Family Structure And Inequalities Summary

For this week’s reading memo, I will be looking at Family Structure and the Reproduction of Inequalities by Sara McLanahan and Christine Percheski. The main theme of this article is that family structure has an impact on inequality, specifically in terms of poverty. One piece of evidence that the authors used to support this argument that I found the most striking, is how what kind of parents a child grows up with effects that child’s life chances. The article states that “Children who grow up apart from their biological fathers score lower on standardized tests, report poorer grades and view themselves as having less academic potential that children who grow up with biological parents” (264). Even if a child grows up in a two parent household