The Pew Research Center has released a new report on the growing proportion of households with children under the age of 18 in which mothers are the sole or primary source of income. From 1960 to 2011, this share has increased from 10.8 percent to 40.4. And the relative representation of single mother families and families in which a married mother is the primary provider has also shifted over time. Single mother families have gone from 7.3 percent of the total to 25.3 percent while married mother/primary provider have gone from 3.5 percent to 15 percent. The report’s authors, Wendy Wang, Kim Parker and Paul Taylor, observe that the economic circumstances of single mother families and married mother/primary provider families are quite different:

The income gap between the two groups is quite large. The median total family income of married mothers who earn more than their husbands was nearly $80,000 in 2011, well above the national median of $57,100 for all families with children, and nearly four times the $23,000 median for families led by a single mother.

The groups differ in other ways as well. Compared with all mothers with children under age 18, married mothers who out-earn their husbands are slightly older, disproportionally white and college educated. Single mothers, by contrast, are younger, more likely to be black or Hispanic, and less likely to have a college degree.

One of the report’s more striking findings is that there is a sharp partisan divide over whether changing family structure is a legitimate source of concern:

The public’s opinions about unmarried mothers also differ by party affiliation and race. Republicans (78%) are more likely than Democrats (51%) or independent voters (65%) to say that the growing number of children born to unwed mothers is a big problem. Whites are more likely than non-whites to view it as a big problem (67% vs. 56%). The views of men and women on this issue are the same.

Given the differences in the life chances of children raised in stable marriages and those raised by single parent or disrupted families, the fact that so many Americans believe that the growing number of children born to unwed mothers is not a big problem is noteworthy. It could be that many Americans believe that there is no material difference between being raised by cohabiting parents as opposed to married parents. But there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that cohabiting families are far less stable than married families, whether in the U.S. or Europe. Though it would be churlish to characterize those who believe that the growing number of children born to unwed mothers as “marriage denialists,” I was reminded of divided public opinion on climate change, as documented by a Pew survey from October of last year:

Fully 85% of Democrats say there is solid evidence that the average temperature has been getting warmer, up from 77% last year and similar to levels in 2007 and 2008.

Nearly half of Republicans (48%) say there is solid evidence of warming, compared with 43% last year and 35% in 2009. The percentage of Republicans saying there is solid evidence of warming is still lower than it was in 2006 and 2007, but is now about where it was in 2008. A majority of independents (65%) say there is solid evidence of warming; that is up from 53% in 2009 and lower than from 2006 to 2008.

To return to the “breadwinner moms,” Wang et al. identify one of the main drivers of the rising number and share of married mother/primary providers: 

Married mothers are increasingly better educated than their husbands. Even though a majority of spouses have a similar educational background, the share of couples in which the mother has attained a higher education than her spouse has gone up from 7% in 1960 to 23% in 2011. In two-parent families today, 61% have a mother whose education level is similar to her husband’s, 23% have a mother who is better educated than her husband, and 16% have a father who is better educated than his wife.

That is, the divergence between women and men in skills acquisition and employment rates described by Melanie Wasserman and David Autor in “Wayward Sons” has already had an appreciable impact on dynamics within married families. Wasserman and Autor also describe the various ways in which the gender gap varies across groups, e.g., African American women have surpassed African American men across a number of economic and educational indicators more dramatically than non-Hispanic white women have surpassed non-Hispanic white men. Group differences of this kind are reflected in Pew’s findings on never married mothers:

Compared with single mothers who are divorced, widowed or separated, never married mothers are significantly younger, disproportionally non-white, and have lower education and income. Close to half of never married mothers in 2011 (46%) are ages 30 and younger, six-in-ten are either black (40%) or Hispanic (24%), and nearly half (49%) have a high school education or less. Their median family income was $17, 400 in 2011, the lowest among all families with children.

As family structure has changed, the share of women with children under the age of 6 participating in the labor force has increased dramatically — from 35 percent in 1975 to 65 percent in 2012. This development has tended to strengthen the political case for the expansion of subsidized access to early childhood education. Those of us who would prefer that early childhood education remain in the hands of civil society organizations or state and local governments are thus obligated to think through what an alternative approach might look like. Essentially, we can either decide that we want the public sector to take on the breadwinner role to allow low-income single mothers to raise their children full-time or we can decide to expand wage subsidies or work supports (or both) to allow low-income single mothers to combine child-rearing with full-time employment. Both options are potentially very expensive, though there is a reasonable case that the latter strategy is likely to be far more expensive than the former, as the latter strategy requires labor-intensive enforcement mechanisms that would be largely unnecessary under the former strategy. The welfare reform movement was motivated not so much by a desire to achieve cost savings, but rather out of a moralistic desire for conditional reciprocity. Working parents objected to the idea that poor women should be paid to work in the home rather than in the market. Moreover, many observers were concerned that “worklessness” in high-poverty communities had negative effects on the economic and educational prospects of children, and so there was a strong political impetus to shift from welfare to work supports, even despite the fact that this new approach created new costs, at least in the short- to medium-term. There is a third option, i.e., require labor force participation without also expanding wage subsidies or work supports. But this option is untenable in a slack labor market, unless we decide to use public sector job creation as a back-stop, and of course this is also an expensive strategy. 

The reason this third option is untenable is that we are discovering that we are dealing with a series of moving targets. It’s not just that the prospects of children raised in single parent or disrupted households aren’t getting better as quickly as we’d like. The position of these children is deteriorating in relative terms as college-educated parents in stable marriages do a better job of providing their children with the cognitive and noncognitive skills to flourish in knowledge-intensive service work. If we could somehow engineer a revival of marriage, there is at least some reason we could arrest this deterioration, given enough time. The problem, however, is that the relative advantage of marriage over cohabitation, as we’ve discussed, flows from what the sociologist Andrew Cherlin has called enforceable trust, i.e., in contemporary U.S. culture, a marital union is harder to dissolve than cohabitation. But as the stigma surrounding divorce continues to recede, this relative advantage of marriage is eroding, which suggests that it is more likely than marriage will decline over time among the affluent and college-educated in the U.S. (as it has in western Europe) than that it will grow stronger among the less affluent and the non-college-educated. This outcome is not inevitable, and I believe that we ought to do whatever we can to prevent it from coming to pass. It is, however, the most likely scenario, and it raises the question of how we should approach the challenge of cultivating skills in children raised in the bottom half of the income distribution if we assume that families continue to grow weaker. Civil society organizations can and should step into the breach. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves about the capacity of civil society organizations to act independently. In “Facing Up to Big Government,” published in National Affairs last spring, John DiIulio of the University of Pennsylvania vividly documents how dependent the voluntary sector is on the public sector.

The landscape described by Pew is of central importance to America’s economic and political future. The major party coalition that speaks most compellingly to the need to combine market and household production, to the challenges of the “sandwich generation,” and to economic aspiration more broadly will tend to have an advantage over the other. Republicans are at a disadvantage because disrupted families are underrepresented in the GOP coalition, which tends to be older and whiter than the Democratic coalition, and so these developments have in a sense snuck up on elected conservatives. Family life has changed so quickly that the generation gap is more like a generation chasm. Eventually Republicans are going to have to talk about and think about the interaction between changing family structure and a changing economy more rigorously, and when they do they won’t be weighed down by certain convictions that constrain their Democratic rivals (e.g., the widespread belief among Democratic voters that the growing number of children raised outside of marriage isn’t a big problem). At the same time, they’re going to have to deal with the fact that civil society organizations and families won’t be able to drive positive change entirely on their own.