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There’s No Way to Repair Marriage Without Repairing Men
Our nation’s masculinity crisis is the cause and result of the great marriage divide.
Dec 30, 2022, The Atlantic
Every now and then you see a statistic that illustrates a societal challenge in stark terms. Yesterday, Brad Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, tweeted data from the Current Population Survey showing that 95 percent of upper-income moms are married, 76 percent of middle-income moms are married, and only 35 percent of lower-income moms are married.
That’s a shocking disparity, but it makes a certain kind of immediate intuitive sense. After all, many married families are dual-income. Of course they’re going to have an economic advantage over single moms. Married families with present fathers don’t just provide disproportionate emotional and psychological benefits to children, but are also more economically stable.
But it’s one thing to say, as I did earlier this week, that rebuilding America’s marriage culture is an “urgent matter of economic opportunity and stability.” It’s another thing entirely to think through how we can address the marriage gap and change the course of so many American lives.
And we can’t think of the how without considering the plight of America’s working-class men. It’s a fact that fatherlessness harms boys. It’s a fact that men are falling behind women in educational attainment. It’s a fact that men are imprisoned in large numbers in this country. It’s also a fact that men are disproportionately likely to abuse illicit drugs.
The cumulative result is that America contains millions of young men who aren’t truly “marriageable” in the classic sense. Many don’t have role models who showed them how to be a husband and father. Many don’t have the education or training that enables them to be a consistent breadwinner (even if they’re not the sole breadwinner). And if they’ve had any contact with the criminal-justice system, their access to economic opportunity is even more limited.
