It’s been nearly fifty years since the publication of “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” remembered by history simply as “the Moynihan Report” after its author, future United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who in 1965 was an assistant labor secretary. The report detailed the decay of the black two-parent family and the concomitant social and economic problems. In this article in Education Next, the first in an entire issue dedicated to the Moynihan Report, Princeton professor Sara McLanahan and Christopher Jencks of Harvard’s Kennedy School ask, “Was Moynihan right? What happens to the children of unmarried mothers?” Note the race-neutral formulation. The authors aren’t attempting to avoid an inflammatory question. Rather, they’re addressing a problem now far more widespread than it was when Moynihan wrote. The rate of unmarried births among whites today is considerably higher than the 1965 rate among blacks, which troubled Moynihan enough to issue his bombshell report. Indeed, an estimated half of all children in the United States live with a single mother at some point before they turn eighteen. This portends many different outcomes, none of them good. The authors cite a recent review of forty-five studies using quasi-experimental methods, which find that growing up apart from one’s father reduces a child’s chances of graduating from high school by about 40 percent. Interestingly, the absence of a biological father has not been shown to affect verbal and math test scores. The disconnect seems to be attributable to another ill effect of a fatherless childhood: an increase in antisocial behavior such as aggression, rule breaking, delinquency, and illegal drug use. “Thus it appear that a father’s absence lowers children’s educational attainment not by altering their scores on cognitive tests but by disrupting their social and emotional adjustment and reducing their ability or willingness to exercise self-control,” McLanahan and Jencks note. These effects are larger for boys, which means the increase in single-parent families may also be contributing to widening gender gaps in college attendance and completion. Would these kids be better off if their biological parents were married? Not necessarily. Children with unmarried mothers are more likely to have a biological father who is in prison, beats his partner, or cannot find or hold a job. So what can be done? There’s no really satisfactory answer, though the authors assert that a good starting point is to give girls and women a good reason to postpone motherhood. “But, we also need to improve the economic prospects of their prospective husbands,” they add, “especially those with no more than a high school diploma.” Pretty much what Moynihan said fifty years ago.
SOURCE: Sara McLanahan and Christopher Jencks, “Was Moynihan Right?,” Education Next, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring 2015).
