So far, many readers on the left have concurred that this is a problem they should have been paying more attention to, while those on the right have had a simpler response: Duh. “Happy to welcome Melissa Kearney to the club of folks who understand more kids would be better off if we had more two-parent married families,” quipped the American Enterprise Institute’s Naomi Schaefer Riley, one of many scholars from the prominent conservative think tank who have lauded the book.

But it is worth asking: What good comes of pointing out that many people could use a cohabiting partner and that many kids could use a second involved parent? Kearney has written an important, careful book on a topic that is an “elephant in the room,” as she puts it. Still, I am not sure anyone has any idea what to do with that elephant. …

The real elephant in the room, I think, is that the United States doesn’t want to contemplate, let alone create, a policy infrastructure that supports single parenthood. It doesn’t want to make sure that kids thrive with a single earner in the home.

[That’s nonsense. Not only has the dominant culture made a virtue out of single parenthood, the social safety net programs have incentivized them. Lowrey even concedes at one point that the issue isn’t “earners,” but having two adults in a committed relationship to share parenting duties. Some two-parent homes have two earners, but many of them only have one, and that may make for better parenting outcomes even if it means a somewhat lower level of wealth accumulation. What is required is an acknowledgment that the “sexual revolution” and no-fault divorce have been social disasters, and that the safety-net policies of the Great Society contributed this massive destruction to the nuclear-family model as well. — Ed]