Our society has actively promoted two-parent families for decades, but today we’re in a particularly intense moment. We have books getting published like Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization and The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Social conservatives are talking about establishing a “Manhattan Project” for boosting birth rates and nuclear families, and some on the right are even musing about ending no-fault divorce.
Sociologist Christina Cross’s new book, Inherited Inequality: Why Opportunity Gaps Persist Between Black and White Youth Raised in Two-Parent Families, seeks to challenge these stories and solutions. Cross studies the outcomes of kids who grow up in two-parent Black families — a group of people she argues tends to “escape our collective imagination” — despite all the intense focus on single-parent households.
Cross’s work bucks an idea that has fundamentally shaped government policy since the Moynihan Report in 1965 through welfare reform and contemporary marriage promotion initiatives: that if Black families just got married and stayed together, racial inequality would largely disappear. Her research reveals that Black kids raised by two parents still struggle far more than white kids from two-parent families, and do only about as well as white kids who only had one parent at home.
The numbers are stark. Black children in two-parent homes were two to four times more likely to get suspended or kicked out of school than white children with both parents. When it came time for college, there was a 25-point gap between how many Black versus white kids from two-parent families actually enrolled. By their mid-twenties, Black young adults from these families were three times more likely to be unemployed than their white counterparts.
Despite representing half of all Black children in America, these two-parent Black families have been virtually ignored by researchers — just 2 out of 163 family structure studies published in leading journals between 2012 and 2022 examined their outcomes. Cross and senior correspondent Rachel Cohen Booth discussed the hidden costs of America’s marriage promotion spending, the research gaps that have allowed myths about Black families to persist, and why even two-parent Black households can’t escape structural racism. This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.
Your research strongly suggests that promoting these traditional two-parent families is not going to reduce racial inequality, but you do find some advantages for Black children raised in these kinds of households. Given that, do you think encouraging marriage is still a worthy policy goal or cultural aim, even if it doesn’t solve all the problems marriage advocates claim it could?
Christina Cross: One of the things I focus on in my book is that there’s been such a singular emphasis on promoting marriage and the two-parent family for addressing racial inequality, and that this laser focus on this one intervention really limits our ability to close gaps between groups.
My research shows that even amongst Black and white children in two-parent families, inequality is very high. So the question we need to be asking ourselves is: Is this the best use of our time, attention, and resources? And are there other strategies and interventions that we could be focusing on that might be more effective? And my research suggests that yes, that is the case.
A lot of people probably will wonder why we should object to something that yes, isn’t a silver bullet, but still seems to offer some help and protection. But I think you do find costs and consequences to this approach. Could you just walk me through the costs you see of prioritizing a focus on two-parent families?
So one cost, as I was mentioning, is that when we focus simply on promoting two-parent families, it limits our ability to explore other strategies that could be more effective. There are also real economic costs as well. Many people are surprised to find that currently our federal government spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year promoting marriage and the two-parent families.
TANF, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, is our largest cash assistance program in the US, and this program has outlined four goals, three of which focus on promoting marriage and the two-parent family. The government spends between $250 and $400 million each year on these efforts.
We’re in a moment where federal funding for key safety net programs is being cut drastically. With the limited resources that are available, might we be more effective at improving children’s outcomes and reducing gaps between groups by offering direct cash assistance or assistance for child care subsidies or for education or so many other really important things that families need?
In your book you identified a theory called the Family Resource Perspective as the principal framework used by social scientists and family demographers to explain how family structure influences well-being, which seems to basically boil down to more parents raising a kid means more money and more hands on deck. That sounds intuitive, certainly, but can you talk a little bit about how your research complicates that framework?
The Family Resource Perspective really emphasizes how having two parents in the home leads to more resources, more income, more wealth, more time to spend with children. But one of the things that often gets overlooked and that I highlight in my research is that these key resources are not evenly distributed, not everyone in two parent families has access to them. And unfortunately, that is especially the case when we look at Black two-parent families.
So I found that when it comes to income, Black two-parent families had about 60 percent of the income of white two-parent families and only 25 percent of the wealth. And so when we’re thinking about how important these resources are for improving child outcomes, we need to remember that if we don’t have equal inputs, we cannot expect equal outcomes,
I know this wasn’t directly in your book, but I was curious. What do we know about kids who grow up in more affluent, divorced families?
Actually, that’s a next step for me and my own research that I want to explore. Because we tend to focus on average differences. So on average, two-parent families have more resources than single-parent families. But what would it look like for a child to be raised in a single-parent family that was high-income? Or that even included other adults in the household who may not be a biological parent but who could help with child rearing? We can imagine that if resources are really driving family structures’ impact on children, then more resources, and more adults in the household, could lead to better outcomes for children, even if they don’t grow up in a two-parent family.
In that same vein, what if anything did you find regarding bad marriages? Do we know if they bring any kind of different level of harm or benefit to children compared to divorce or single parenthood?
