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The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind
The surprising story of how declining marriage rates are driving many of the country’s biggest economic problems.
In The Two-Parent Privilege, Melissa S. Kearney makes a provocative, data-driven case for marriage by showing how the institution’s decline has led to a host of economic woes—problems that have fractured American society and rendered vulnerable populations even more vulnerable. Eschewing the religious and values-based arguments that have long dominated this conversation, Kearney shows how the greatest impacts of marriage are, in fact, when two adults marry, their economic and household lives improve, offering a host of benefits not only for the married adults but for their children. Studies show that these effects are today starker, and more unevenly distributed, than ever before. Kearney examines the underlying causes of the marriage decline in the US and draws lessons for how the US can reverse this trend to ensure the country’s future prosperity.
Based on more than a decade of economic research, including her original work, Kearney shows that a household that includes two married parents—holding steady among upper-class adults, increasingly rare among most everyone else—functions as an economic vehicle that advantages some children over others. As these trends of marriage and class continue, the compounding effects on inequality and opportunity grow increasingly dire. Their effects include not just children’s behavioral and educational outcomes, but a surprisingly devastating effect on adult men, whose role in the workforce and society appears intractably damaged by the emerging economics of America’s new social norms.
For many, the two-parent home may be an old-fashioned symbol of the idyllic American dream. But The Two-Parent Privilege makes it clear that marriage, for all its challenges and faults, may be our best path to a more equitable future. By confronting the critical role that family makeup plays in shaping children’s lives and futures, Kearney offers a critical assessment of what a decline in marriage means for an economy and a society—and what we must do to change course.
In The Two-Parent Privilege, Melissa S. Kearney makes a provocative, data-driven case for marriage by showing how the institution’s decline has led to a host of economic woes—problems that have fractured American society and rendered vulnerable populations even more vulnerable. Eschewing the religious and values-based arguments that have long dominated this conversation, Kearney shows how the greatest impacts of marriage are, in fact, when two adults marry, their economic and household lives improve, offering a host of benefits not only for the married adults but for their children. Studies show that these effects are today starker, and more unevenly distributed, than ever before. Kearney examines the underlying causes of the marriage decline in the US and draws lessons for how the US can reverse this trend to ensure the country’s future prosperity.
Based on more than a decade of economic research, including her original work, Kearney shows that a household that includes two married parents—holding steady among upper-class adults, increasingly rare among most everyone else—functions as an economic vehicle that advantages some children over others. As these trends of marriage and class continue, the compounding effects on inequality and opportunity grow increasingly dire. Their effects include not just children’s behavioral and educational outcomes, but a surprisingly devastating effect on adult men, whose role in the workforce and society appears intractably damaged by the emerging economics of America’s new social norms.
For many, the two-parent home may be an old-fashioned symbol of the idyllic American dream. But The Two-Parent Privilege makes it clear that marriage, for all its challenges and faults, may be our best path to a more equitable future. By confronting the critical role that family makeup plays in shaping children’s lives and futures, Kearney offers a critical assessment of what a decline in marriage means for an economy and a society—and what we must do to change course.
237 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 18, 2023
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September 19, 2023
The word “important” is overused in describing books. Part of why overusing it is a problem is that it diminishes the power it carries when it is truly merited. And Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege truly deserves to be called important.
Economists' discussions of poverty have largely shied away from “cultural” issues like marriage because of the fear of falling into cultural judgments, the belief that they are entirely a consequence of economic outcomes not a cause of them, and a worry that we do not have any solutions to them. All three of these have some truth to them. Nevertheless I have always been a bit guilty that my own writing, reading, and policy work has been on conventional poverty issues like tax-and-transfer programs and ways to facilitate and encourage work while avoiding culture entirely.
Enter Kearney with a thoughtful, non-judgmental account of the undesirable consequences of the decline in children’t being raised by married couples—much of it based on her previous scholarly research as well as the research of others (including a number of sociologists, which is nice to see in a book by an economist). She documents this trend which is particularly pronounced for lower-income families, rebuts a number of ways of explaining it away (e.g., there is not much cohabitation without marriage and the little there is tends to be relatively unstable), establishes its importance for outcomes for children and the channels by which it is important, and discusses a number of the causes as well. For good measure there is also a discussion of declining birthrates. And woven throughout is a set of policy conclusions from specific programs (e.g., fatherhood programs and what they need to do to improve) to a broader plea that we should all be taking marriage more seriously.
The story is a complicated one because the decline in marriage is partly caused by economic developments (most notably the decline in earnings for men) but also causes them. Moreover her earlier research found that when men got more opportunities from fracking it did not lead to more marriage so the economic relationships may not work in reverse and there may be persistence in a new set of norms. Moreover the programs that deal with these issues are complicated too, with mixed success and nothing particularly huge. The result is not a magic bullet solution to the problem Kearney so ably documents so much as a plea for all of us to care more about it—a process that holds out the hope of developing more solutions in the future.
Economists' discussions of poverty have largely shied away from “cultural” issues like marriage because of the fear of falling into cultural judgments, the belief that they are entirely a consequence of economic outcomes not a cause of them, and a worry that we do not have any solutions to them. All three of these have some truth to them. Nevertheless I have always been a bit guilty that my own writing, reading, and policy work has been on conventional poverty issues like tax-and-transfer programs and ways to facilitate and encourage work while avoiding culture entirely.
Enter Kearney with a thoughtful, non-judgmental account of the undesirable consequences of the decline in children’t being raised by married couples—much of it based on her previous scholarly research as well as the research of others (including a number of sociologists, which is nice to see in a book by an economist). She documents this trend which is particularly pronounced for lower-income families, rebuts a number of ways of explaining it away (e.g., there is not much cohabitation without marriage and the little there is tends to be relatively unstable), establishes its importance for outcomes for children and the channels by which it is important, and discusses a number of the causes as well. For good measure there is also a discussion of declining birthrates. And woven throughout is a set of policy conclusions from specific programs (e.g., fatherhood programs and what they need to do to improve) to a broader plea that we should all be taking marriage more seriously.
The story is a complicated one because the decline in marriage is partly caused by economic developments (most notably the decline in earnings for men) but also causes them. Moreover her earlier research found that when men got more opportunities from fracking it did not lead to more marriage so the economic relationships may not work in reverse and there may be persistence in a new set of norms. Moreover the programs that deal with these issues are complicated too, with mixed success and nothing particularly huge. The result is not a magic bullet solution to the problem Kearney so ably documents so much as a plea for all of us to care more about it—a process that holds out the hope of developing more solutions in the future.
