The Paper of Record and the Two-Parent Home

For at least three decades now, the question of whether one-parent homes are generally worse for children than two-parent homes has been treated by leading journalists essentially as an open question, subject to debate. Typically, therefore, journalists refrain from reporting a clear answer, choosing instead to dance around the question, often by quoting several “experts” who disagree with one another. You’ve seen these stories many times. The entire question is presented as controversial and politically charged. As an empirical matter, one expert (often described as “conservative”) is quoted as having concluded that family fragmentation is bad for children and society, while other experts are quoted as having reached different conclusions. In addition, we are typically told that the issue is complicated, more research is needed, blah, blah, blah.

But in a page-one story on August 12, the New York Times broke decisively with this tradition, reporting that “a powerful consensus has emerged in recent years among social scientists, as well as state and federal policy makers. It sees single-parent families as the dismal foundries that produced decades of child poverty, delinquency and crime. And it views the rise of such families, which began in the early 1960s and continued until about five years ago, as a singularly important indicator of child pathology.” Moreover: “From a child’s point of view, according to a growing body of social research, the most supportive household is one with two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage.”

At a minimum, a journalistic corner has been turned. What had been treated for decades as an empirically unsettled question (despite the fact that the evidence has consistently and almost entirely pointed in one direction) has finally become, in the U.S. paper of record, at least for now, an empirically settled question. A moment worth noting.

Sources: Blaine Harden, “2-Parent Families Rise After Change In Welfare Laws,” New York Times, August 12, 2001.

First published Fall 2001.