I'm guessing the successful people you're describing do not have severe learning disabilities. And I find it at least questionable that parenting has gotten markedly less supportive in the past few decades.
Look at the trends of the past few decades: divorce; single parent; and dual income households. There is in fact remarkedly less two parent, supported by single income households, meaning it's a rareity for a child to simply have a parent at home when they return from school to fix them a healthy snack, ask how their day was, or help with homework. Certainly it's not a single cause, but stability in the home is indisputably tied to mental well being of the child.
The rate of change is the rate of new divorces minus the rate at which divorcee households are ending (if the concern is divorced parents with children, by death of the parent, child, or the child leaving the household.)
> Even if the divorce rate was zero, there would still be existent divorced households.
A declining, eventually to zero, number of them.
I was instead pointing out that simply bring up a reduced rate is not really a counterpoint. Especially when, as you accurately point out, the divorce rate is not even the entire picture for the rate-of-change of divorced households. See also Arizhel's sibling comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150694
But hey, will_brown did a better job of making the same point and defending himself:
Yes if you ignore overall trends and use a simple snapshot today divorce rates are slightly lower than the alltime high in 1980. To my larger point, in 1960 9% of kids lived in single parent homes, that number today is 36% and as high as 72% in a certain demographic.
Housing rising in cost is only dog piling on and exacerbating the issue.