Our Endangered Species

“Family breakdown is the shadow behind all sorts of other problems that people are much more easily conversant about,” explains the Manhattan Institute’s Kay Hymowitz. Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution tells Pearlstein that “on a scale of one to ten, [it’s] probably a fifteen; it’s the biggest problem we have.” Because, as Heather Mac Donald, also of the Manhattan Institute, puts it, “The family unit is the absolute basis of society. It is responsible for civilizing human beings and creating adults who are capable of engaging in the economy. With families breaking down at the rates they are, our chance of being able to take care of other large economic problems recedes.”

You can tell a lot about a society by its taboos. Several weeks ago, America reeled when Adrian Peterson—the great NFL running back of his generation—was indicted on charges of “reckless or negligent injury to a child.” Peterson is alleged to have disciplined his son by “whooping” him—these are Peterson’s words, not mine—with a “switch.” The child, a 4-year-old boy, suffered cuts on his backside and thighs. For this act, which 50 years ago was commonplace, Peterson was arrested, suspended by his employer (the Minnesota Vikings), and publicly castigated by all and sundry.

Unremarked upon was the fact that the 29-year-old Peterson does not live with this boy and reportedly has seven children—that we currently know about—with five different women. Which illustrates nicely the changing mores in America: Corporal punishment is a scandal, or even a crime, but there is no judgment about men who father children out of wedlock and then abandon the vulnerable mothers and children. Yet only one of these pathologies poses an existential threat to our society. This problem, which scientists refer to as “family fragmentation,” is the subject of Mitch Pearlstein’s new book.

Most books about family breakdown are leaden, statistics-laden exercises, but Pearlstein has taken a novel approach: He interviewed 40 interesting, well-informed experts and condensed those conversations into a short, highly readable seminar. The interviewees range from Isabel Sawhill to Kay Hymowitz to Heather Mac Donald to Chester Finn, with the overall effect being that the reader feels as though he’s sitting in a coffee shop eavesdropping on a particularly stimulating and elevated discussion.

Pearlstein begins by asking how serious the problem of family fragmentation is for America. It’s a loaded question, of course. As Pearlstein says, there is “no aspect of life in which children who grow up in broken or never-formed two-parent families do as well, on average, as boys and girls who grow up with both parents.” (He knows this because his last book, From Family Collapse to America’s Decline, was one of those statistics-laden contraptions.) And he is correct: From incarceration rates to education to income to health, children raised by both mother and father are better off than children raised in any other family configuration. If you care about outcomes, and not some moral or ideological agenda, then the traditional nuclear family is the gold standard.

The trick is that the social capital created by traditional families is what undergirds the rest of our society. Sociologists and economists now understand that when this social capital is diminished, it causes all sorts of other problems. The crises of the welfare state, wage stagnation, income inequality, unemployment, the prison-industrial complex—all of these, and much more, can be traced to the breakdown of the family.

“Family breakdown is the shadow behind all sorts of other problems that people are much more easily conversant about,” explains the Manhattan Institute’s Kay Hymowitz. Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution tells Pearlstein that “on a scale of one to ten, [it’s] probably a fifteen; it’s the biggest problem we have.” Because, as Heather Mac Donald, also of the Manhattan Institute, puts it, “The family unit is the absolute basis of society. It is responsible for civilizing human beings and creating adults who are capable of engaging in the economy. With families breaking down at the rates they are, our chance of being able to take care of other large economic problems recedes.”

David Blankenhorn, founder of the Institute for American Values, explains sorrowfully:

I look at the more than 70 percent of children in the African American community born outside marriage as well as the more than 40 percent for America as a whole and all the damage and suffering of children they imply, and I say if I could change just two numbers in America it would be those. It would not be unemployment rates, or new business starts, or people with health care coverage, or people with adequate incomes. As important as all those things are, if I could only change two numbers, it would be 70 percent and 40 percent.