March 16, 2024
I was a bit wary of this book going into it, but my worries were quickly assuaged. The author doesn’t slam single mothers, nor does she advocate for a return to nuclear families with traditional gender roles (she herself is a working mom with a PhD). Rather, this book is a thoroughly researched economic exploration of the unique privileges experienced by children in families with two married parents, and the way this perpetuates class stratification across generations. The most interesting part for me was the part about how norms in specific regions or social groups affect whether parents have kids inside or outside of marriage. I’m not a parent, so I have no horse in this race, but I thought this was a super interesting read!
October 17, 2023
Not all childhoods are equal. The data shows that children from single-parent households are statistically less likely to succeed in almost every area of life (it doesn’t mean they won’t).
Published in 2023, the book offers the newest research on the matter. Although mainly focused on the USA, the findings can apply to all the countries with similar trends in family structures.
When we talk about a drop in marriages, we often say that it is because people are focusing more on careers. However, research shows the opposite—the more educated and career-driven you are, the more likely you are to marry. The marriage rates keep dropping the most among the uneducated and the poor.
Overall, the author carefully crafts her arguments not to mix causation with correlation. She also seems politically neutral in her approach. However, her writing is extremely dry and overly focused on numbers—it feels like reading a long research paper.
Here are a few facts from the book that are worth quoting:
1. “In 2019, almost half of all babies in the US were born to unmarried mothers. This figure represents a dramatic increase since 1960, when only 5% of births were to unmarried mothers.”
2. “US Census statistics reveal that families headed by a single mother were five times more likely to live in poverty than families headed by a married couple; families headed by a single father were nearly twice as likely to live in poverty.”
3. “But by and large there is a consistent trend in which children growing up in mother-only households are at a relative disadvantage compared to children growing up in two-parent households, even despite all the parenting help that unpartnered mothers might get from nonresident fathers, other relatives, and government and community programs, among other sources.”
4. “The decrease in men’s earnings relative to women’s earnings has also led to a reduction in marriage. The standard model of marriage in the economics literature posits that as female wages rise relative to male wages, there will be a reduction in marriage because the returns to marriage are lower.¹⁵ This means that women have less to gain by entering into a marriage contract. It follows, then, that an increase in women’s relative wages will lead to a reduction in marriage and an increase in divorce because the female “outside option” has improved.¹⁶”
5. “Another largescale study finds that adolescents who experienced their mother marrying a stepfather after parental divorce had worse behavioral outcomes and more negative feelings than adolescents whose biological parents remained continuously married.²¹”
Published in 2023, the book offers the newest research on the matter. Although mainly focused on the USA, the findings can apply to all the countries with similar trends in family structures.
When we talk about a drop in marriages, we often say that it is because people are focusing more on careers. However, research shows the opposite—the more educated and career-driven you are, the more likely you are to marry. The marriage rates keep dropping the most among the uneducated and the poor.
Overall, the author carefully crafts her arguments not to mix causation with correlation. She also seems politically neutral in her approach. However, her writing is extremely dry and overly focused on numbers—it feels like reading a long research paper.
Here are a few facts from the book that are worth quoting:
1. “In 2019, almost half of all babies in the US were born to unmarried mothers. This figure represents a dramatic increase since 1960, when only 5% of births were to unmarried mothers.”
2. “US Census statistics reveal that families headed by a single mother were five times more likely to live in poverty than families headed by a married couple; families headed by a single father were nearly twice as likely to live in poverty.”
3. “But by and large there is a consistent trend in which children growing up in mother-only households are at a relative disadvantage compared to children growing up in two-parent households, even despite all the parenting help that unpartnered mothers might get from nonresident fathers, other relatives, and government and community programs, among other sources.”
4. “The decrease in men’s earnings relative to women’s earnings has also led to a reduction in marriage. The standard model of marriage in the economics literature posits that as female wages rise relative to male wages, there will be a reduction in marriage because the returns to marriage are lower.¹⁵ This means that women have less to gain by entering into a marriage contract. It follows, then, that an increase in women’s relative wages will lead to a reduction in marriage and an increase in divorce because the female “outside option” has improved.¹⁶”
5. “Another largescale study finds that adolescents who experienced their mother marrying a stepfather after parental divorce had worse behavioral outcomes and more negative feelings than adolescents whose biological parents remained continuously married.²¹”
July 2, 2024
A terrific synthesis of the advantages of being raised by married parents, the causes of the rise in single-parent households and how America has become the single-parent capital of the world. "The Two-Parent Privilege" is a careful, methodical and non-judgmental analysis of decades of research into parenting, and what the cultural shifts away from marriage have meant for children and eventually, adults.
According to Kearney, single-parenthood has been rising for decades largely as a result of cultural shifts in attitudes towards marriage and the decline of male marriageability. Consequentially, this has exacerbated economic inequality and reduced social mobility. According to her, an absence of male parents in particular hurts young boys, who are particularly vulnerable to absent dads. This - like several positions in this book - strikes me as somewhat obvious, although as an academic Kearney buttresses these claims with cogent statistical analyses.
Surprisingly, single-parenthood isn't rising because of divorce, but rather because many mothers are choosing to never marry. I was very surprised to learn that about HALF of American children born in 2019 are born to unwed mothers. Kearney makes an important observation on this phenomenon - Never-married fathers are less likely to remain involved with their children than divorced ones, likely because they've moved to other relationships. Worryingly, this means raising the children will become the sole responsibility of a single-parent. Critically, Kearney assiduously emphasizes that this is largely happening amongst the less-affluent troughs of American society, and spends a non-trivial amount of time defending her case that single-parenthood is not just the cause of poverty, but also entrenches it.
I am not an economist, but candidly I think this must have been a challenging book to write. While the conclusions struck me as obvious, as an academic the arguments must nonetheless be grounded in statistics, and Kearney's claim that single-parenthood compounds poverty appears to my eyes as well-established. Simultaneously, I can imagine this is also very difficult to an ostensibly left-leaning Professor in that she risks considerable ostracization from amongst her ivory tower colleagues.
