New York Times op-ed says liberals need to admit that single parent families are large ‘drivers’ of childhood poverty – and that youngsters whose parents are married usually fare far better

American liberals must accept that single-parent families are more likely to raise children in poverty, an influential New York Times columnist has argued.

Nick Kristof said this fact was taboo among progressives, who feared they would be labeled racist if they admitted it.

Black families are statistically more likely to be single-parent than white, Hispanic or Asian families: Less than half of Black children lived with two married parents in 2020. according to the last census.

Only 38 percent of black children live with married parents.

And while 62 percent of white children live in low-poverty areas, where fathers are present in most homes, only 4 percent of black children do.

“We have had a blind spot for a long time,” Kristof wrote, in a column published Wednesday.

‘We are often reluctant to acknowledge one of the leading causes of child poverty – the widespread breakdown of families – for fear that this would be condescending or racist.’

Kristof noted that single mothers raising children are five times as likely to live in poverty as families with married couples.

Children who grow up in single-family homes are less likely to complete high school or earn a college degree, and are more likely to become single parents themselves.

Kristof points to a new book coming out next week by Melissa S. Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, called “The Two-Parent Privilege.”

Kristof calls Kearney’s book ‘important’.

“The data reveals some uncomfortable realities,” she writes.

‘Two-parent families are beneficial for children. Places with more two-parent families have higher rates of upward mobility. Not talking about these facts is counterproductive.”

The writer noted that many liberals “talk left but walk right” – insisting that single-parent families are no different than married families, but ultimately end up marrying and raising children in a traditional nuclear family.

Kristof noted that many people who grew up in single-parent homes continued to be successful, including Barack Obama.

“And I think the big driver behind the rise in single-parent households is the poor decisions made by policymakers, which have led to mass incarceration and a collapse in the incomes of working-class men,” Kristof wrote.

But, he pointed out, those who pointed out the problems of single-parent families had already been “denounced by liberals for racism and victim blaming” in 1965, when New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan – who had grown up in poverty by a single mother – wrote about the decline in black marriages and warned of a possible social collapse as a result.

“One advantage of a two-parent family is simply an arithmetic: two parents can earn two incomes, which means less poverty,” Kristof wrote.

He pointed out that America was an outlier: out of 130 countries surveyed by Pew in 2019the United States had the lowest percentage of two-parent families.

Kristof said one way to improve the situation was to increase the earnings of less-educated men, to make them more “marriageable.”

“Family breakdown, especially among low-income Americans, may be uncomfortable to talk about, but it is part of the apparatus of inequality in the United States,” he concluded.

“It doesn’t help if we turn our eyes away, ignore the data and deny the existence of two-parent privileges.”