Can gay wedlock break political gridlock?: A debate.

• Author: Bernstein, Jared
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE

In the divisive, partisan political debates in D.C., the term "grand bargain" refers to a deal in which each side gives up a dearly held position to get what they want. Democrats accept entitlement cuts, for example, while Republicans accept a tax hike.

In a recent article in these pages ("Can Gay Wedlock Break Political Gridlock?," March/April/May 2015), David Blankenhorn, William Galston, Jonathan Rauch, and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead suggested that conservatives and progressives forge such a grand bargain regarding marriage. In this scenario, conservatives would accept same-sex marriage and progressives would accept the compelling research that married families are better for child outcomes than single parents.

I found their reasoning and evidence strong, and their case well argued. But the bargain they offered was weak then and it's even weaker now, since the Supreme Court has made same-sex marriage allowable across the country. Certainly it would be better for a pluralistic America if conservatives accepted gay marriage--but, especially since younger generations already do so, regardless of their politics, I'm not sure it matters that much. That train has left the station, with Justice Kennedy at the controls. While it's possible that future courts could reverse the decision, it's unlikely.

So I'm here to offer a stronger version of a grand bargain. Progressives should accept that there's a link between family structure and childhood outcomes. (I'll go through the research below, as the findings are more nuanced and open to interpretation than this language makes it sound.) But since it's no sacrifice for conservatives to accept something that's already solidly in place, here's their part of the new grand bargain: in the interest of promoting more lasting marriages and stable families, they must accept the policy interventions that will provide more economic opportunity to families, including children, their parents, and their potential parents. These interventions could involve employment and wage programs, universal health care coverage, quality pre-K, college tuition assistance, and incarceration reform.

The role of family structure in poverty, inequality, and child outcomes has been debated for decades, with progressives arguing that the increase in single parenthood is driven by economic forces, and conservatives arguing that prevailing cultural norms are to blame. While all this has been going on--and versions of this debate date back to the English Poor Laws of the early 1600s--researchers have been examining the impact that growing up outside of stable marriages has on children's outcomes.

This now large body of research finds considerable evidence that children who grow up with two parents rather than one achieve better adult outcomes, at least on an "all-else-equal" basis (bad marriages, for example, are bad for kids). Some of this is also common sense: two incomes are greater than one, and two caregivers by definition have more time, arms, ears, and so on than one. While the research typically finds that family stability (that is, consistency in family structure) is particularly important for kids' outcomes, it's clear that married families are more likely to be stable than unmarried ones.

These observations--married families are less likely to be poor and unstable; there are advantages inherent in having multiple caretakers in a home--suggest to some that public policy should, in the interest of helping some of our least advantaged kids, try to reverse the "retreat from marriage."

Fair enough, but it's not that easy, and here, the very different progressive and conservative diagnoses matter a lot. First, the literature is not as unequivocal as many writers on this subject claim. For one, all else is in fact far from equal, and the choices facing single women who want to be parents are complicated in a number of ways. Second, to the extent that the changes in family structure are cultural, I think they are and will remain largely immune to public policy (and I won't even get into the irony of conservatives and especially libertarians trying to employ policy to change culture and family structure).

Third--and here's where the bargain comes in--policy really could make a difference if it invested in the well-being and upward mobility of kids in disadvantaged families, regardless of their family type. Moreover, if we also invest in their parents and potential parents, we may incentivize more marriages as well.

While this may make you yearn for the mythical one-handed economist, here's how the sociologists Sara McLanahan and Christopher Jencks, highly reliable voices in this debate, summarize the research:

On the one hand, growing up without both biological parents is clearly associated with worse average outcomes for children than growing up with them. Specifically, children growing up with a single mother are exposed to more family instability and complexity, they have more behavior problems, and they are less likely to finish high school or attend college than children raised by both of their parents. On the other hand, these...