According to Kearney, single-parenthood has been rising for decades largely as a result of cultural shifts in attitudes towards marriage and the decline of male marriageability. Consequentially, this has exacerbated economic inequality and reduced social mobility. According to her, an absence of male parents in particular hurts young boys, who are particularly vulnerable to absent dads. This - like several positions in this book - strikes me as somewhat obvious, although as an academic Kearney buttresses these claims with cogent statistical analyses.
Surprisingly, single-parenthood isn't rising because of divorce, but rather because many mothers are choosing to never marry. I was very surprised to learn that about HALF of American children born in 2019 are born to unwed mothers. Kearney makes an important observation on this phenomenon - Never-married fathers are less likely to remain involved with their children than divorced ones, likely because they've moved to other relationships. Worryingly, this means raising the children will become the sole responsibility of a single-parent. Critically, Kearney assiduously emphasizes that this is largely happening amongst the less-affluent troughs of American society, and spends a non-trivial amount of time defending her case that single-parenthood is not just the cause of poverty, but also entrenches it.
I am not an economist, but candidly I think this must have been a challenging book to write. While the conclusions struck me as obvious, as an academic the arguments must nonetheless be grounded in statistics, and Kearney's claim that single-parenthood compounds poverty appears to my eyes as well-established. Simultaneously, I can imagine this is also very difficult to an ostensibly left-leaning Professor in that she risks considerable ostracization from amongst her ivory tower colleagues.
September 1, 2025
3.5 stars
This book is written by an economist and is full of facts and figures. Seriously, every single paragraph is a statistic of some kind. That stopped it from being highly readable.
The gist is kids do better with two parents. Being a single parent is HARD and stressful. Sharing the load (and resources) makes parents better, more capable, and makes kids better. (There isn’t enough data on heterosexual vs. homosexual parents, Kearney says.)
Boys especially suffer from lack of fathers. If it’s not possible for a father to be around, community male role models help a lot. Courts are reluctant, for this reason, to put fathers in jail, but if they are up to no good, the family is better off with them incarcerated. This lets boys see there are consequences to criminal behavior.
Being married is a huge factor in staying out of poverty. Marriage rates (and income) are higher among college graduates, and their kids are more successful. When accounting for marriage, racial achievement gaps shrink a lot—not completely, but a lot. Kearney suggests government programs do more to encourage marriage (so far they have focused on single moms, mainly) and support mentorship programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters.
The book is pretty nonpolitical; I would put Kearney as right in the middle of the road, if anything.
Clean content
This book is written by an economist and is full of facts and figures. Seriously, every single paragraph is a statistic of some kind. That stopped it from being highly readable.
The gist is kids do better with two parents. Being a single parent is HARD and stressful. Sharing the load (and resources) makes parents better, more capable, and makes kids better. (There isn’t enough data on heterosexual vs. homosexual parents, Kearney says.)
Boys especially suffer from lack of fathers. If it’s not possible for a father to be around, community male role models help a lot. Courts are reluctant, for this reason, to put fathers in jail, but if they are up to no good, the family is better off with them incarcerated. This lets boys see there are consequences to criminal behavior.
Being married is a huge factor in staying out of poverty. Marriage rates (and income) are higher among college graduates, and their kids are more successful. When accounting for marriage, racial achievement gaps shrink a lot—not completely, but a lot. Kearney suggests government programs do more to encourage marriage (so far they have focused on single moms, mainly) and support mentorship programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters.
The book is pretty nonpolitical; I would put Kearney as right in the middle of the road, if anything.
Clean content
November 18, 2025
My understanding of the social consequences of family structure have been deeply important to me. It's formed a foundational part of my worldview. I was raised with many bourgeois or moderate center-right views on family, and most of the experiences and research I have come across always seemed to reinforce this point. Of course, a scientifically-minded and skeptical individual should test ideas rigorously. The author of this book, Melissa S. Kearney, appears positioned perfectly to do just that. She ascended from a working-class background into a prestigious research position in an empirical field who voices moderately left-liberal political concerns/motivations. If anyone can deliver the cold, hard facts on the importance of two married parents rearing children, it is Kearney.
So what are those facts?
There is a near 50-year decline marriage and two-parent households in America. This concerning decline is concentrated among Americans without a college education. For instance, in 2019 ~63% of U.S. children lived with married parents; in 1980 ~77% did. Among children whose mothers have a four-year college degree, about ~84% lived with married parents (little change); among children whose mothers have only high school or some college the share fell sharply (~83% → 60%).
Why does the decline in marriage matter?
Outcomes for children raised in two-parent households are better in virtually every possible dimension. Kearney's own research and that of others in the field find that children raised in households with two resident parents (especially married parents) do substantially better on a range of long-run outcomes: educational attainment, adult earnings, incarceration rates, and teenage parenthood, etc. Additionally, some meaningful portion of the increase in aggregate inequality and decrease in intergenerational mobility is explained by the decline in two-parent households.
How does having two married parents improve long-run outcomes for kids?
Kearney presents work showing the advantages of two parents are partly resource-based (e.g. greater pooled income, more parental time), partly complementarities in parenting (e.g. division of labor, emotional bandwidth), and partly driven by assortative mating (i.e. more educated people both marry each other and combine higher human capital). She leans more heavily on the resource-based explanation as most important, which is a natural tendency for an economist. However, I've seen work on the effect of parental death on childhood outcomes suggest that it is perhaps the concentration of human capital that is the fundamental driving factor. However, there is evidence that cuts both ways, and it is hard to isolate variables and do causal analysis in this field.
Why has marriage declined, especially among non-college educated Americans?
Kearney foregrounds economic factors as responsible for the decline in marriage, though she entertains other explanations to illustrate the important of sociocultural factors too. The primary explanation, as she see it, is that there has been a decline in marriageable men due to their declining labor market prospects given structural changes in the economy. She cites an interesting study that shows that random boost to male income now increase fertility but don't recover marriage patterns (see → https://www.nber.org/papers/w23408), suggesting something about the decline in non-college male marriageability extends beyond material factors alone.
What can be done?
Kearney is loathe to suggest that anything even slightly regressive or even neo-traditionalist be entertained. This of course will serve he prospect to persuade skeptic. She argues that remedial policies should focus on child well-being rather than marriage-promotion but that the latter should still be entertained through structural reforms. She also argues that social policy from the latter half of the twentieth century had only a modest impact on the decline in marriage (contra Charles Murray's Losing Ground) but, where possible, policy disincentives for marriage should be removed. It seems she may have overlooked some of the ways the structure of these programs encourage already tenuous relationships between men and women in less well off communities to decline further. Given the two or more generations we are into this process, it would appear very hard to unwind some of the damage already caused without dramatic interventions. I fear, if we're to believe the strong version of Kearney's case, then her prescription are wholly inadequate to the problem.