I didn’t focus specifically on marriage quality, but we know that not all marriages are created equally. It really is important to keep that in mind because we know that a child who is in a household where there is a significant amount of stress and conflict is going to be negatively impacted by that. That’s not from my own research, but there are a number of studies that do show that.
You found that Black two-parent families have increased by 15 percent over the last decade, whereas Black single-mother families have declined by roughly the same amount. What do you think is driving that?
You know, it’s funny because as I was doing background research for my book, I was surprised to find this because the story has been for so long that Black two-parent families are so small and we talk about them as if they don’t even exist. So I was surprised to find that they’re increasing and actually for every Black child who lives in a single-mother family, there’s a Black child who’s growing up in a two-parent family, but so much of our focus has been on single-parent families. And so in uncovering this finding, I’m also curious to know what’s driving it. For my book, I was not pursuing that direction, but that’s actually one of the next things on my research agenda as well.
You have this pretty striking statistic that between 2012 and 2022, there were 163 articles published on family structure effects in the five leading family studies journals, but just two of them looked at the outcomes of Black youth in two-parent families. Why do you think that is? Were you surprised to find that?
Yes, I was very surprised. I mean, I had a sense that there was less research on Black two-parent families just based on where much of our conversation currently sits focused on Black single-parent families. But to find that there were so few studies, I mean, two out of more than 160, it’s just very striking. We’ve really only begun to scratch the surface of understanding what it means to live with two parents in the home for Black children, and there’s very little empirical evidence to support some very strong claims about the power of the two-parent family for addressing racial inequality, which is why I decided to write this book.
I wanted to be able to provide some foundational facts for us to have a more accurate conversation about the role of the two-parent family and improving child outcomes and addressing one of our most intractable issues, which is racial inequality. And unfortunately, I’m finding that this family structure cannot do what we imagine that it should be doing. And that’s really, really important.
Given your critiques of America’s current approach, what policies or cultural shifts would you recommend to better help Black families and children?
So I think about these things as being two-pronged. As you mentioned, part of this is about culture and then the other part is about structure. So when thinking about culture, I think it’s important to remember the power of narrative, the power of story, because it shapes the way we think about problems and how to address them. And for so long, we’ve had a cultural narrative that says that the main reason that Black people have a harder time getting ahead is because they don’t live in the “right” type of family, that they’re less likely to raise their children within the context of a two-parent family. And as we can see in terms of our federal programming like TANF, that has led us to focus on trying to promote this family structure.
My work shows that even when Black people raise their children in two-parent families, inequality is still very high. So part of what I hope to do in my book is to change the narrative, to present evidence that we really have not had access to because there has been so few studies on Black two-parent families. So that’s the cultural component.
But also in thinking about structure, I think it’s important for us to know that one of the main reasons why there are such huge opportunity gaps between Black and white children is that there are huge gaps in resources. Right now, we’re in a moment in which many social safety net programs are being cut — like SNAP, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. These changes in our structure are likely to widen many of the gaps that I witnessed in my book.
We’ve seen recently some strategies that have been effective that we could potentially implement. One of them in particular is the expanded Child Tax Credit, which lifted millions of kids out of poverty in the pandemic. Another policy is marriage penalties. For some couples, it costs them more in taxes when they file as a married household than if they were to file as single individuals.
I know a lot of conservatives want to get rid of those penalties.
That’s true. And so that could be one strategy, but also leveraging existing assets of families. There’s been such a focus on the nuclear family in terms of how we craft social policy. And sometimes that actually limits our ability to support families that might arrange themselves differently. Black Americans are more likely to live in extended families, and there are some policies that would limit Black families’ ability to provide support to one another in this arrangement. Family leave policy, as an example: with family leave policy, folks are allowed to take leave to take care of a nuclear family member, like a spouse or child, but some people are responsible for taking care of their parents or grandparents. They might be in a situation where they’re living with siblings or cousins or other individuals who are not necessarily considered within the family leave policy. And that means that when it comes to taking care of them, they have to choose between missing out on pay.
Last year, you came in the crosshairs of Christopher Rufo, who labeled you a “Black Critical Race Theory/DEI scholar” and leveled charges of plagiarism. I know the scholars from whom you were accused of plagiarizing have all rejected the allegations. Harvard’s sociology department rejected it, the head of Plagiarism Today rejected it, and the American Sociological Association also rejected it. What did you make of this kind of attack on your work, and were you surprised?
Well, in moments like this, I think even being singled out really speaks to the work that I’ve been doing and the fact that it has had reach outside of academia. We know that Chris Rufo is not an academic. And so, as difficult as that moment was, what that really signals to me is that I have been able to contribute to national conversations and hopefully to be able to help generate more productive conversations. And I plan on continuing to do that.
And as you mentioned, there was so much widespread support for the work that I was doing inside and outside of academia, which I found to just be very encouraging and heartening. And so I’m gonna continue to do the work, and I’m very excited to see what will come of this book that I have written for a much broader audience.