Our Kids are Struggling. Who Can Help Them?

November 1, 2023

SEASON 3, EPISODE 5: Two scholars join Governors Bredesen and Haslam to discuss the challenges facing kids and families in a special episode recorded live at the Baker School.

In the face of low academic performance, mental health challenges, and a decline in college going, especially among men, public policy for America’s youth is a priority across the country. But is it really within the government’s power to affect what truly ails youth and their families? Melissa Kearney, an economist and the author of The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, and Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men and author of Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do About It, join Governors Bredesen and Haslam to discuss the challenges facing America’s youth today. This episode was recorded live at the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs in Knoxville, Tennessee in October 2023.

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“This is just something we shouldn’t be okay with”

Kearney opened the conversation by illustrating the challenges facing kids today, noting that more than 12% of kids live in poverty, one in six are food insecure, and millions are housing insecure. “This is just something we shouldn’t be okay with,” she said, pointing to evidence about how poverty and its associated burdens affect a child’s development and success in school.

Kearny described arriving at the premise of her book after years of research into more traditional economic policies, such as improving schools and strengthening the safety net, that aim to support kids.  “And what I kept coming up against is we now have 30% of kids in the US being raised outside a two-parent home,” she said, adding that the decline of two-parent families is a trend seen largely outside of the college-educated class, which is continuing to get married and raise children together at similar rates as they have in the past.

“We need to improve schools, we need to have a stronger safety net. But really, I think fundamentally improving the wellbeing of kids in this country and addressing income inequality is going to take strengthening families and boys in particular,” she said. “We have millions of boys growing up without dads in their home, and it’s perpetuating this problem of boys not doing as well as they otherwise I think would, and then men not being well suited to be husbands and dads.”

“The short version of what happened is that Gloria Steinem got her way.”

Reeves highlighted some of the challenges facing boys and men today, including rising suicide rates and education gaps.  He noted that many of these challenges have hit working-class communities particularly hard, describing a “triple-whammy in many ways of economic changes, social changes, as well as cultural changes.”

How did we get here? “The short version of what happened is that Gloria Steinem got her way,” Reeves said. “Gloria Steinem, one of the best-known feminists of the 1970s, said the main point of the women’s movement is to make marriage a choice rather than a necessity. And the way to get that is to increase women’s economic independence and autonomy, that was the driving force of it.”

Reeves noted that we’ve made great strides in that direction; today, 40% of women earn more than the average man, he said, adding that in 1979 it was only 13%. “We have seen a massive transformation in the economic position of women in relation to men, which I personally think is a wonderful thing…I think it’s arguably the greatest economic liberation in human history, and I’m here for it. However, it has downstream consequences. And one of those is women who don’t have to get married, even if they are parents, are choosing not to get married.”

“I don’t think banging the drum for marriage is going to reverse any of these trends”

One place where Reeves and Kearney disagreed is how we should respond to declining marriage rates.

“I don’t think banging the drum for marriage is going to reverse any of these trends,” Reeves said. “I think banging the drum for responsible and engaged fatherhood as well as motherhood is, because I think that ship has sailed.”

Kearney was less willing to concede that the marriage ship has effectively sailed. “I don’t think we should resign ourselves or accept a position where that’s just a luxury good now. That’s just yet another advantage of the college-educated class,” she said. “We are never going to close class gaps if we just accept that as a reality.”

“We spend way more money taking kids out of families than we do on strengthening families”

Is there a role for the government in addressing some of these issues? While acknowledging that some of these challenges fall outside the realm of what economic policies could realistically address, Kearney and Reeves agreed that one place the government could help is with funding programs aimed at strengthening families.

“The government spends very, very little money on programs aimed at strengthening healthy families,” Kearney noted. “We spend way more money taking kids out of families than we do on strengthening families…the government could be funding programs on the ground in the community that work with vulnerable families. There are lots of couples who have kids together who want to stay together and they’re literally looking for relationship education classes and they can’t afford high-priced counseling. Those are the kinds of programs the government could be funding.”