Is Kearney's argument correct?
Yes and no. Kearney makes a persuasive case that having two parents has some causal positive effect on the lifelong outcomes of children, but she doesn't convincingly show that these positive effects would extend to household formed by the assortment of two individuals of low EA/SES. In other words, she presents little data to show that randomly increasing marriage among the segment that has historically shown marriage erosion mitigates the poor outcomes concentrated among this group. The research she presents can't isolate dual parenting as the x-factor in positive childhood outcomes. There are clear benefits to those who experience it, but it remains unclear if these generalize.
The issue here is selection effects. In other words, the individuals who don't get married and stay married while raising children may differ systematically from the people who do. The marital decline among non-college educated folk is itself a signal of this selection. Further, the mechanisms that she cites as driving the differences in childhood outcomes would still different among high status and low status couples even if all parents were coupled, assuming that assortative mating tendencies remain unchanged (lots of evidence to believe this). Perhaps we'd see some absolute narrowing on measures on inequality and mobility, but the relative differences would be unchanged.
The residual uncertainty about whether increasing two-parent residences would actually result in consistent and large improvement in long-run childhood outcomes or just result in marginal absolute narrowing on some measures undercuts any urgency about whether two-parents household should be more strongly incentivized by political structures, especially when one of the two major political parties has a skeptical view of traditional family life and norms. Subsequently, the best way to argue for the need for political attention for two-parent households is to focus less on making a partial empirical argument for its superiority and to prioritize the moral value of a mother and father raising children together. To most liberals, it is gauche to legislate morality but if civil society has dropped the ball, there has to be some remedy, especially because there is perhaps a strong empirical case to make about how the rise of divorce, the decline in marriage rates, and the decline in fertility subsequent to later and fewer marriages is deranging our political system.
Ultimately, Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege is a careful, data-first argument that the decline of marriage, especially its concentration by education (the college gap), is an important, measurable contributor to rising inequality and weakening intergenerational mobility in the U.S. She marshals robust descriptive evidence (Census/ACS/PSID), fairly mechanistic evidence, and targeted quasi-experimental studies to argue that two resident parents provide pooled resources and parenting complementarities that materially improve child outcomes. At the same time, Kearney is sensibly cautious about causality, acknowledging selection and complex causal channels, and she recommends policy that supports children’s material and developmental needs rather than narrowly attempting to compel more marriage. Unfortunately, this sensible and technocratic approach will not be enough to address the real problem of declining rates of two-parent homes.
So what are those facts?
There is a near 50-year decline marriage and two-parent households in America. This concerning decline is concentrated among Americans without a college education. For instance, in 2019 ~63% of U.S. children lived with married parents; in 1980 ~77% did. Among children whose mothers have a four-year college degree, about ~84% lived with married parents (little change); among children whose mothers have only high school or some college the share fell sharply (~83% → 60%).
Why does the decline in marriage matter?
Outcomes for children raised in two-parent households are better in virtually every possible dimension. Kearney's own research and that of others in the field find that children raised in households with two resident parents (especially married parents) do substantially better on a range of long-run outcomes: educational attainment, adult earnings, incarceration rates, and teenage parenthood, etc. Additionally, some meaningful portion of the increase in aggregate inequality and decrease in intergenerational mobility is explained by the decline in two-parent households.
How does having two married parents improve long-run outcomes for kids?
Kearney presents work showing the advantages of two parents are partly resource-based (e.g. greater pooled income, more parental time), partly complementarities in parenting (e.g. division of labor, emotional bandwidth), and partly driven by assortative mating (i.e. more educated people both marry each other and combine higher human capital). She leans more heavily on the resource-based explanation as most important, which is a natural tendency for an economist. However, I've seen work on the effect of parental death on childhood outcomes suggest that it is perhaps the concentration of human capital that is the fundamental driving factor. However, there is evidence that cuts both ways, and it is hard to isolate variables and do causal analysis in this field.
Why has marriage declined, especially among non-college educated Americans?
Kearney foregrounds economic factors as responsible for the decline in marriage, though she entertains other explanations to illustrate the important of sociocultural factors too. The primary explanation, as she see it, is that there has been a decline in marriageable men due to their declining labor market prospects given structural changes in the economy. She cites an interesting study that shows that random boost to male income now increase fertility but don't recover marriage patterns (see → https://www.nber.org/papers/w23408), suggesting something about the decline in non-college male marriageability extends beyond material factors alone.
What can be done?
Kearney is loathe to suggest that anything even slightly regressive or even neo-traditionalist be entertained. This of course will serve he prospect to persuade skeptic. She argues that remedial policies should focus on child well-being rather than marriage-promotion but that the latter should still be entertained through structural reforms. She also argues that social policy from the latter half of the twentieth century had only a modest impact on the decline in marriage (contra Charles Murray's Losing Ground) but, where possible, policy disincentives for marriage should be removed. It seems she may have overlooked some of the ways the structure of these programs encourage already tenuous relationships between men and women in less well off communities to decline further. Given the two or more generations we are into this process, it would appear very hard to unwind some of the damage already caused without dramatic interventions. I fear, if we're to believe the strong version of Kearney's case, then her prescription are wholly inadequate to the problem.
Is Kearney's argument correct?
Yes and no. Kearney makes a persuasive case that having two parents has some causal positive effect on the lifelong outcomes of children, but she doesn't convincingly show that these positive effects would extend to household formed by the assortment of two individuals of low EA/SES. In other words, she presents little data to show that randomly increasing marriage among the segment that has historically shown marriage erosion mitigates the poor outcomes concentrated among this group. The research she presents can't isolate dual parenting as the x-factor in positive childhood outcomes. There are clear benefits to those who experience it, but it remains unclear if these generalize.
The issue here is selection effects. In other words, the individuals who don't get married and stay married while raising children may differ systematically from the people who do. The marital decline among non-college educated folk is itself a signal of this selection. Further, the mechanisms that she cites as driving the differences in childhood outcomes would still different among high status and low status couples even if all parents were coupled, assuming that assortative mating tendencies remain unchanged (lots of evidence to believe this). Perhaps we'd see some absolute narrowing on measures on inequality and mobility, but the relative differences would be unchanged.
