The Bastardization of the American Family

Wow, I didn't know the numbers were this high for Millenials. The more I read about this generation, the less I like them (not that I like X-ers or Boomers). The difference between the ghetto and the suburbs is shrinking. I could have used "The Blackification of the American Family" as an alternative title. The kids don't deserve the title of bastards though; the parents do.

If current trends continue, we will soon see the day when the only people who get married are homosexuals.

How common is it for a married man to stay with his kids?

As a follow-up to my post on family structure, this table is more specific since it indicates what percent of families are biological, step, cohabiting, or single-mother. It varies a bit by whether you interview a teen or a parent because of ambiguity of definitions (2009. Demography 46:85-101). The specific question I want to answer is, what percent of two-parent families have kids with their biological father.

We calculate that by dividing the percent in biological families by the percent in all two-parent families. Eighty-two percent of two-parent families have Dad with his biological kids. (And this is an underestimate since a small percent of stepfamilies are biological father-children families.) You can see it is more of a problem among Hispanics and especially blacks. Some commenters seem to think the biological family is quite rare, and men shouldn't get married and have kids because they will generally lose them.

End of the nuclear family?

As I wrote earlier, I'm addressing the claim that the nuclear family is outdated and something men should avoid one statistic at a time. The graph above, from Childstats.gov, shows that almost 70 percent of kids are currently in a household with two married parents. While it's true that a minority of those families are stepfamilies, a stepfamily is a nuclear family, and as a reader wrote earlier, they've always been around. That's about 3 times the number of kids in mother-only families.

My initial impression is that there is a lot of Internet exaggeration about these negative family trends. It sounds like a rationalization to me. It's convenient to say that I can't be admirable like my grandfather because that world is gone. It hasn't gone anywhere, and it is what you make it.

Hunger in America? Americans are so fat and rich, I assume that no one ever lacks food here. That's not exactly right. According to the General Social Survey, here are the percentages of those who have been unable to purchase food they needed sometime in the past year by sex and ethnicity:


Percent unable to buy food they needed (first men, then women in parentheses)

Blacks 6.9 (9.3)
Mexicans 7.1 (8.5)
American Indians 0.0 (12.3)
Germans 5.6 (5.5)
Scotts 2.4 (8.8)

USA 3.4 (5.6)

English/Welsh 2.4 (3.4)
Italians 0.0 (5.2)
Irish 2.9 (1.4)

For most groups, this hardship hits women more than men. Many of these women are single with dependent children. Few two-parent households are this poor. These are the fruits of feminists telling us that men are not essential to the household: women's natural abilities and Papa Government can do the job.

Race, Class, Crime IV: A reader asked about the relationship between race/family structure interaction and being arrested. Maybe the simplest way to look at how the impact of family structure varies by race is to list the percent ever arrested by the relevant combinations:


Percent ever arrested

Mother-only black males 32.4
Mother-only white males 23.4
Two-parent black males 24.9
Two-parent white males 17.0

Mother-only black females 11.1
Mother-only white females 5.7
Two-parent black females 4.4
Two-parent white females 3.7

Notice how white men from single parent families fare better than black men from two-parent homes. Research shows the same pattern for poverty: a famous study by Marvin Wolfgang showed that middle-income blacks were more criminal than low-income whites.

Not surprisingly, growing up in a two-parent home does help everyone, and according to these data, it helps black girls the most. Maybe dad is able to keep her away from bad boys (girls often become delinquent through the influence of boys).

Race, Class, and Crime III: One possibility not considered in the previous two posts is that the correlation between race and crime is eliminated when family structure is controlled. I recoded the variable on family arrangements at age 16 to 1 for living with both parents and zero for everything else. Here are the multivariate results:


Logistic regression coefficients (t-statistic in parentheses)

Black .43 (3.29)
Mother's educ .00 (.15)
IQ -.02 (-.84)
Male 1.62 (15.25)
Age -.03 (-8.64)
Living with mom and dad at 16, -.48 (-4.28)

Number of valid cases 4,782

Family structure is related to being arrested, but it reduces the race-crime link only a little bit, according to GSS data.