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Comment by 3np | Hacker News Reader

One thing that really stuck out to me was the implicit assumption that "stable home environment" requires or is equal to "married couple of biological parents living together until child becomes adult".

Especially the quote where an agreement that stability is important was interpreted as agreement that marriage is important.

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Virtually everyone in the world aside from a handful of declining European countries believes that “stable home environment” = “married parents.”

Declining how? Besides natural population growth, I can't think of any other relevant decline European countries are experiencing. And even if they were experiencing a general decline, that doesn't mean there's correlation with the percent of married couples vs non-married ones. Marriage or civil union doesn't change the stability of the couple ( besides the fact that the former usually implies a party with a lot of people which could be expensive).

It’s especially jarring in contrast to Rayiner’s other comments in this conversation are about how Asian Americans are such economically successful go-getters compared to lazy white people due to their culturally superior family structure or something.

Rayiner: have you looked at the demographic pyramid in South Korea, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, or urban China recently? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4a/So...

Or if we want to talk about places where “traditional family values” (i.e. opposition to women’s rights) poll very high, how about the demographics of Russia?

The demographic decline in “a handful of European countries” is substantially a matter of time since industrialization, access to birth control, urbanization, female literacy, amount of immigration, housing prices, etc. more than ethnic/cultural/religious origin, and it is going to land on everywhere else in the world (USA, South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, ..) soon enough.

Argumentum ad populum does not compute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_by_consensus

The evidence is that married couples are more stable than unmarried couples.

Maybe you could share this evidence instead of sharing an anonymous assertion

Sure. I'll also show you how, so you could do this yourself in future.

I googled "stability of cohabiting couples". This led me to Wikipedia [1]. From there I hit the 2002 CDC report "Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage in the United States" [2]. That provides the following statistic:

"The probability of a first marriage ending in separation or divorce within 5 years is 20 percent, but the probability of a premarital cohabitation breaking up within 5 years is 49 percent. After 10 years, the probability of a first marriage ending is 33 percent, compared with 62 percent for cohabitations."

I wondered if that had changed since 2002, so I hit Google Scholar and searched for articles after 2010. A 2020 article discussed cohabitation broadly. I scrolled down and found a 2018 article [3]. (There's an ungated PDF elsewhere if you need it.) They look at 8 countries including the US. Their findings: "cohabiting couples who do not subsequently transition to marriage... consistently have the highest predicted probabilities of separation within 5 years." Some of the gaps between cohabiting and married couples disappear if you control for (e.g.) education and other demographics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohabitation#Likelihood_of_spl... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/02news/div_mar_cohab.htm [3] https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/55/4/1389/167...

It's puzzling to me that you are getting downvoted instead of responses when it seems like your comment follows the whole progressive comment Hacker News thing... Or whatever it is they are going for this week.

i can certainly think of cases where the children and one parent are really much better off without the second

I had an unstable family and a lot of patchwork in my youth. Won't recommend it. It doesn't have to be negative, but it often comes with compromises. And children aren't stupid, they can leverage the conflict of their parents, but it isn't necessarily for their best in the long run.

I heavily dislike the illusionary idealism from some for something that can be quite a lot of work. The state of marriage is pretty much not relevant though. At least in my opinion.

Yes it happens, but isn't the rule. On average, it's ideal to have two happy, loving parents. But only on average!

Thinking in terms of averages and correlations should not justify absurd oversimplifications.

The average human being has 1.99 eyes.

It seems you might be missing the larger point and getting hung up in pedantry. Try taking a deep breath and a step back to consider the bigger picture.

They basically said stable relationships are more stable than unstable relationships and you want evidence?

Stable relationships are possible without marriage. Some people view these as synonyms and others see that as a clear mistake.

Oh sorry I read their comment incorrectly

Why are the only options "married couple" or "unmarried couple"? Or even "married couple" or "single parent"?

Why can't broader family structures be considered, and be stable?

Those are the options that have significant data.

No one knows how other models work. However, note that "stable" comes from the data. Maybe other models are stable, maybe they're not. Without data, it's simply unknown.

I believe Harvard did a study that showed that two parent households were more strongly correlated with child academic achievement than other factors. Granted that's not married couples or biological parents, but two parent households. And academic achievement is only one measure of success.

Stable home environment = GOOD married couple of biological parents living together until child becomes adult

Stable home environment = GOOD biological parent until child becomes adult (if other GOOD parent dies, not leaves)

Leaves = child trauma, parent BAD = child destructive behaviour

One GOOD parent dies = child trauma, but lesser extent

GOOD = morally, respect, supportive, nice, kind, good-feel stuff

/eli5

Lesson: Marry not for looks, but personality eg. Johnny Depp and Amber Heard

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