Interlinking Structural Racism and Heteropatriarchy: Rethinking Family Structure's Effects on Child Outcomes in a Racialized, Unequal Society.

In the field of family science and in the broader family policy discourse, debate is ongoing about the importance of family structure for child outcomes. Missing from this debate is a full integration of how the foundational pillars of White supremacy, namely structural racism and heteropatriarchy, impact both family formation and child outcomes, especially among diversely configured Black families. From a critical intersectional lens, we argue that conceptual models used to explain racialized child outcomes based on family structure effects are problematic because they compare family structure statuses without accounting for structural racism and interlinked heteropatriarchal conditions. We present a new conceptual model that integrates structural racism and heteropatriarchy to examine the salience of family structure statuses for child outcomes and discuss approaches to research design, empirical measurement, and interpretation in order to bring this new model into practice.