I encourage healthy debate about controversial issues like this. When I opened up my New York Times today, I found this article, which questions how important two-parent households are for childhood success, especially among Afro-American youth:
“living in a two-parent family does not increase the chances of finishing high school as much for black students as for their white peers”
“Greater involvement in extended family networks may protect against some of the negative effects associated with parental absence from the home”
The conclusion of this New York Times opinion piece is that structural racism has more impact on the success of young Afro-American kids than single parent households.
If you follow Raj Chetty's work on income mobility it appears that single parents in the neighborhood matter a lot more than single parents themselves. Since single parenthood is much more common for black families and our cities tend to be segregated, black kids tend to grow up around single parented kids which is a disadvantage. Basically having two awesome parents doesn't make up for having your entire world be not that. And having a single parent doesn't ruin an upbringing surrounded by people with two parent families. I think it's as much about shared culture as anything, the social norms get established by majority rule basically.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/opinion/two-parent-family...
Some quotes:
“living in a two-parent family does not increase the chances of finishing high school as much for black students as for their white peers”
“Greater involvement in extended family networks may protect against some of the negative effects associated with parental absence from the home”
The conclusion of this New York Times opinion piece is that structural racism has more impact on the success of young Afro-American kids than single parent households.