Why we're still losing the war on families, 31 years later

The last big battle over the nuclear family was 31 years ago and pitted then-Vice President Dan Quayle vs. Murphy Brown — a fictional TV character.

Murphy Brown won.

Despite all evidence showing two-parent families consistently produce far better outcomes for children than single-parent homes, liberalism and Hollywood feminism won the culture.

The two-parent household continued its steep decline to this day.

Quayle was right about the nuclear family

Quayle, who spent much of his boyhood growing up in a two-parent household that toggled between Indiana and Arizona, fired the first broadside back in 1992.

He called out Candice Bergen’s TV newswoman character Murphy Brown for mocking fathers and implying they are dispensable. She did this by having a fictional child out of wedlock with no plan to add a dad to the mix, argued Quayle.

“Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong,” Quayle told the Commonwealth Club of California in a campaign speech that launched a culture war.

“Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this. It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”

Bergen and Hollywood fired back with Murphy Brown responding as her fictional self in defense of families that come in all shapes and sizes.

Despite hard data and an Atlantic cover story that declared “Dan Quayle was right,” the nuclear family continued its downslide.

Obama pleaded for more active fathers

The data, however, didn’t lie then. And it doesn’t lie now. When two-parent households disintegrate, children suffer.

So compelling is the data that some American liberals tried to raise the issue anew.

Here is Barack Obama during his first run for president in 2008:

“Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important. And we are called to recognize and honor how critical every father is to that foundation. They are teachers and coaches. They are mentors and role models. They are examples of success and the men who constantly push us toward it.

“But if we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing — missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”

The culture was unmoved. As it was with Quayle.

Ramaswamy revives the two-parent debate

Now comes Vivek Ramaswamy, a new kind of Republican candidate, a man with more recent immigrant roots than Dan Quayle arguing that the nuclear family must be restored if we are going to save the country.

“The word 'privilege' gets used a lot. Well, you know what? I did have the ultimate privilege of two parents in the house with a focus on educational achievement, and I want every kid to enjoy that.

“... The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to man.”

That triggered an immediate backlash from USA TODAY, which published a story headlined, “‘Society is changing’: Ramaswamy praises the ‘nuclear family,’ but single parents say his comments hurt.”

In the story, Jocelyn Viterna, chair of studies of women, gender and sexuality at Harvard University, says, “The notion that father-led families are supposed to govern us is quite frankly a dangerous, dog whistle attack on women’s fundamental rights to self-determination.”

That's not meant to belittle single moms

Perhaps. But we’ve come a long way from the Dan Quayle vs. Murphy Brown debate. Ramaswamy recognizes, as do most Americans, that there are a million exceptions to the two-parent home that work.

“I don’t think we have to say in strong form that this is the only path,” said Ramaswamy, “but at a societal level it’s the best path known to mankind.”

We all know single women who are raising children alone and producing good and even spectacular results.

But, still, the statistics don’t lie. They have consistently shown for decades that in the aggregate, children do better when raised in two-parent households.

Were kids ripped from their parents? We need to know, pronto

Surely, we have matured enough as a society that we can discuss the optimum way for raising children while understanding that the optimum isn’t always an option.

Surely, we all know that divorce sometimes rescues children from trauma and dysfunction and can lead to better outcomes than a two-parent home turned toxic.

That doesn’t mean we should reject the two-parent ideal.

An important voice on the left arises

Arriving from the political left to make that case is the highly regarded Melissa Kearney, an economist trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and now a chaired professor at the University of Maryland and affiliate scholar at the left-of-center Brookings Institution.

With the launch of her new book “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind,” Kearney has written op-eds in both The New York Times on Sunday (“The Explosive Rise of Single-Parent Families Is Not a Good Thing”) and The Atlantic on Monday (“A Driver of Inequality That Not Enough People Are Talking About”).

In those op-eds she argues:

“The erosion of the convention of raising children inside a two-parent home ... is often not publicly challenged or lamented, in an effort to be inclusive of a diversity of family arrangements. But this well-meaning acceptance obscures the critical reality that this change is hurting our children and our society.”

Horne touts parental choice: Unless parents choose what he dislikes

She points out that America has been particularly aggressive in its dispatchment of the two-parent home. “Roughly a quarter of children live in a one-parent home, more than in any other country for which data is available.”

The persisting trend is creating a “class divide” as college-educated adults are settling into two-parent households while parents with less than a four-year-college degree have rejected two-parent homes in large numbers, she writes.

This broad trend is harming children

A mere 60% of children who live with mothers with high school diplomas or some college education lived with married parents in 2020. That’s a 23% drop since 1980, Kearney writes.

“This is not a positive development. The evidence is overwhelming: Children from single-parent homes have more behavioral problems, are more likely to get in trouble in school or with the law, achieve lower levels of education and tend to earn lower incomes in adulthood. Boys from homes without dads present are particularly prone to getting in trouble in school or with the law.”

Some will argue the statistics demonstrate we should provide more financial support for single parents so they can enjoy incomes similar to two-parent households, and thus raise the living standards of their children.

But Kearney argues that’s politically impractical.

“What are the odds that the government will start providing one-parent families with, say, benefits equal to the median earnings of an adult with [just] a high school degree, which comes to around $44,000 a year? I would put the odds at zero.”

The point is that we need to find ways to promote two-parent homes while not stigmatizing single mothers and their children, she writes.

“Doing so will improve the well-being of millions of children, help close class gaps and create a stronger society for us all.”

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Why America is still losing the war on the nuclear family