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When both parts of the family are aggressively working towards acquiring more, the softness of a family gets lost. There is less emotional dependence, less of one person doing one thing, and more of two people who have a lot of potential to be at loggerheads with one another.

Statistics suggest otherwise:

¶ As more women have entered the workforce over the past few decades, the divorce rate, contrary to popular expectation, has gone down.

¶ US states where women have a higher labor force participation rate have lower divorce rates.

¶ Couples in which the wife an be considered a “career woman” have a 25 percent lower chance of divorce.

http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/fall10/couples/

--- If you accept divorce rate as an indicator for a failed family.

For instance, what if families with two hard-working parents spend less time together but still find a level of contact that's need-filling. They grow neither happy nor unhappy enough to divorce. It's a stable but weak and unnurturing family and perhaps isn't the best place to bring up a young child.

Failure of a family is multifaceted and the op puts forth a theory too strong to be knocked down merely by decreased divorce rates.

(Edited: In light that the statistics the author quoted might be wrong, I'm should disclaim that I don't personally think that the polar-opposites parental style we're talking about here is best. I just want to advocate caution judging family-style health by divorce.)

It’s not a perfect indicator, but it is what the economists would call “a revealed preference”. I understand that people can have all sorts of reasons for remaining in an unhappy marriage, but I would expect that all other factors being equal, a large-scale social trend that makes the average marriage less happy would also lead to more people becoming unhappy enough to bail out.

The original argument was never about marriages being "less happy". It was about them being less healthy, less caring, less connected. It's quite likely that they're happy enough to not want to divorce without being a stable, healthy family producing a good environment to raise a child.

A lower chance of divorce does not entail a better family unit with a balance of gentleness and aggressiveness as suggested by the parent.

I grew up outside of the US with an American mother i'd characterize as post-feminist. She taught me that men and women are equal but not the same.

I meet a lot of women in the states who have adopted career advancement and a high salary as their version of "success". I had a long conversation with a female friend of mine who graduated from Stanford, worked as a VC. She said that there is a lot of pressure from other women to go into business and be competitive. That if as a woman you decide "I want to have a family and raise children", you're selling out.

With all of the effort for women's rights (and there is still more to be done), no one is defending a woman's right to be a successful mother and homemaker.

A Stanford graduate working as a VC is hardly a representative of an "average" woman. It may be hard for HN readers to imagine b/c so many of us are city dwellers, but there are parts of the US where it is still socially unacceptable for women to defy traditional gender roles.

She isn't the "average" woman. My main point is, in her circle she felt it was socially unacceptable to _adopt_ traditional gender roles.

I'm saying that I believe her problem to be a unique consequence of her very unusual social situation. It's not a problem that most women have.

Incidentally, how do you think a man would be treated if he finished his degree at Stanford Business and decided to be a homemaker? would it be different than a man who graduated from another school in another field?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism

Proponents of third-wave feminism claim that it allows women to define feminism for themselves by incorporating their own identities into the belief system of what feminism is and what it can become through one's own perspective. In their introduction to the idea of third-wave feminism in Manifesta, authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards suggest that feminism can change with every generation and individual:

"The fact that feminism is no longer limited to arenas where we expect to see it-- NOW, Ms., women's studies, and redsuited Congresswomen-- perhaps means that young women today have really reaped what feminism has sown. Raised after Title IX and "William Wants a Doll", young women emerged from college or high school or two years of marriage or their first job and began challenging some of the received wisdom of the past ten or twenty years of feminism. We're not doing feminism the same way that the seventies feminists did it; being liberated doesn't mean copying what came before but finding one's own way-- a way that is genuine to one's own generation."

why not take the simpler explanation that the reason families have broken up is that they actually weren't that happy?

Also why doesn't having multiple people in a family earning an income lead to an increase in security? i.e. the impact of a (e.g. job loss, illness) can be buffered by the other partner's income.

Only if they weren't already spending up to the limit (and past) of both incomes together. If one is working and loses his job, the other can get a job; if both are working and don't have any cushion, they are more likely to have a problem.

Even if those two kinds of roles were as incompatible as you claim, which I don't believe for a second, why would the separation of roles run along gender lines instead of individual preferences?

It seems to me that you are implying a natural suitability and inclination of women for being gentle and caring and a natural ability of men to be totally focused assholes taking on all the intellectual challenges.

I think his point is that an ambitious person, either male or female, tends to try and find a caring and nurturing person as their soulmate and spouse, as a natural way of balancing the family relationships.

It certainly doesn't need to always be males who are ambitious and females who are nurturing; my uncle has been a stay-at-home father for 16 years while his wife has been an ambitious doctor who is always on call.

To be fair, OP didn't say that either role should always be fulfilled by any particular gender, just that it's good to have a mix in a family. In fact, he didn't mention gender at all, so it could also apply to families where the partners are homosexual.

Are you saying that's not true? Certainly males are more aggressive than females (like in many mammalian species), and certainly women have caring, child-rearing instincts.

I don't know what are instincts, what is culture and what are just stereotypes of either. However that may be, my opinion as a male is that I should not be kept in a zoo because someone thinks I have a natural inclination for killing and raping others. My personal experience tells me that it would be completely bonkers to think that women aren't just as sharp and focused as men on average.

Sharpness and Focus != Ambition

Ambition is drive one feels to achieve - that IMHO is very different between genders (on average offcourse).

You forgot to list the cons of both parents being very gentle and caring. Why does one half need be "ambitiously working towards acquiring more"?

The candid materialism of Americans (if you pardon the assumption) never ceases to amaze me. Want a "successful" family, start paying more attention to other things not exchangeable for green pieces of paper.

America's long history of unchecked ambition hasn't always been great for its citizens' well-being, but it's the reason why we put a man on the moon, have 10 of the world's 10 best research universities, and are known for larger-than-life aspirations and achievements.

I said materialism, not ambition.

even if that is correct, the problem comes when you tie it into gender roles. societal factors tend to deny families the ability to choose which partner will play which roles.