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This article originally appeared in The Washington Post on Jan. 24, 2025

Column by Andrew Van Dam

Here at the Department, we just can’t turn off the overactive swath of gray matter that sees data stories everywhere. Even in situations where no self-respecting gray matter really should be activated — such as rewatching “Kindergarten Cop.”

That rickety Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle from 1990 is a goofy film from tip to tail. But one of the most questionable moments in our eyes came when the young and buff Arnold, playing police detective John Kimble, admits in front of a parent at Oregon’s Astoria Elementary that he’s not married.

“Welcome to Astoria,” the Arnold-addled mother responds breathily, “the single-parent capital of America.”

The observation is key to the plot — it’s in the trailer! — and it helped reframe single parenthood as freeing and flirty. But in our long experience with obscure American statistical capitals, Astoria, Oregon, doesn’t pass the smell test as the single-parent capital.

The places with the most single parents tend to be, to put it bluntly, struggling. The strongest predictors of single parenthood are high poverty rates and high shares of the population receiving government assistance.

Astoria, the United States’ first settlement west of the Rockies, doesn’t fit the bill. While the city may not have parlayed its position at the mouth of the miles-wide Columbia River into success as the New Orleans or New York of the West Coast, as its boosters once dreamed, it has carved out a comfortable existence in Oregon’s northwestern extremity.

Its poverty rate is higher than the U.S. or Oregon averages, as is its share of people on food stamps or other public assistance, but it’s not even close to the highest rates in Oregon, let alone the nation.

Not surprisingly, then, Astoria is hardly an outlier on single parenthood. About 28 percent of Astoria households with children are unpartnered, a bit above the national rate of 25.5 percent, and enough to rank about 6,000th in the 15,000 places for which the 2020 Census has at least 100 households with children.

It’s not even the single-parent capital of places named Astoria! That honor goes to Astoria, Illinois, a town of fewer than 1,000 people that used to be known as Vienna until, in 1839, city fathers realized that name was already taken — presumably by Arnold’s Austrian compatriots — and named themselves after beaver baron John Jacob Astor instead. (Here, we’re counting single parents as those who don’t have either a spouse or partner present.)

But maybe things were different decades ago, when the script for “Kindergarten Cop” was being written. It was an era when much of the Pacific Northwest struggled in the face of declining timber and commercial fishing, and perhaps Astoria suffered? We asked Clatsop County Historical Society archivist Liisa Penner, who has chronicled life in Astoria so long that the county heritage museum’s archive room is named after her — the “Liisa” spelling is common in Finland, where she was born.

“I do remember the many empty stores that were here in the 1970s and 80s,” she told us via email. “For a long time, it appeared Astoria was just going to fold up and blow away. It is so different now! The younger generation has found all kinds of ways to bring business to Astoria and the county.”

And it’s true that in the 1970s, when Astoria’s Clatsop County had the 12th-highest poverty rate of Oregon’s 36 counties, the county had more unmarried parents, relative to total parent households, than all but two other Oregon counties. In 1970, it ranked 732nd out of more than 3,100 counties nationally; in 1980, that rose to 462nd.

Back then, as official city historian John Goodenberger pointed out, an episode of the 1974 NBC buddy dramedy “Movin’ On” painted Astoria as a town out of “Deliverance,” with a couple of escaped convicts waylaying the show’s tandem-trucking heroes in what is now a saloon outside town. Later, cattle herded by a hapless young hayseed blocked the road and had to be dispersed by a gun-toting lawman.

By this point, you might be thinking: Wow, Astoria was quite the cultural touchstone in the late 20th century. And indeed, popular entertainment may have aided the town’s salvation in the form of yet another unlikely blockbuster set and filmed there: “The Goonies,” a 1985 film about a band of adventurous young misfits trying to save their homes from a powerful real estate developer.

“If you were to speak to some of my college students, they would tell you ‘The Goonies’ is responsible for sparking Astoria’s four-decade-long revival,” Goodenberger told us. “No one, they’ll tell you, saw the beauty in Astoria before the movie made the town an international destination. The reality is more complex, but there’s some truth to their claim.”

Today, Astoria is a destination so desirable that, Goodenberger says, some fear it’s “being loved to death.” Home prices — up more than 140 percent in the past decade, faster growth than in more than 90 percent of its peers, according to Zillow data — are squeezing out many longtime residents.

