Writing in USA Today, Brad Wilcox and Chris Bullivant say the two-parent family, normally based on marriage is strong among the upper middle class – more than 90% of children live with two married parents, “but among the poor and working class, 35% and 55% of children have the privilege of living in a married home”. A large marriage gap also exists in Ireland.

Yet, they say, journalists, academics, congressional policymakers and the foundation executives who dominate the national conversation “rarely if ever confront the family factor lurking beneath many of our country’s biggest problems”.

They say that this prevents a focus on the enormous family chasm that has emerged in the United States in the last few decades. That marriage divide was virtually nonexistent in the 1970s and yet, now, it “risks entrenching a permanent social and economic divide in society”.

Worse again, the very lack of focus or even recognition of the family factor means that there is “no pressure to generate solutions to bridge the family divide” and the myriad social problems consequent on that fraying societal structure.