As millions of families gather to wave goodbye to summer this Labor Day weekend, let’s take a moment to celebrate their contribution to next-generation social mobility.
The prevalence of two-parent families in communities predicts their average level of student achievement and social mobility rates for those from disadvantaged backgrounds—even after adjusting for income, education, ethnic composition, racial segregation, and other community factors. Children learn more if they have two parents, and they benefit as well from living in places where two-parent families are the norm.
University of South Carolina economist Angela Dills, Dany Shakeel of the University of Buckingham, and I discovered the importance of families after digging into county-level data on social mobility for children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, which has been made available by Opportunity Insights at Harvard University.
Like many previous studies, including a recent book by Melissa Kearney, we find that having two adults in the home creates more opportunity for success than otherwise, even when money and other factors are taken into account. As important as dollars is time, the scarcest resource of all. Adult time is needed for a child to learn words and numbers, to receive emotional support, to learn about learning resources, and to get a ride—or walk—to school. An opportunity for children to have twice as much time with a parent counts for a lot.
Not all two-parent families make the best use of their time with children. Conversely, many single parents find ways to make extraordinarily good use of the limited time they have. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and neighbors sometimes have their back. We have all witnessed single parents who somehow succeed in raising capable children on their own. These heroic accomplishments are to be celebrated this Labor Day as much as, perhaps even more than, those of parents with partners to help them through the pleasures and challenges of diaper changing, toddler minding, book reading, word learning, birthday-party throwing, adolescent comforting, and more.
Yet the stark reality stabbing through the data we examined is that children from low-income backgrounds who grow up in communities with a greater density of two-parent families tend to earn more as adults. That’s partly due to the fact that children in these communities are learning more at school, as measured by their performance on state tests. The higher achievement at these schools translates into higher rates of social mobility for children from disadvantaged families.
Schools win the silver medal in the social mobility competition, but it is not just learning at school that counts. The prevalence of two-parent families in a community has a large, direct effect on children’s future incomes as adults irrespective of their achievement levels in school. We do not have all the information needed to identify the mechanisms at work. In all likelihood, learning skills needed for future success reflects what happens in the family and the family’s access to many community resources, not simply the learning taking place within school buildings.
A greater density of community organizations, both religious and secular, also facilitates social mobility: scouts, church groups, YMCAs, sports clubs, and similar organizations. Social mobility rates are higher in those areas where these kinds of groups are more densely concentrated. Still, the prevalence of community organizations wins the bronze, as it trails both the importance of good schools and a dual-parent presence in the county.
Adolescent friendships can help to boost social mobility as well. Low-income students who have a higher proportion of friends from more advantaged backgrounds in high school will be more likely to climb the social ladder, a point also made by Raj Chetty and his team at Opportunity Insights. This is more common if students have higher achievement levels. More exactly, places with higher levels of student achievement are the same places that have more friendships across the social divide. We are unable to figure out which factor causes the other. That’s a bit like determining whether the frog or the tadpole comes first.
We also looked into whether trust in political institutions affects children’s opportunities to move up the income ladder. To our surprise, this factor, although given so much attention in contemporary discussions, seems irrelevant to upward mobility once other factors are taken into consideration. The mobility of the next generation depends more on the preservation of dual-parent families, good schools, and beneficial community organizations than on reductions in political and social discord.
The gold medal goes to dual-parent families, which by wide margin contribute more to an equal-opportunity society than any other factor. If pre-school programs, nutritious food in schools, earned income tax credits, and tax credits for families with children all help to preserve two-parent families, it means they contribute to social mobility for the disadvantaged. The successful single mother deserves our praise, but public policy should work to preserve as many two-parent families as possible.
Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. He welcomes your reactions to this post by email at paul.peterson@educationnext.org; responses will be curated and shared periodically. His Education Exchange podcast is available with a new episode each Monday.