So why did the “Kindergarten Cop” script portray thriving Astoria as the single-parent capital? We called Hollywood, tracking down Herschel Weingrod, one of the screenwriters. He told us that he and his writing partner, Timothy Harris, were brought in to rewrite a script originally by Murray Salem. He also said he had no recollection of writing that line, which means the single-parent capital was either in Salem’s original script or inserted during production.

That sent us to director Ivan Reitman, but he died in 2022. His right-hand man, executive producer Joe Medjuck, told us that he had no idea where the line came from, but that it made sense in the script.

“I suspect the line was there just to make the detective’s task more difficult,” Medjuck said. “The more single parents, the more difficult it is to find the one he’s looking for.”

Tragically, we can’t confirm this with Salem, who died of an AIDS-related illness less than a decade after the film’s debut. But it’s possible Salem wrote the script with another city in mind: He reportedly was inspired by a kindergarten teacher at his 20-year high school reunion in a declining Rust Belt town in Ohio. And Medjuck confirms the original script may not have been set in Astoria.

So where should the script have been set? What’s the real single-parent capital of America?

When we ran the numbers, we found it lies in perhaps an even more quintessentially, picturesquely American region — but one that seems to be in no danger of being loved to death.

The counties with the most single parents tend to be in the Black Belt, the Southern heartland so named for its rich black soil — dirt so beguilingly fecund that landowners bought endless thousands of enslaved Africans to till it.

Their descendants, of course, formed the core of the region’s large Black population, which helped keep the name relevant into the present day. And indeed, single parenthood is often linked with Black communities, both in popular culture and in research.

Relative to Whites, Black American women are three or four times as likely to be single parents, and Black children are three times as likely to grow up in poverty, the work of University of North Carolina sociologist Regina S. Baker has shown. But Baker’s findings also caution against assuming one caused the other, as politicians and sociologists have done repeatedly in theories of “Negro pathology.”

As Baker wrote with collaborator Heather O’Connell of Louisiana State University, such theories claim or imply that “Black women’s perpetual unwed motherhood was the cause of Black family instability.” But a recent Demography analysis from Baker and her collaborators, David Brady of the University of Southern California and Ryan Finnigan of the University of California at Berkeley, calls that simplistic conclusion into question. It shows that, especially in Black families, younger parents, less educated parents and unemployed parents all predict child poverty better than the prevalence of single mothers.

Indeed, they have found the children of White women are more likely to be pushed into poverty by single motherhood than are the children of Black mothers. Though that’s partly because Black women don’t get as big of an economic boost from marriage.

“Instead of talking about Black single mothers, why don’t we talk about how kids in Black married families still face really big disadvantages?” Brady told us. “These racial inequalities are so huge that focusing on single mothers — it’s a side story compared to the comprehensive racial inequality that remains!”

The idea that there’s no inviolable force linking poverty and single motherhood becomes clear when you run the numbers for other countries, Brady said. In the vast majority of rich democracies, he said, being a single mother creates no statistically significant negative effect.

“The United States does not stand out for having a particularly high amount of single parenthood,” Brady told us, “but if you’re a single mother, you’re far more likely like to be poor here than in any other rich democracy.”

In the Black Belt, one region stands out for single parenthood: the Mississippi Delta, a New Jersey-sized floodplain between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers with fields so fertile that in the Roaring Twenties they gave rise to Huff Daland Dusters, crop-dusting pioneers who would soon rep the region as Delta Air Lines.

But the Delta’s airline-spawning heyday was also a harbinger of its decline, as fast-mechanizing farmers tossed aside the workforce their forefathers had enslaved, and much of the region plunged into a long population decline that it has yet to reverse.

We can argue which town or county within the Delta claims the crown of single-parent capital. It hops around depending on which measure you’re looking at over which time frame.

But if you lump counties together based on their economic connections, using commuting zones, you see the top three single-parent zones in America (centered on the cities of Greenville, Vicksburg and Greenwood) make up much of the Delta.

Its present is precarious, and its past can be ugly: the lynching of Emmett Till, the Parchman plantation turned prison, early innovations in sharecropping. But the Delta is also the cradle of American music, the birthplace of the blues and B.B. King, and — to quote one British author, “the most American place on Earth.” We assume Arnold Schwarzenegger will be headed there next.

As for us, we’d love to do another “Kindergarten Cop” fact check, but it’ll have to wait until the Census Bureau adds a new question to their form: Who is your daddy, and what does he do?