Given all this, you might wonder how there could be any disagreement on the question of whether or not family fragmentation is problematic. Yet while most of the liberal academy has reluctantly acknowledged the objective superiority of traditional families, there are some holdouts. One of them, the progressive historian Stephanie Coontz, gives Pearlstein a window into how liberal thinking has been tortured by the breakdown of the family:

People are nostalgic for the 1950s and ’60s. There are some things I would be nostalgic for, too. That was a period when if you were a guy and a high school dropout, you could earn a wage to support a family. Wages for the bottom 50 percent were rising faster than for the top 20 percent and income inequality was decreasing. There were two things, one good and one bad. The good part was that it was really possible for a man to support a family. The bad part was that it was impossible for a woman to support herself without getting herself a guy. That meant that she often put up with relationships that you and I would consider absolutely unacceptable.

What Coontz reveals is that, whatever they may say, for some liberals income inequality, economic mobility, and the welfare of children are second-order goods, prized below such things as “relationship quality” and sexual autonomy. Some liberals can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the importance of the former if it means impugning the consequences of the latter. But Pearlstein performs a great service in presenting Coontz’s view without mocking or arguing against it. He realizes that if we’re going to change the culture, people like Stephanie Coontz will have to be wooed, not defeated.

And this is not an impossible task. Broken Bonds has a lot for liberals to like. Pearlstein acknowledges the particular problems of race with grace and humility. A free marketer, he also understands that, at best, the free market has very little to offer when it comes to cultural correctives. And he’s cognizant of the social breakdown that concerns communitarians across the spectrum. As the writer Barbara Dafoe Whitehead tells him, part of our problem is that the days of daily contact between the social classes are ending. Instead of everyone shopping at the same supermarket, one group is “going to Whole Foods and the other group going to a food pantry. Or going to the YMCA instead of some people now going to private health clubs. .  .  . All these local institutions that brought people together-—-lower-middle class, middle class, and upper-middle class-—-have sorted themselves into separate categories.”

The question, then, is what to do? And here, Broken Bonds humbly acknowledges that there are no magic bullets. Education reform is an obvious pathway, because a big part of family fragmentation is lower-class kids being left behind by bad schools, which give them few job prospects and leave them unable to support families. Eric Hanusheck, an economist at Stanford, cites research showing the vastly different outcomes that students have with good teachers. He claims, “If we could replace the bottom 5 to 8 percent of teachers with just average teachers, we could jump dramatically in terms of international rankings. But more than that, it would have enormous impacts on the U.S. economy in the future.”

However, this and other reforms would require either the cooperation, or defenestration, of teachers’ unions.

Pearlstein makes the even more radical suggestion that divorce laws might be reformed, too, in order to make divorce—especially for couples with children—more difficult. Yet his most intriguing proposal is the idea that we ought to have policies designed to help stabilize the prospects of men. In one interview, Columbia economist Ron Mincy illustrates just how dire men’s wage stagnation has been over the last two generations: “The only category of American men who have earned more than their fathers since 1974,” he says, “are those who have gone to graduate school.”

But it’s even worse than that. For all the War on Women rhetoric in the air, the reality is that women are doing much, much better than men. As Pearlstein details:

For every 100 women who earn a bachelor’s degree, 75 men do so. For every 100 American women who earn a master’s degree, 66 American men do so. For every 100 females, ages 20 to 24, who commit suicide, 624 males do so. For every 100 women, ages 18 to 21, in correctional facilities, 1,430 men are so confined.

Boys and men have fallen far, far behind in America. Yet when it comes to accomplishment and stability, success isn’t a zero-sum game, because if we don’t get men back to par, many women won’t find decent husbands, many more children won’t have present fathers—and everyone else will pay for the economic and social fallout.

Once again, what is to be done? Here is where Broken Bonds is somewhat depressing. As Kay Hymowitz concludes, “This is something I’ve been thinking about for over a decade now and I don’t have an answer. The only thing I know how to do is push for a consensus that it’s, in fact, a problem.” Pearlstein’s excellent book is another brick laid on that important road.

Jonathan V. Last, senior writer at The Weekly Standard, is the author of What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster.