.

I had found that several researchers had uncovered that the negative impact of living with a single mother was smaller for African-American children.

And of course, I was really struck by that, given the conversations that I had been hearing since I was a child, but also what I knew more generally.

80% of white Americans and 70% of Hispanic Americans and 60% of African Americans all agreed that African Americans have a harder time getting ahead because of differences in family upbringings, specifically family structures.

So this is a consensus or a widely held idea that was at odds with what I was finding in the data, which made me explore more.

That finding was about single motherhood.

And I began to wonder about the flip side of the coin.

What is it like for African-American children when they grow up in two-parent families?

Do they reap the same rewards?

- Do they reap the same reward?

So do you wanna take, can we take those sort of separately?

What's your theory is, why is it that growing up in a single-parent household is more damaging to white kids than to black kids?

What do you think that is?

That actually became the focus of my dissertation research, and I began to test some theories that had already been put out in the world, but they were, at that point, speculation.

There were two in particular that I decided to test.

One of them focused on extended families.

So we know that in general, African-Americans tend to be more deeply embedded in their extended family networks.

They're much more likely to live with extended kin or to live close to them.

And they engage in significant amounts of support exchange.

And one of the theories suggested that African-Americans more deeply embeddedness in this extended family actually served as a protective factor, sort of buffered against some of the negative consequences of single motherhood.

I think kind of anecdotally, a lot of us have seen that.

Do you know what I mean?

And it also explains the way that sort of legal structures kind of work against black families, like, for example, this whole business of people registering their kids in out-of-boundary schools, like, schools where they don't live but maybe their grandparents live.

And then you look more closely at it and you think, oh, wait a minute, the grandparents function as another set of parents.

Like the grandparents might have the kids Monday through Friday and the parent has the kids on the weekends because that's a better school.

And then people look at that and think, oh, you're doing something illegal.

But for them, it makes sense.

It's normal, right?

Yes.

And actually, that's one of the things that I have explored in other areas of my research, how some groups just do family differently.

And it's much more common for African-Americans to involve extended relatives in routine childbirth tasks and even to share households some of the time or all of the time with these extended relatives.

But if we focus so much on the nuclear family, we will miss that and we can make it actually much harder to support these families.

And you're saying that the corollary to that is that white families, that's less common.

It's less common.

Like the focus really is very much sort of the nuclear family and that if if a single parent doesn't have that, a single white parent doesn't have that, it becomes much harder.

Well, they're much more likely to live further apart from other relatives.

And actually, in my study, I found that many single parents, white single parents reported less satisfaction with the amount of support they were receiving from their extended relatives.

Interesting.

Okay, so then let's take it the other way, which is to say that black kids who live with two parents don't seem to reap the same benefit as white kids who live with two parents.

Why is that?

Well, to understand this, I think it's important to understand why living in a two-parent family is generally beneficial for children in the first place.

And it's because parents have more monitoring and time to spend supervising children, but they also have more money on average.

So in general, children in two-parent families have access to more resources.

Well, unfortunately, one of the things that I found in my data is that black children who grew up in two-parent families have drastically fewer resources, in particular economic resources, than white children who grow up in the same type of family.

Their household incomes are about 60% of that of white two-parent households, and their family wealth is just a quarter, 25%.

Why does that matter?

Why does that matter, that the gap in wealth and assets, the money that exists because of your house or your investments and things like that, why does that gap matter so much, in your opinion?

Well, wealth matters so much for being able to give people a sense of economic security at any point, but especially during moments of downturn, right?

You mentioned the recession earlier.

Having wealth can make all the difference in being able to keep your home or not, and being able to afford to send your children to a quality school and being able to provide children other advantages as they try to establish their own independent household.

There are many parents who offer their children help with down payments to own homes, which of course allows for a greater and earlier accumulation of more wealth.

So you can sort of see this compounding advantage from having access to more assets and having higher levels of wealth.

Were any of these findings surprising to you?

- Well, yes, actually.

It was already concerning to find that black children from two-parent families had drastically lower academic and labor market opportunities than their white peers.

But what I was really struck by, and what I did not expect to find, is that black children in two-parent families had outcomes that were more similar to their white peers who lived in a single parent family than to their white peers who grew up with both parents.

- Why is that?

- Well, it goes back to these resources disparities that I mentioned before in large part, but actually I found that for some outcomes, economic resources had less to do with what was going on, but things outside the home also come into play.

