Greetings and salutations.

Welcome back to Life and Books and Everything.

I'm Kevin DeYoung, senior pastor at Christ's Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina.

And I am joined today by my special guest, Melissa Carney.

And we're going to talk about her new book called The Two-Parent Privilege. Melissa has a very august resume here. She's a professor of

economics at the University of Maryland, director of a number of different research groups and a non-resident senior fellow

at Brookings and a scholar in a number of different labs and affiliations and journals and lots

of good academic work that she's done. She did her undergraduate at Princeton, PhD in

economics at MIT. Melissa, thank you for coming on here to talk about your new book.

Happy to be here.

Thanks so much for having me.

So this is a book about parents, and it's a book where you're using your expertise

as a trained academic economist, but you also write personally, you say at the

beginning and at the end in particular that you're a mom and an economist. And in that, that's the

correct order. That's what's most important. And you have three kids. So tell us about your family.

Okay. It's exactly right. I'm a trained economist, but I think the greatest thing I do is be a mom to my three kids, a boy and two girls,

and I'm raising them with my husband in suburban Maryland. And how did you get to the University of Maryland? And are, are you a big Terps sports fan?

I mean, I admit that I spend most of my time over in the economics department, but I do cheer

for the Terps every now and then, and I'm delighted when they do well. I have been at the University of Maryland

for 17 years now, moved down to D.C. from the Boston area, probably 19 years ago, went to

Brookings and a two-year fellowship, did some dedicated research there on topics that I've been

working on for over two decades, U.S.

...