Where are the parents?

A group of seven young Philadelphia teens were caught on surveillance camera beating a 73-year-old man named James Lambert Jr. to death with a traffic cone in June. The footage shows the teens giggling and recording the slow, brutal assault as if it were casual entertainment. “I just don’t know what’s going on in our city,” Lambert’s niece told Fox 29 Philadelphia. “Where were the parents?”

Pennsylvania, like many states nationwide, is experiencing a youth-crime crisis. Data from the state’s Juvenile Court Judges’ Commission suggest that a major factor in crime among youth is family structure. More than 80 percent of every juvenile court disposition in 2021 involved a young person who lives in a broken home, without two married parents. Nearly 48 percent live with a single mother, while a mere 15.5 percent live with both parents. Similar trends hold up year after year after year.

“That’s consistent with what I’d expect, but it’s a striking number,” said Brad Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. “The strongest predictor for incarceration is the share of two-parent families in a neighborhood.” Wilcox pointed to research by Raj Chetty of Harvard University and the IFS that confirms that criminal behavior drops dramatically for youths who live with both parents and in neighborhoods with a high proportion of married adults.

“America’s young man problem is disproportionately concentrated among the millions of males who grew up without the benefit of a present biological father,” a recent IFS brief concluded. “The bottom line: both these men and the nation are paying a heavy price for the breakdown of the family.”