So one thing that I found is that black children and two parent families were two to four times more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than their white peers.

And they had very high suspension rates compared to any group.

Well, economic resources only explained a small fraction of what was going on there.

But what I also found is that when it comes to their behaviors, they were not different with respect to how they showed up in the classroom.

But there's been a ton of research to show that black children's behaviors are often perceived to be more negative and disruptive in a classroom.

And so then we think about how perception really plays a role in driving these disparities in school discipline.

So you point out that black two-parent families are almost invisible in academic literature, even though they make up nearly half of black families today.

Why do you think that is?

That's correct.

Well, for so long, the conversation about black families has been about single-parent families.

There's been such a concern with trying to figure out why African Americans have a harder time getting ahead on life.

And so then the conversation and the attention has been on these single mother families.

And so even though there has been a rise in black two parent families, that's not where we have been focused on for so long.

Narratives are incredibly powerful and sort of directing our attention and shaping the way that we think about issues.

And so because that's been just such a long standing narrative, the narrative about black single parenthood, I think it has made it difficult for us to really imagine and think about black two parent families.

So what do you think has been lost by not spending more time thinking about this black two parent family experience?

It leads us to some pretty false assumptions about what's really driving inequality and outcomes for black children, but also what we can be doing to level the playing field.

Because we haven't focused on black two parent families, we haven't known how drastic the opportunity gaps are for this group compared to their white peers.

It has allowed us to believe for so long that the two-parent family is this great equalizer, which has actually shown up in the way that we craft policy.

What are some of the things that would actually, based on your findings, actually make a difference for families?

So it is true that when Black children grow up with both parents, they tend to experience advantages and they do tend to have improved outcomes.

It is also true, unfortunately, that they still lag behind their white peers in this same family structure.

And my findings indicate that much of that has to do with these wide gaps in economic resources.

And so if we really want to turn the tide, we need to be thinking about how to bolster family resources.

Instead of making cuts to key social safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP and Children's Health Insurance Program, we could be thinking about ways to help families to stay afloat during these challenging times by increasing that amount of aid.

Another thing that people are really surprised to find out is that TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which we just commonly refer to as Welfare, its budget has not increased since it was created in 1996, so nearly 30 years ago.

And when we think about inflation since that time, we really start to see that this program is falling behind in the amount of support that it is providing to families, or what we thought was adequate even 30 years ago.

So even just thinking about trying to make sure that that funding keeps up with inflation, there's also been different strategies that we've seen that were effective recently that we could have continued.

I think about the expansion of the child tax credit during the COVID-19 pandemic and how that lifted tens of millions of children out of poverty.

And it really made a difference in increasing economic resources for families.

Why can't we continue to do that?

We see that it works.

- So the bottom line is, you're just saying that living in a two-parent family has significant advantages for white kids.

It has advantages for all kids.

It particularly advantages white kids.

It really doesn't advantage black kids that much.

So if people are not willing to see that, what does that say?

If they're not willing to sort of adjust for the difference, what does that say?

Well, if we continue to assume that the benefits of this family structure are universal, we're not going to be able to close these gaps that we say that we care so much about.

It will lead to us perpetuating inequalities between children of different races as they have gone on for decades.

One of the reasons why I call my book Inherited Inequality is because I want to highlight this unequal access to opportunity that has persisted in the U.S.

across generations, and we don't want to continue to pass that on to the next generation.

I'm imagining that some might look at your findings and say that this takes people off the hook, that people should exercise personal responsibility, and that sort of blaming outside forces for your kids' lack of success in school and things of that sort just doesn't-is unhelpful and kind of perpetuates a sort of a lack of sense of personal responsibility.

What would you say to somebody who made that argument?

Well, the thing about my book is that I'm looking at people who've done it quote unquote the right way.

They've done what society said we should do in order to guarantee our children's success and yet they have not found their children in a position to actualize those same dreams of success.

Unfortunately, their children don't have access to the same opportunities.

So this goes beyond the individual.

These are parents who have managed to stay together for decades.

I follow children from birth through young adulthood, and they provided a stable home for their children.

And after doing what they were told was supposed to guarantee them a bright future for their children, they still have to endure additional barriers.

This is not simply about individual responsibility.

Individuals of course have choice and agency, but they're also facing significant constraints.

- Professor Christina Cross, thank you so much for talking with us.

- Thank you for having me.