U.S. has world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households
pewresearch.org
pewresearch.org
Unfortunately I feel our society and current pop culture somehow feeds this problem, but I can't pinpoint how. Some say the welfare system doesn't help either [1]. But I'm not certain that's the full answer, and can also feed into yet more political hysteria.
[0] https://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/report/the-real-r...
[1] https://ifstudies.org/blog/family-breakdown-and-americas-wel...
It's saddening to think that online dating has been the only way to meet new people for millions of young single people over the past 12 months.
> Unfortunately I feel our society and current pop culture somehow feeds this problem, but I can't pinpoint how
Until the world opens back up and people are able to interact again, I don't see pop culture as the real problem.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/t...
For example, what impact does boarding school have on both the children and the families they come from? (boarding school allows both parents to work all week, allows children more time to socialize with their peers, allows parents to own smaller houses, etc.)
What impact do after school clubs have (so parents can both have a full time job). How about residential summer camps?
How about the impact of larger remote schools? In a school of 100 children, the range of activities that can be offered is limited. Yet if there were 100,000 children, then children could specialize on really rare topics, and still have enough people interested to fill a class.
It just seems there are so many potential ways to make family life & schooling work better for everyone, but without data it's a matter of every parent stumbling in the dark, because for most people child-raising isn't something they have done hundreds of times before.
[1] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Institute_for_Family_S...
[2] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Heritage_Foundation
Then they grow up, find a lover, and realize they need to give up parts of their individuality in order for the relationship to work.
Whaaaatt?? Give up my individuality? But I was raised to enshrine this above all else! Heck no, I'd rather divorce!
This results in low self-worth of many people in bad circumstances, lack of compassion towards them from those who are better off, and sometimes active disdain from those who were lucky enough to climb out of poverty, as an overcompensation for their own past hardship.
Maybe the problem is that government began focusing on this with the War on Poverty? Maybe this focus is how our society is "feeding this problem"? Maybe by subsidizing single parent homes, we inadvertently create more single parent homes? Maybe we consider data: - How many black homes in the 1940s single parent vs 1970s? - What were the black unemployment rates in the 1920s vs 1990s? Or 2010 vs 2019? - See https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...
Instead of renaming schools why don't we free students. For example, rather than throwing money at unions, help the students in Baltimore schools go to schools of their parent's choice such as religious or charter schools. Thirteen of 39 high schools in Baltimore have ZERO students proficient in math.
We doom these children at $15k/head/yr.
Read some of Dr. Thomas Sowell's work. The data is there. It is data that changed him from a marxist as a young man to a believer in freedom and markets.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-majority-of-us-children-still...
Mom-only households are 43.9% for Blacks, 12.0% for Whites.
"In the words of Harvard’s Paul Peterson, “some programs actively discouraged marriage,” because “welfare assistance went to mothers so long as no male was boarding in the household… Marriage to an employed male, even one earning the minimum wage, placed at risk a mother’s economic well-being.” Infamous “man in the house” rules meant that welfare workers would randomly appear in homes to check and see if the mother was accurately reporting her family-status.
The benefits available were extremely generous. According to Peterson, it was “estimated that in 1975 a household head would have to earn $20,000 a year to have more resources than what could be obtained from Great Society programs.” In today’s dollars, that’s over $90,000 per year in earnings.
That may be a reason why, in 1964, only 7% of American children were born out of wedlock, compared to 40% today. As Jason Riley has noted, “the government paid mothers to keep fathers out of the home—and paid them well.”
https://ifstudies.org/blog/family-breakdown-and-americas-wel...
If we want this to improve, the simplest solution is to unlink being a single parent from getting extra welfare or preferential access to social housing. If we want to go even further, we could unlink welfare from having children at all, and just offer child tax credits instead and universal access to family planning.
Available person-hours per child in a loving environment is highly connected to positive academic and emotional outcomes for children (some married couples still suffer from one partner being absent, even in the same house though). It’s no surprise that American school children are some of the most medicated for behavior modification.