The residual uncertainty about whether increasing two-parent residences would actually result in consistent and large improvement in long-run childhood outcomes or just result in marginal absolute narrowing on some measures undercuts any urgency about whether two-parents household should be more strongly incentivized by political structures, especially when one of the two major political parties has a skeptical view of traditional family life and norms. Subsequently, the best way to argue for the need for political attention for two-parent households is to focus less on making a partial empirical argument for its superiority and to prioritize the moral value of a mother and father raising children together. To most liberals, it is gauche to legislate morality but if civil society has dropped the ball, there has to be some remedy, especially because there is perhaps a strong empirical case to make about how the rise of divorce, the decline in marriage rates, and the decline in fertility subsequent to later and fewer marriages is deranging our political system.
Ultimately, Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege is a careful, data-first argument that the decline of marriage, especially its concentration by education (the college gap), is an important, measurable contributor to rising inequality and weakening intergenerational mobility in the U.S. She marshals robust descriptive evidence (Census/ACS/PSID), fairly mechanistic evidence, and targeted quasi-experimental studies to argue that two resident parents provide pooled resources and parenting complementarities that materially improve child outcomes. At the same time, Kearney is sensibly cautious about causality, acknowledging selection and complex causal channels, and she recommends policy that supports children’s material and developmental needs rather than narrowly attempting to compel more marriage. Unfortunately, this sensible and technocratic approach will not be enough to address the real problem of declining rates of two-parent homes.
January 21, 2025
4.5 - this book is going to take me a minute to process. I think the argument in this book is important when it comes to thinking about what’s “best” for children, especially because everyone seems to have their own idea on what that is.
This problem is so complicated and feels insurmountable in America… so while I really enjoyed learning about this and will think about it as I vote, have kids, and interact with programs that support families, it’s slightly disheartening to think about how much effort and change would need to happen to make a lasting change.
But! One encouraging thing from the end of the book is her mentioning that even the smallest efforts can start making changes for kids and they matter.
This problem is so complicated and feels insurmountable in America… so while I really enjoyed learning about this and will think about it as I vote, have kids, and interact with programs that support families, it’s slightly disheartening to think about how much effort and change would need to happen to make a lasting change.
But! One encouraging thing from the end of the book is her mentioning that even the smallest efforts can start making changes for kids and they matter.
November 22, 2023
I didn't finish reading this because it was so heavy statistically. She also kept saying the same thing, that kids who have two parents go on to have better jobs and more stable lives. Which is not to say a child raised in a single parent home cannot achieve those things just that it is harder.
I heard her on a podcast talking about her book and thought just listening to the podcast was good enough for me.
I heard her on a podcast talking about her book and thought just listening to the podcast was good enough for me.
October 1, 2024
More interested in the idea than the execution. While I don’t disagree with the premise, there wasn’t enough on fully non-financial (direct or indirect) benefits of a two-parent household to find it interesting. Primary reasoning (which, btw, I fully agree with) is that two-parent households have more resources (most proveably, money), and more money is pretty heavily associated with better outcomes (of the type she is focused on: educational achievement, socioeconomic standing, health, etc).
She spends a lot of time saying “More money enables more [X], and more [X] leads to better outcomes.” If you already have a decent background in how economics leads to all those X’s, and also have a decent background of why those X’s lead to better outcomes (again, of the type she’s measuring), then once you accept that 2 parents will probably have higher income potential than just 1 (which you should accept very quickly), there’s not a lot more that needs to be said. But that’s basically the first 50-60% of the book.
Second half is better—gets more into non-financial contributors to outcomes, like time involved in kids activities, reading to kids, emotional availability, etc. Still obvious that 2>1 in terms of being able to provide those things, but more novel to me than the financial side. And agree with her emphasis that household structure isn’t talked about or admitted enough as a really relevant contributor to child outcomes.
3.5/5
She spends a lot of time saying “More money enables more [X], and more [X] leads to better outcomes.” If you already have a decent background in how economics leads to all those X’s, and also have a decent background of why those X’s lead to better outcomes (again, of the type she’s measuring), then once you accept that 2 parents will probably have higher income potential than just 1 (which you should accept very quickly), there’s not a lot more that needs to be said. But that’s basically the first 50-60% of the book.
Second half is better—gets more into non-financial contributors to outcomes, like time involved in kids activities, reading to kids, emotional availability, etc. Still obvious that 2>1 in terms of being able to provide those things, but more novel to me than the financial side. And agree with her emphasis that household structure isn’t talked about or admitted enough as a really relevant contributor to child outcomes.
3.5/5
October 29, 2024
Kearney may be an excellent economist, and she has valuable things to say, but the quality of writing in this particular book was disappointing. I could tell that she was trying to be engaging, but fell utterly flat with her dry prose, making it torturous to push through.
The short version: Children do better when they grow up in households with a married mother and father. That's really all you need to take away from this book. If you want the statistics and research studies, flip to her references section in the back.
The short version: Children do better when they grow up in households with a married mother and father. That's really all you need to take away from this book. If you want the statistics and research studies, flip to her references section in the back.
May 23, 2024
For being much different content than I expected I was a big fan of this one. And for once the research/stats didnt feel suffocating
October 11, 2024
Melissa S. Kearney has an important thesis: kids growing up in single-parent households face many economic disadvantages, and marriage rates are on the decline, especially among the less-educated. Intuitively, married parents generally have more time, money, and emotional bandwidth to devote to their offspring. Unfortunately, human interest gets a bit lost in the weeds here; there were so many charts that seemed to show almost the exact same statistical analysis that my eyes glazed over. I wish Kearney had partnered with an ethnographer to tell more stories about the patterns shown by the data. As such, I found myself thinking this could have been a scientific article instead of a book. I really appreciate her scholarship (and her bravery in reporting on a somewhat sensitive subject), just wish this was more readable!
April 26, 2024
"Children's outcome in life are profoundly shaped by their family and home experiences. Children who have the benefit of two parents in their home tend to have more highly resourced, enriching, stable childhoods, and they consequently do better in school and have fewer behavioral challenges. These children go on to complete more years of education, earn more in the workforce, and have a greater likelihood of being married."
This was an interesting study of the plummeting marriage rates in the U.S. and the profoundly negative effects on children.
What was missing was any discussion on the role of religious observance on marriage or out-of-wedlock births.
