I understand the reason this fiction is maintained: people with kids need the job even more than people without, and have an interest in denouncing people who claim kids make you less productive. There's also the second order effect in which "with kids" is correlated with "older".
The net of it though is that devs with kids tend to assign work a lower priority, to take fewer risks, to need more money, and to be older and hence less familiar with new technologies (and too busy to learn in their free time).
Society doesn't have a good answer for this situation yet. In times past, technology didn't move so fast that experience was mostly obsolete (and hence useless) in a decade's time. A 40 year old farmer with kids in 1713 would probably have much to teach a young whippersnapper. The same isn't true for a 40 year old programmer with kids in 2013.