Stetson

“If the mothers who are not married are not married precisely because the men with
whom they have fathered children would not meaningfully contribute positive
resources to the raising of their children, then the observed marriage gap in children’s outcomes is not a good approximation for what their children would gain
from parental marriage.”
― Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

“But at some point – a point I think we are well past, given the body of research – the
weight of the evidence is so strong that the most reasonable conclusion is that even
if there were some unobservable differences between single and married parents,
the thing staring at us from the data is overwhelming: having a second parent in the
home, with the added resources (money, time, etc.) that second parent brings, is, on
average, beneficial for children’s outcomes.”
― Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

“The uniquely human things you do are thanks to the chatter of spikes in your cortex. This outer layer of the brain contains more neurons in you than in any other animal, ever. So many in fact that we have to divide the cortex into a constellation of areas, each with its own name, to make sense of it all. (Few of these names are exciting—the area with the most neurons that talk directly to the spine, and so has the most control over movement, is called the primary motor cortex; the areas next door are the premotor cortex and, wait for it, the supplementary motor area. Inspired.) These areas all share the same types of neurons but do wildly different things with the spikes sent between them.”
― Mark Humphries, The Spike: An Epic Journey Through the Brain in 2.1 Seconds

“Family structure and parental relationship status are not randomly assigned – that
is, they aren’t designed for easy study. Even if researchers take steps to statistically
account for all the things that can be observed in the data that might be confounding
factors, there is still the possibility that there is something unobserved about single
parents, something that researchers can’t see in the data, that would make them
less well-equipped to be parents even if they were married, such that their children’s
outcomes would still be inferior to those of the children of married parents.”
― Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind