Much better than community is family. Go to church, meet a nice girl or boy, get married and have some babies. That's the actual solution for the loneliness epidemic.
Or, you know, a million years of evolution baking the instinct into our primate brains
There is one matrilineal society with a culture that some anthropologists describe in terms you describe -- the Mosou people. However, more recent anthropological data indicates that this too is not the whole truth. While the Mosou are undoubtedly matrilineal, they typically know who the father is and children with involved fathers (rather than just involved uncles) do better. Moreover, Mosou society is not spontaneous. It developed as the result of a lower class being subjugated by a very patrilineal upper class nobility. The lower class was socially engineered to be compliant, while the upper class taxed them. The upper class was eventually disbanded by communist china, and the Mosou are now mistakenly used as an example of a stable matriarchal society. Nevertheless, even this fails to stand to scrutiny as exposure to the patrilineal mainstream Chinese society means most men just leave for greener pastures in mainstream Chinese society. Were it not for gawking tourists to prop up their economy, it's unlikely they'd be around still.
Which really means: Encouraging families that don't work to stay together, no matter how much it hurts the people involved.
Helping people to resolve conflicts so they want to stay together is a completely different thing than just encouraging people to stay together.
Apart from the chicken-and-egg problems, probably the bigger problem with that is that naturally the populations you are comparing are extremely biased. So, even if it is not an artifact of social policies that children in two-parent households do better than children of single parents, there is no reason to think that the number of parents is actually the determining factor.
It might just as well be that people who are bad at maintaining relationships are also bad at raising children, so forcing two of them to raise a child together will not give you any of the benefits that you get from people who are good at maintaining relationships raising a child, and you will instead just draw down the average outcomes of two-parent households.
> I'm sure there's all sorts of chicken-and-egg problems in the data
Pretty much that.
If society disadvantages people who build support structures that do not fit a very strict set of requirements, then you can't really draw any useful conclusions about whether those support structures are good based on observing that society, because it is very likely that negative effects you see are simply effects of the discriminatory policies, and thus are useless for justifying the discrimination.
> Trying to get the parents to want to stay together is a worthy effort, but when you've decided to make children I socially expect you to put their needs first
But trying to get people to stay together who don't want to is very unlikely to be putting the child's needs first. If you can make people want to stay together (and not due to outside pressure/threats), that might well be worth it, but if you can't, you probably will be hurting the child if you try to force them, in particular if they get to resent the child because it's what is keeping them in a relationship they don't want to be in.
You can not force people to like other people, and forcing people to be with people they dislike is a recipe for disaster. It's really as simple as that.
> I don't think it's unreasonable to encourage people to stay in an unhappy marriage rather than leaving their kids with a broken home, assuming the current home wouldn't be worse for the kids than the broken one.
How is an unhappy marriage not a broken home? Either the parents will be displaying their dislike for each other, or they have to constantly live a lie, constantly be dishonest to their child about their emotional state ... neither sounds like a nurturing environment for a child.
I said people should not stay together if they can't work out their differences, you say they should not stay together if they have unworkable differences ... which seems to be the same idea?
But then, the overall impression is not like you are intending to agree with me.
I am confused.
The smallish nuclear family is a very modern invention. Going to high school (and the natural consequence of parents not educating their own children) is even more recent.
That is why people say 'family is the building block of civilization'.
Seriously though, I'm sure we can attribute our urge to procreate to 4,500,000,000 years of evolution, not to churches.
I suggest you read up on Unitarian Universalist and Sunday Assembly churches, which you may not have heard of, but they exist all over the world, and echo exactly what you're saying.
This is so contrary to a century of results from social research from multiple disciplines from all over the world it would be hard to know where to start to counter it. Community is fundamental to humanity, the nuclear 'family' a local and occasionally useful innovation.
Please do try. I don't think what you are saying is true at all and it certainly isn't any thing like a universally accepted scientific truth.
And if they do find someone, won't the loneliness be cured already without having kids?
I strongly suspect that being lonely in a marriage is worse than being lonely and single.