2024 A book of my choice
This was an interesting study of the plummeting marriage rates in the U.S. and the profoundly negative effects on children.
What was missing was any discussion on the role of religious observance on marriage or out-of-wedlock births.
2024 A book of my choice
February 13, 2025
TL/DR:
"OK, so I don't want to be judgey, and I definitely want to recognize that all families are different in their own unique thing and that's a wonderful and beautiful thing. I'm totally not judging single mothers. And I'm definitely not a conservative! Hah! Who, me? Nononono. I'm a liberal! Like you! I just want to say that, well, maybe, you know, it might be worth considering that there's possibly overwhelming empirical evidence for the claim that children do best with two parents in a committed, married relationship. I'm sorry. Did that sound mean? I'm sorry..."
"OK, so I don't want to be judgey, and I definitely want to recognize that all families are different in their own unique thing and that's a wonderful and beautiful thing. I'm totally not judging single mothers. And I'm definitely not a conservative! Hah! Who, me? Nononono. I'm a liberal! Like you! I just want to say that, well, maybe, you know, it might be worth considering that there's possibly overwhelming empirical evidence for the claim that children do best with two parents in a committed, married relationship. I'm sorry. Did that sound mean? I'm sorry..."
April 17, 2024
lol i want to write about this
1) i don’t think most of the stories actually happened to her
2) she uses real economic data to make suggestions based on vibes
1) i don’t think most of the stories actually happened to her
2) she uses real economic data to make suggestions based on vibes
September 3, 2025
I loved this book. It’s not trying to push a political agenda. Instead, it presents facts, research, and sometimes uncomfortable realities.
For those that say, “This sets women back hundreds of years. Single-parent homes are increasing because wives can finally leave and support themselves.” I agree that does happen sometimes and woman should have that choice, but look at this statistic:
“In 2019, only 63% of children in the US lived with married parents, down from 77% in 1980. This decline has not been experienced equally across the population. There has been little change, for example, in the family structure of children whose mothers have a four-year college degree: In 2019, 84% of children whose mothers had four years of college lived with married parents, a decline of only 6 percentage points since 1980. Meanwhile, only 60% of children whose mothers had a high school degree or some college lived with married parents, a whopping 23 percentage point drop since 1980. A similarly large decline occurred among children of mothers who didn't finish high school; the share of children in this group living with married parents fell from 80% in 1980 to 57% in 2019. Figure 1.1 plots these trends.”
Why is it, then, that college educated women, the ones who could support themselves and have the resources to leave their husbands if they wanted to, are the ones who stay??? The rise in single-parent households is concentrated among families with fewer resources. Ignoring the two-parent advantage doesn’t protect these kids. It hurts them.
Another quote to consider:
“Children who grow up without two parents in their home are at a substantial disadvantage relative to kids who do. That is not to say that children who are raised by a single mother can't go on to achieve great things. Of course they can, and many do! But there are also mounds of social science evidence that shows how the odds of graduating high school, getting a college degree, and having high earnings in adulthood are substantially lower for children who grow up in a single-mother home.”
None of this is an argument for staying in a toxic or unsafe relationship. It’s an argument for taking family structure seriously while we also make stability more attainable: talk positively about healthy marriage, expand access to counseling, support family tax credits, make childcare more affordable, and keep investing in women’s education.
Single-parent households are not bad, and shaming parents helps literally no one. But pretending the outcomes are identical on average doesn’t help kids either. Let’s look at the data honestly and build the supports that give more children the benefits of stable, loving two-parent homes.
For those that say, “This sets women back hundreds of years. Single-parent homes are increasing because wives can finally leave and support themselves.” I agree that does happen sometimes and woman should have that choice, but look at this statistic:
“In 2019, only 63% of children in the US lived with married parents, down from 77% in 1980. This decline has not been experienced equally across the population. There has been little change, for example, in the family structure of children whose mothers have a four-year college degree: In 2019, 84% of children whose mothers had four years of college lived with married parents, a decline of only 6 percentage points since 1980. Meanwhile, only 60% of children whose mothers had a high school degree or some college lived with married parents, a whopping 23 percentage point drop since 1980. A similarly large decline occurred among children of mothers who didn't finish high school; the share of children in this group living with married parents fell from 80% in 1980 to 57% in 2019. Figure 1.1 plots these trends.”
Why is it, then, that college educated women, the ones who could support themselves and have the resources to leave their husbands if they wanted to, are the ones who stay??? The rise in single-parent households is concentrated among families with fewer resources. Ignoring the two-parent advantage doesn’t protect these kids. It hurts them.
Another quote to consider:
“Children who grow up without two parents in their home are at a substantial disadvantage relative to kids who do. That is not to say that children who are raised by a single mother can't go on to achieve great things. Of course they can, and many do! But there are also mounds of social science evidence that shows how the odds of graduating high school, getting a college degree, and having high earnings in adulthood are substantially lower for children who grow up in a single-mother home.”
None of this is an argument for staying in a toxic or unsafe relationship. It’s an argument for taking family structure seriously while we also make stability more attainable: talk positively about healthy marriage, expand access to counseling, support family tax credits, make childcare more affordable, and keep investing in women’s education.
Single-parent households are not bad, and shaming parents helps literally no one. But pretending the outcomes are identical on average doesn’t help kids either. Let’s look at the data honestly and build the supports that give more children the benefits of stable, loving two-parent homes.
January 9, 2024
I’m glad I read you, I’ll think about you for a long time, but I’m not sure I’ll retain that much from you
September 14, 2023
Accurate description of the sad state of this country.
December 10, 2023
This is a seven-star book or more in a five-star world. I heard the author interviewed by Bari Weiss earlier this week, and I knew I had to read the book.
Essentially, and I'm being extremely broad-brush here, the book points out that marriage and two-parent families remain the best solution for troubled young Americans and for society.
What's great about this is she sticks to what she knows. In her interview, she referred to the culture wars as "intractable," and they do seem to be that. She avoided dealing with any religious or spiritual aspects of the issue. She brilliantly focused on what she knew, and that made the book excellent. Her years as an economist who studies household economics come to life in vibrant ways in this book.
I want to go over it again in braille this time to just ferret out her numbers and digest them better. But her research fascinated me, and it will you as well if you read this.
