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Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

These trends have been happening for decades and it tracks quite well the gradual breakdown of stable family structures. Psychologically for example, kids experience their parent’s divorce as worse than a parent’s death.

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Do you have a source for that claim? It sounds like nonsense. My parents divorced when I was 6 or 7 years old, and I’m pretty sure it would be unimaginably more traumatic if one of them had died instead.

Just anecdotally, my parents divorced and one of my parents took their own life, the divorce was harder

If you compare children of divorce with children who have a parent die the children of divorce look worse on basically every measure, sure. That doesn’t mean divorce is worse for children than the death of a parent. Divorce is a choice. The king of person who gets divorced is different from the kind who doesn’t. By way of example Asian-Americanc college graduates who get married in their 30s have a divorce rate around ~2%. Most people who get divorced remarry. The kind of person who marries a divorcee is not the same king of person as those who don’t.

Correlation isn’t causation.

I've read some takes that divorce can be positive for a child. The theory was: parents having time away from their child gave them a break, and also helped them value their time with the child more. There are also theories that living in a divorced family is better than living in an unhappily married one.

AFAIR there are studies looking at families with different cultural stances on divorce (but good luck controlling for other factors there). Also they tend to measure more easily measurable outcomes in the child than mental health, such as grades, which don't necessarily correlate.

Of course divorce can be positive! My parents divorced in my late teens and it was hugely beneficial for me since it meant I could live with my mother and entirely avoid the very stressful daily conflicts with my father.

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