Seventy-four percent of children raised by both married biological parents earn top grades — As and Bs. For kids in every other family structure, that number drops to 60 percent.
Fourteen percentage points. That's the gap that decades of government programs, billions in education spending, and an entire industry of social workers couldn't close. Because they were solving the wrong problem.
New research from the Institute for Family Studies and the American Enterprise Institute, drawing on the National Survey of Children's Health, has arrived at a conclusion that would have been obvious to anyone who attended a family dinner before 1975: family structure is a more powerful predictor of school problems, academic performance, and depression than either race or household income. Brad Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, presented findings showing that children not raised by both biological parents were 47 percent more likely to have disciplinary problems and more than twice as likely to be depressed.
The data lands at a moment when American literacy is already in crisis. Sixty-four percent of fourth graders don't read proficiently. More than half of American adults read below a sixth-grade level. And while those numbers were getting worse, Harvard was busy handing out As to 60 percent of its students in 2024-25, up from 25 percent in 2005-06. More than 2,000 colleges and universities dropped SAT and ACT requirements entirely.
So the education establishment responded to declining student performance by making it easier to look like students were performing. Meanwhile, the single variable that actually moves the needle — whether a kid goes home to two parents — got buried under talking points about systemic inequality and funding gaps.
The family structure trend tells its own story. In 2012, only 64 percent of American children lived in married-parent families — the low point. By 2024, that crept up to 66 percent. Two points in twelve years. Not exactly a comeback.
And government housing policy actively works against the research. Only 3 percent of subsidized housing serves two adults with children. Thirty percent serves female-headed households with children. The federal government designed a housing system that structurally discourages the one arrangement that produces the best outcomes for kids, then spent years wondering why outcomes weren't improving.
The progressive position on family structure for the last fifty years has been that it doesn't matter — that any household configuration produces the same results as long as the funding is adequate. The data says that position was wrong. Not slightly wrong. Exposed-by-a-14-point-academic-gap wrong.
None of this is complicated. Kids do better when both parents are in the house. The research confirms it. The National Survey of Children's Health confirms it. The 47 percent spike in disciplinary problems confirms it. The depression data confirms it.