American marriages just aren't happening in the way they did in 1980 and farther back. The percentage of kids living in single-parent homes has risen sharply since 1980, and fewer Americans with high-school degrees or less are marrying. The numbers are down among college graduates, but not by nearly as much. There's a fascinating chapter here on the importance of dads and the extreme difficulties boys face who grow up with a dad who is largely absent or not there at all. She looks at why this is happening. It's worth your time to read that chapter if you only superficially skim other parts. I don't recommend treating this book that way if you can help it. There's too much here to keep you thinking and exploring to do superficial scans of this. My explanations of it have been totally inadequate and far clumsier than she deserves. But if the state of the American family troubles you for whatever reason, this is a good book to carefully wend your way through. And what the heck! You may as well search the podcast sphere for that interview. Weiss does her usual excellent job of asking searching and fair questions, and Kearney's responses are concise and easily understood. I snagged this from Bookshare about five minutes into that interview.
Essentially, and I'm being extremely broad-brush here, the book points out that marriage and two-parent families remain the best solution for troubled young Americans and for society.
What's great about this is she sticks to what she knows. In her interview, she referred to the culture wars as "intractable," and they do seem to be that. She avoided dealing with any religious or spiritual aspects of the issue. She brilliantly focused on what she knew, and that made the book excellent. Her years as an economist who studies household economics come to life in vibrant ways in this book.
I want to go over it again in braille this time to just ferret out her numbers and digest them better. But her research fascinated me, and it will you as well if you read this.
American marriages just aren't happening in the way they did in 1980 and farther back. The percentage of kids living in single-parent homes has risen sharply since 1980, and fewer Americans with high-school degrees or less are marrying. The numbers are down among college graduates, but not by nearly as much. There's a fascinating chapter here on the importance of dads and the extreme difficulties boys face who grow up with a dad who is largely absent or not there at all. She looks at why this is happening. It's worth your time to read that chapter if you only superficially skim other parts. I don't recommend treating this book that way if you can help it. There's too much here to keep you thinking and exploring to do superficial scans of this. My explanations of it have been totally inadequate and far clumsier than she deserves. But if the state of the American family troubles you for whatever reason, this is a good book to carefully wend your way through. And what the heck! You may as well search the podcast sphere for that interview. Weiss does her usual excellent job of asking searching and fair questions, and Kearney's responses are concise and easily understood. I snagged this from Bookshare about five minutes into that interview.
January 31, 2024
4.5 stars
Very important. The author is very clear about what is supported by data and what is not. She also bends completely backward to make clear throughout the book that her findings should not be taken as a reason to bludgeon people. In the first 1% of the book: "It is reasonable to argue, for example, that a household with two parents has a greater capacity to provide financial and nonfinancial resources to a child than a one-parent household does. To argue this is not to judge, blame, or diminish households with a single parent; it is simply to acknowledge that (1) kids require a lot of work and a lot of resources, and (2) having two parents in the household generally means having more resources to devote to the task of raising a family. What I am doing is arguing, through an appeal to data and rigorous studies, that two parents tend to be able to provide their children with more resource advantages than one parent alone. And furthermore, that a two-parent family is increasingly becoming yet another privilege associated with more highly resourced groups in society."
Some fascinating tidbits I learned:
The increase in single-parent households has been driven by non-college educated parents, meaning that the people that benefit the most from getting married are the ones not doing so as much.
The trend is also NOT a case where we're becoming more like the Europeans (where committed adults live together and raise their children without getting formally married).
It's NOT being caused by teen pregnancies, which are at an all-time low.
The data suggest that people not getting married has been driven by a decrease in the economic attractiveness of non-college educated men. There were some fascinating studies done on manufacturing towns before and after jobs were shipped to China or automated, and it was clear that one of the results of this subsequent lack of stable jobs was a decline in marriage in those areas.
Very important. The author is very clear about what is supported by data and what is not. She also bends completely backward to make clear throughout the book that her findings should not be taken as a reason to bludgeon people. In the first 1% of the book: "It is reasonable to argue, for example, that a household with two parents has a greater capacity to provide financial and nonfinancial resources to a child than a one-parent household does. To argue this is not to judge, blame, or diminish households with a single parent; it is simply to acknowledge that (1) kids require a lot of work and a lot of resources, and (2) having two parents in the household generally means having more resources to devote to the task of raising a family. What I am doing is arguing, through an appeal to data and rigorous studies, that two parents tend to be able to provide their children with more resource advantages than one parent alone. And furthermore, that a two-parent family is increasingly becoming yet another privilege associated with more highly resourced groups in society."
Some fascinating tidbits I learned:
The increase in single-parent households has been driven by non-college educated parents, meaning that the people that benefit the most from getting married are the ones not doing so as much.
The trend is also NOT a case where we're becoming more like the Europeans (where committed adults live together and raise their children without getting formally married).
It's NOT being caused by teen pregnancies, which are at an all-time low.
The data suggest that people not getting married has been driven by a decrease in the economic attractiveness of non-college educated men. There were some fascinating studies done on manufacturing towns before and after jobs were shipped to China or automated, and it was clear that one of the results of this subsequent lack of stable jobs was a decline in marriage in those areas.
March 26, 2024
This book can be more or less summed up in a few sentences. Namely, the data overwhelmingly show that children fare better in households with two parents. Apart from that, however, the author practically twists herself into pretzels with disclaimers that she doesn't disfavor the patchwork of family formations that have become normalized in recent decades. Instead, the chapters unfold like a tapdance with precision to come right up to the line without actually crossing it. The author does not wish to offend, even though her research clearly demonstrates that single-parent households have been devastating to American society.
While the author's conclusions seem a bit like common sense, they are not accepted in fashionable circles as she herself points out. Cocktail parties and academic seminars in places like Washington and New York -- the usual suspects -- frown upon such hard cold truths even if the party participants will acknowledge off the record that they recognize and agree with the research. Such benevolence.
On one hand, I applaud the author for laying out her findings that boys in particular, but also girls, fare far better with both parents in the home; on the other hand, the author clearly seeks to avoid the wrath of cultural elites who don't want to hear it. She claims the data don't show that mothers and fathers are necessary (not many studies about that, turns out), but then spends a whole chapter saying boys need fathers. In other words, there are inconsistencies throughout, although I think the harm is negligible in light of the overarching findings of the book.
While the author's conclusions seem a bit like common sense, they are not accepted in fashionable circles as she herself points out. Cocktail parties and academic seminars in places like Washington and New York -- the usual suspects -- frown upon such hard cold truths even if the party participants will acknowledge off the record that they recognize and agree with the research. Such benevolence.
