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SALT LAKE CITY — Young people living in two-parent households are getting more support at home than their own parents and grandparents did when they were young. They can turn to their father or their mother if they have a personal problem.
The change is owed to the fact that dads are stepping up more in a personal way, taking on more of a caregiver role than did fathers in the past.
"We saw that for young people today who were raised in two-parent households, they actually get significantly more support from their fathers compared to young people one or two generations ago," said Sam Pressler, a practitioner fellow at the University of Virginia's Karsh Institute of Democracy and also a research affiliate at the Harvard Human Flourishing Program. "What you're also seeing is that there's kind of a compounding benefit to the children of those parents, where not only are they getting the support of a mother, now they're also getting the support of a much more actively involved and present father."
What's good news for some kids, though, doesn't benefit children who don't live with both parents, according to findings of the 2024 American Social Capital Survey by Pressler and Daniel A. Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. That suggests that children raised in single-parent homes face a bigger emotional resource gap compared to peers raised by both parents and also compared to previous generations in single-parent homes.
The survey report, "Disconnected: The Growing Class Divide in American Civic Life," looks at relationships, including not just how parents and children interact, but also friendships and the degrees of support that people can count on if something goes wrong or a need arises.
For many Americans, finding someone to provide a small loan, a place to stay for a few days or care for the kids in a crisis is itself a crisis.
Parents who help solve problems
The report said that 6 in 10 young adults raised by both their parents said they could count on their dad to help with a personal problem as they were being raised. Fewer than half of older adults raised in two-parent homes said that. "So even though fewer American children today grow up with present fathers, those who do are more connected to them," write Cox and Pressler.
The report noted, however, that young men were more apt to say they could turn to their father for help with a personal problem when they were kids, compared to young women. While two-thirds of young men said that, just over half of young women report that was true in their formative years.
The survey found that 82% of young men and 75% of young women said they could turn to their moms for help when they were younger.
Because dads are often more involved day-to-day in two-parent households than they were in the past, the gap in support and resources for children in single-parent households compared to those in two-parent households has grown.
The report didn't cover how fathers are more involved, but rather quantified involvement, Pressler said. The findings were robust when it came to being able to rely on both parents in a two-parent home for support with personal challenges.
The survey included responses from 6,597 U.S. adults by phone in the Ipsos "KnowledgePanel." Conducted March 29 to April 14, 70% of the surveys were on cell phones and 30% via landline. The responses were weighted for gender by age, race, ethnicity, education, census region, metropolitan status, household income and 2020 presidential vote choice. The margin of error is plus or minus 1.3 percentage points.
Will friends (if you have any) step up?
The report also finds a growing class divide in who people can count someone on if they need help — and education attainment makes a difference.
Previous generations were more likely to have a circle of friends, the report found.
Friendships have not recovered from the ravages of the pandemic, per the report, which said that 17% of Americans say they have no close friends, a category that does not include relatives. Eighteen percent have one or two good friends, a third have three to five and a quarter have at least six good friends.
The educational gap on the question of friends is striking: Not quite one-fourth of Americans who got no further than a high school diploma say they have no close friends, compared to just 1 in 10 college graduates. Those with more than a high school diploma are twice as likely than those without a college education to have six or more close friends (33% vs. 17%). In previous generations, by the way, college graduates were not more likely than others to have large circles of friends.
That education divide is even bigger for Black Americans, with 35% of those with high school or less saying they have no close friends, compared to 25% of Hispanics and 19% of whites who didn't pursue education beyond high school.
Pressler said the size of the friendship gap surprised him, including that it widened so much over the last generation. "And then, within that — and I hadn't seen this before — looking at the way class and race intersect within this data: 24% of people without degrees saying they have no close friends, but then 35% of Black Americans without degrees saying they have no close friends."
Among college graduates, the numbers are similar regardless of race: 8% of white, 7% of Hispanic and 11% of Black adults say they don't have any friends. The survey revealed, too, that Americans have not only fewer friends, but those they do have may not live nearby. One-fourth of Americans say that most or all of their friends and relatives live nearby, while 44% say few or none of them do.
