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Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
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I mean back to your original point though, does economic status play a bigger role than marriage? It's obviously common sense that a child born into a two-parent household is going to generally be brought into a better economic situation, but I wonder what the results would look like if you compared children being raised in a single-parent home where the parent makes more than $150k vs. those raised in a two-parent household where combined income is $75k or less.
The economic status of your parents also probably plays a large role on whether your born into a single-parent home in the first place. I think that's what I and many others take issue with when it comes to broad statements like "marriage is better for social and economic outcomes." Okay but what is the cause behind why certain groups are more likely to be born to single-parents than others.
You can see below that, once again, African-Americans are significantly more likely to be born and raised in single-parent households than whites are. You can sit there and say "well we need to reduce the number of single-parent households for every race," but the statistics show that it seems to be problem that is more specific to African-Americans, so does it not make sense to determine why this is the case and address the root of the problem? Like I alluded to in another post, unless you believe that being an absentee father is somehow correlated with the amount of melanin in one's skin, then I'm not sure what else you can point to other than specific systemic and environmental challenges that are faced by African-Americans that aren't faced by white people.
EDIT: That said, it is interesting to note that the rate of single-parents among African-Americans seems to have leveled off while the numbers for other races have been steadily climbing.
