Another thing millennials are killing?
Basically, back when the Baby Boomers were young it was a major source of shame to have sex outside of marriage for a lot of people, so they got married early and then discovered that it wasn't a good match. Lucky for them the divorce option was available at least.
These days kids are much more free to experiment before they tie the knot and aren't forced into bad marriages as much. General availability of contraception also helps I suspect.
The downside is that when they do have kids outside of marriage it's a worse situation as the families are less stable without the institution holding them together.
So the ideal situation seems to be for kids to have lots of sexual partners using effective contraception before they settle down and get married to the partner they are most compatible with and then have kids. A policy that seems sensible from one angle, but sinful as hell from another.
Do you have any data backing up this assertion?
The article and linked research don't make that assertion.
These are just off the top of my head. Marriage as an institution definitely does raise the bar relative to dating in how stressful mentally and financially dissolution of a relationship is.
There are a few interesting points in this one:
https://www.brookings.edu/research/cohabiting-parents-differ...
Cohabitating adults are less likely to stay together in every country where it's measured.
In the US, college educated non-married parents are 2.5x more likely to split before their first-born turns 12.
I guess we could extend the metaphor perpetually - if there was no biological clock or aging at all, the rules might be completely different again.
Generally when women feel like they have the option to do so, they tend to delay marriage and have fewer children.
This is good for personal comfort, but less good for societal survival. The Roman situation the sibling commenter mentioned is relevant, as is a comparative analysis of birthrates worldwide.
There's an unstated major premise here - that any "two parents cohabitating" family, even an unhappy one, is better than a single-parent or separated-parents family.
Is that true?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2930824/
Of course, other studies may differ so this shouldn't be taken as conclusive.
Whenever you've got people self-selecting into treatment populations, you need to be extremely careful about causality. For example, let's say that you've got a positive association between delinquent behavior and divorce, and that it seems to be stronger when the custodial parent stays single than it is when the custodial parent remarries. One story is that an unstable family situation causes delinquent behavior. Another equally plausible one is that difficult-to-rear kids stress their parents out, which causes them to divorce, and makes it harder for them to remarry.
It is possible to at least poke at these kinds of tangles, but you've got to be extremely diligent and careful about it. More careful than I think is possible in the "giant scattershot regression model" genre of observational study.
When I asked, "Is that true?", I meant it as a rhetorical question. I doubt anyone actually knows the answer. There's an idea, which I got from Green & Gerber's textbook on field experimentation, that some questions are just fundamentally unanswerable.
No, two unhappy parents cohabitation (married or not) is not ideal. No, a single parent is not ideal. But, a single parent who bounces in and out of relationships every few years is worse than either of the above.
That instability is worse for the child than the other options.
Just a thought, nothing to back it up one way or the other.
The rhetoric seems to be spread more from a mix of traditionalism and insecurity about being dumped or stuck in an unhappy marriage than solid facts.