Children respond to divorce worse than they do to the death of a parent.
Everyone is punished when more people around them in society is suffering. (except the extremely wealthy, who can afford gated communities with armed guards and who don’t have to ever interact with those below them on the income scale).
Coming from someone who would like to be a single parent some day...
Things start to scale much better once you get to bigger family units, with 3 or even 4 generations present. Grandparents, uncles, sisters and brothers of different ages. Looking after the kids. Or in tribal society whole tribe up to 100 people.
I would like to raise a child, but I also want what will be best for them, not me.
There's a saying often attributed to both Aristotle and Ignatius Loyola (founder of the Jesuit order): Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.
* https://www.healthline.com/health/parenting/first-seven-year...
Couples (generally) space children out a bit, so the second one often comes when the first is roughly two: so one parent can look after each. If a third comes along, the first would be 3-4 years old, and already somewhat maturer and hopefully able to handle some detachment from the parent(s).
AFAICT, the 'best practice' is for there to be a "secure attachment" that your child has to you as parent(s):
* https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_attachment...
I find it interesting talking to adults who have never married and never had children because their concepts of time and finance are so utterly different. For example I ask them why they aren’t multimillionaires driving something like a Ferrari and they look at me like I’m crazy. If I had the time availability and financial freedom of a single person earning at the same rate I would easily be a multimillionaire, numerically speaking, off salary and savings alone due to lower expenses and greater saving/investment principal over time. Single people somehow always find that confusing.
I also find it interesting how older (30+) educated adults are somehow surprised by the time and money commitment involved with children. How could that possibly be a surprise... yet it generally is a complete devastating shock. Baffles the mind.
Adopt if you want to help someone in need.
Surrogacy is an ethical landmine that most people don’t think deeply about in terms of consequences.
How do they respond to bickering parents who hate each other but don't get divorced "for the children"
I have a friend who's wife seems to hate him. They've stayed together for 15+ years "for the children". My friend was lamenting that he had to try to teach his young adult kids (19-24) not to treat other people the same way mommy treats dad.
Edit: a more interesting study would break down the teen pregnancy population in the US by religion or ethnic background to look at the different rates instead of grouping everyone together. The US is not a monoculture.
For example, in Africa and Asia it is much more common that children live with their parents and grandparents for example. This is included in their definition of "single-parent household":
> In this report, single-parent households have a sole adult living with at least one biological, step or foster child under age 18.
Also, it would not explain the difference between Europe and the US. In Europe there are few places where abstinence-only is the norm. While in the US this is much more common. And yet the US has a higher rate of children living in a single-parent household.
When we look at the dominant religion in those regions I was referring to, we see that Islam places strict guidelines on sexual relationships. So there is a strong causal relationship there. Furthermore, to your point, Islam does promote strong family relationships which can also strongly reduce the problem of single family households. Those two factors are not contradictory.
> Also, it would not explain the difference between Europe and the US
Looking at the map, the vast majority of Europe is still in the orange shade, compared to the heavily blue shade of the countries I'm referring to.
Furthermore, there's the fallacy of looking at how Christianity failed in the West, then people generalizing that abstinence doesn't work as I described in my other post.
Which would be those? I am not sure how "promiscuity" can be measured.
https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2017/12/19/the-...
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/03/19/...
Edit: those economist articles are committing one of the most basic fallacies: correlation vs. causation. South Sudan has so many issues that it's ridiculous to blame them on polygamy.
Economically speaking, I think it's interesting (for various definitions of interesting) how little value the U.S. as a society puts on future educated citizens, and by now this form of shortsightedness is really starting to show.
Because, if you really zoom out, everything you invest into kids will come back 30 years later. Most other western societies (and even "evil" China) have realized that investing into childcare, education, youth programs, financial support for parents and and kids' healthcare is really the ultimate societal index fund.
Compare that to the US, where children are seen as a personal luxury that you have to afford.
It is much easier to import highly educated professionals from abroad.