On one hand, I applaud the author for laying out her findings that boys in particular, but also girls, fare far better with both parents in the home; on the other hand, the author clearly seeks to avoid the wrath of cultural elites who don't want to hear it. She claims the data don't show that mothers and fathers are necessary (not many studies about that, turns out), but then spends a whole chapter saying boys need fathers. In other words, there are inconsistencies throughout, although I think the harm is negligible in light of the overarching findings of the book.
September 27, 2023
Well researched and fairly well argued. The author deserves credit for presenting a thorough analysis of the economic data available. However, throughout the book, dry data is used almost as a cudgel - because the text is dispassionate and focused on hard numbers, there is little engagement with the broader questions of marriage in a modern, increasingly class-stratified society. This book is a good starting place for the conversation, but it would be a shame to let it replace more status-quo critical accounts like The Whiteness of Wealth by Dorothy Brown. I also felt like Melissa Kearney based this book on the “simple math” of two parents = more resources, but never explored other forms of “simple math” like compounding generational advantages and disadvantages in wealth accumulation, our elder care crisis and the 4-2-1 pyramid, or even the relationship between the number of children and total allocation of parental resources. The focus was so narrowly on marriage that it felt defensive when it didn’t need to be.
April 2, 2024
Good information but overly acadmic and repetative - I felt like this would have been better and more impactful as a lengthy magazine/journal article. These types of books pack a lot more punch when actual stories are weaved in among the dry statistics and studies - more like what is done with Evicted, Nickel and Dimed, Janesville, etc. The basic premise will stay with me, as will the one (incomplete) story of the author's discussion with her cab driver, the rest will quickly fade.
December 14, 2023
Reasonable descriptive work on how married people are privileged, summary of previous economics research, and misguided / superficial policy pronouncements about promoting marriage. Full review to come.
August 22, 2024
This one has been on my list since it came out.
Things I liked:
-Kearney is quite good at keeping a neutral tone. She addresses a lot of hard topics and really works hard at giving grace to the people and situations involved.
-The graphs were a good idea.
-There was some good new information in the chapter about boys.
-Some of her solutions were different than I had seen before.
Things that could have been different:
-My copy was digital, so it may be different in other editions, but the graphs would have been better with color.
-A few of her statements were logically unsound. I'm not sure if that was purposefully done to avoid offense or if that is indicative of my own personal bias. And some of her dissection of data could have been clearer.
-90% of the information is pretty available, and sometimes more accessible, in other locations. Perhaps it's because it's a pet topic of mine, but it doesn't really seem to add much that is new. The point of any publication, particularly nonfiction, should be add something new to the conversation.
I still rated it higher---mostly because she does demonstrate a level of compassion that is rare in books that address this topic.
Things I liked:
-Kearney is quite good at keeping a neutral tone. She addresses a lot of hard topics and really works hard at giving grace to the people and situations involved.
-The graphs were a good idea.
-There was some good new information in the chapter about boys.
-Some of her solutions were different than I had seen before.
Things that could have been different:
-My copy was digital, so it may be different in other editions, but the graphs would have been better with color.
-A few of her statements were logically unsound. I'm not sure if that was purposefully done to avoid offense or if that is indicative of my own personal bias. And some of her dissection of data could have been clearer.
-90% of the information is pretty available, and sometimes more accessible, in other locations. Perhaps it's because it's a pet topic of mine, but it doesn't really seem to add much that is new. The point of any publication, particularly nonfiction, should be add something new to the conversation.
I still rated it higher---mostly because she does demonstrate a level of compassion that is rare in books that address this topic.
October 26, 2023
In this incredibly brave and well-reasoned work the author, an economist, exposes the falsehood of the myth that children do well in any parental situation and calls for a return to the ideal of a two parent family, preferably in marriage. She shows that children, especially boys, are disadvantaged and damaged by living with one parent, usually a single mother, simply because (as one chapter is titled "2 > 1". Admitting that the wealthy can probably buy their way out of these shortfalls, she focuses on the role marriage plays for the poor and middle class, the very groups where marriage is most endangered. She also presents causes why many men are not in a position to bring much to a marriage, calls for remediation of problems like low wages for those with limited education and those who have been imprisoned. Finally, she insists that providing resources for impoverished children is somehting we can and must afford.
June 13, 2024
This book has a lot of information to digest & that's why I'm happy that I have a hard copy version of this book to reference at later dates given that I listened to this as an audiobook.
I like the angle this book took on how having two parents in the home is better than not for various different reasons but does an excellent job to give us real data & facts on why that is true. It's not a book to judge or ridicule someone's family dynamic but to explain with hard evidence why having both parents in a home with their children just makes more sense than other options.
I'm glad I listened to this book as it gave me an overall view of the point it was trying to make, but then I'm also able to use the hard copy to look at the charts & diagrams.
I like the angle this book took on how having two parents in the home is better than not for various different reasons but does an excellent job to give us real data & facts on why that is true. It's not a book to judge or ridicule someone's family dynamic but to explain with hard evidence why having both parents in a home with their children just makes more sense than other options.
I'm glad I listened to this book as it gave me an overall view of the point it was trying to make, but then I'm also able to use the hard copy to look at the charts & diagrams.
January 13, 2024
I liked this—a wonky, rigorous, and very carefully presented review of the economic impact of American marriage and parenting trends. The author’s desire to carefully navigate around controversy and avoid being accused of being a social conservative is palpable and constant. There’s a lot of hedging in here that can make the text pretty dry. But still feels like a good treatment of an important under-explored topic that is kind of hard to talk about in polite fancy circles, and I learned a lot.
November 23, 2025
Perfect example of economics as a social science. I didn’t believe/understand marriage as a concept but she broke it down very logically explained to me in my own language (rigorous economic analysis) how it makes sense. Note that this was not the goal of the book. I say that as proof for good this book is.
I also used speechify to read this and using Snoop Dog’s voice for some parts was a really funny experience. Highly recommend.
I also used speechify to read this and using Snoop Dog’s voice for some parts was a really funny experience. Highly recommend.
August 14, 2024
Thought I might be annoyed by this book but it quickly made it clear that it wouldn’t be a book full of toxic rhetoric. Some of the ways they described boys vs girls weren’t my fave (I recall a mention of how boys “mature more slowly” as opposed to acknowledging how they’re socialized). But otherwise a really informative book about the data.
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