"While U.S. children are more likely than children elsewhere to live in single-parent households, they’re much less likely to live in extended families. In the U.S., 8% of children live with relatives such as aunts and grandparents, compared with 38% of children globally."
So you can't tell.
I would think most extendeds in the 38% are two-parent. But it's a good question. Many single parents would also be marked as extended.
#1. 85% of youth who are currently in prison grew up in a fatherless home. (Texas Department of Corrections)
#2. 7 out of every 10 youth that are housed in state-operated correctional facilities, including detention and residential treatment, come from a fatherless home. (U.S. Department of Justice)
#3. 39% of students in the United States, from the first grade to their senior year of high school, do not have a father at home. Children without a father are 4 times more likely to be living in poverty than children with a father. (National Public Radio)
#4. Children from fatherless homes are twice as likely to drop out from school before graduating than children who have a father in their lives. (National Public Radio)
Sidenote - A central tenet of Marxism is the dismantling of the “nuclear family structure.”
I do see it in maybe a less overt way in a lot of comments on HN. There are comments in this discussion blaming a lack of social programs in the US for the problem. Things like that. There's nothing wrong with believing that, but the counter arguments don't get much visibility around here.
I suggest reading chapter 2 (starting at "Abolition of the family!") for the first, and chapter 2.3 and 2.4 for the second.
I don't believe Marxism is a primary cause.
While I don't really know anything about Marxism, I doubt it baselessly advocates for the removal of family structures without something to replace it like community engagement
It's annoying to hear people preach about the woes of Marxism, because, and this is a biased US perspective, a very small proportion of left leaning individuals would ever describe themselves as Marxist. People doing so would be seen as holding extreme opinions. Hearing fearmongering about communists comes off as a red flag that someone's out of touch with reality and fearful of the amorphous blog that is "the left". It comes off as an implicit strawman. Attacking Marxism as means to undermine the credibility of the left is eye-rollingly tiresome to hear. And yeah, of course, comes with plausible deniability. Nothing good will come of that comment but an unpleasant debate of predictably mainstream left folks arguing semantically that marxism doesn't matter, a fringe actual marxist doing their own thing, and a conservative viewpoint playing off both to say "look there's marxist" or "well I saw this extreme opinion on twitter so no".
Marxism and Marxist-influenced movements are also very represented in academia, which naturally makes them influential among the literati at large.
Discrediting the nuclear family unit as the tool of patriarchy is absolutely a central tenet of anti-oppression education programs. I would be surprised if anyone who had exposure to that kind of curriculum would find that controversial.
If that is controversial, perhaps we need better frameworks and tools that enable people to discuss it.
> We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by...
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20190118185735/https://blacklive...
We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement
by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that
collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree
that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
Some of the founders of BLM are self-proclaimed Marxists. I don't think it is much of a stretch to say there is some sort of a connection between Marxism and being anti-family.
Which in a rural white community would literally be a Sunday church sermon.
Again, why in the world would it be necessary to disrupt the nuclear family to gain greater connection to extended family and the community??
This refers to ways our society benefits 2-parent households and makes things harder for single parents. They suggest addressing this by providing more support and community for each other, not by tearing down nuclear families.
As an analogy, installing wheelchair ramps doesn't prevent people from climbing stairs, it just makes building more accessible.
I see no way to read that as BLM supports the nuclear family. So the largest social justice movement in the US doesn't support two parent families. That seems pretty significant
*While U.S. children are more likely than children elsewhere to live in single-parent households, they’re much less likely to live in extended families. In the U.S., 8% of children live with relatives such as aunts and grandparents, compared with 38% of children globally.*
The UK, with a similar lack of living with extended family and a similar culture, has a 21% single parent rate compared to the 23% found in the US.
The nuclear family model of parent and children living separate from extended family is most assuredly not the common model throughout recorded history.
Or are you saying that it's normal for Fathers to be uninvolved in their children's lives?
The US is way below the world average for the rate of children living in extended families.