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Comment by Spinnaker_ | Hacker News Reader

The amount of single parent households has 5X'd since the 50s. The US now leads the world in this measure.

This seems like such an obvious factor to leave out of an article like this. I have trouble believing it's not one of, if not the most important changes the US has gone through.

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There is a strong correlation between poverty and single parent households[1 2 3]. However it is not a popular thing to talk about because it can feel like “blaming the victim”. But if we ignore it we can’t have productive conversations about how to solve poverty.

[1]https://post.ca.gov/portals/0/post_docs/publications/Buildin...

[2]https://ifstudies.org/blog/less-poverty-less-prison-more-col...

[3]https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/04/half-of-all...

But is the correlation cause or effect? AFAICT, there is strong evidence that poverty is a leading cause of single parent households.

It's really a vicious cycle. children raised in a single parent household have worse outcomes on almost every metric when they become adults. That includes their own likelihood of becoming single parents and living in poverty, Essentially repeating the cycle.

Interestingly there has been a lot of research on the "Success Sequence"[1]. This is 3 steps for people living in developed countries to break out of this cycle:

1. Finish high school.

2. Get a full-time job once you finish school.

3. Get married before you have children.

To quote the studies, "97% of people who follow these steps do not live in poverty. In contrast, 76% of those that did not adhere to any of these norms were below the poverty line."

[1] https://www.acf.hhs.gov/opre/report/success-sequence-synthes...

How does poverty cause someone to become a parent, and then cause the other parent to leave? Not disagreeing, but I've never been in abject poverty so I can't really understand how the line goes from one to the other.

Money stress does terrible things to even the best relationships. It doesn't even have to be abject poverty. Most of the people in the US would have a hard time dealing with an unexpected $500-1000 expense[0]. Which of course is a fantastically plausible outcome from almost any kind of medical issue -- nearly 2/3rds of bankruptcies are because of medical debt[1]. What choices do you make when your partner's difficulties make it so that you can't afford to eat? How long do you keep your kids in a situation where Famine stalks them, hollow-cheeked?

[0] https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/emergency-savings-r... [1] https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-93430900525-7/fulltext

In the larger context of the article and how the government is spending money meant for the impoverished: Arizona has used welfare money to pay for abstinence-only sex education. Pennsylvania diverted TANF funds to anti-abortion crisis-pregnancy centers.

Simply put, the impoverished just don't have access to resources that others do, including the ability to take off from work and travel somewhere to get an abortion, if needed.

Add to that the poverty to prison pipeline and it's clear that it's really a systemic issue.

Poor people are more likely to make poor choices like unprotected sex, etc and more likely to be religious (no abortion, be fruitful)

That doesn't remotely pass the sniff test unless you also think poverty has dramatically increased in the US since the 1950's, when the opposite has happened. We're talking about single parent households skyrocketing during 8 decades of reduced poverty.

If poverty were a leading cause, then there must be some other truly enormous even-more-leading cause that's counteracting the reduction in poverty since then.

If you change your start date your sniff test up a few decades then the sniff test passes.

The number of single parent households has dropped and the number of single teen mothers has dropped dramatically in the past couple of decades and it is visible in the child poverty statistics.

This is why it's important to remember that correlation != causation

In the 1950s you could also afford to raise a family of 4 on a single (male) income. If a single mother's income today was comparable to a husband's income back in the 50's relative to cost of living, this wouldn't be an issue at all.

Or, you know, if we had any number of institutions in this country which are more common in the rest of the developed world, such as paid childcare and maternity leave, affordable healthcare and rent, real protections against discriminating on the basis of age&gender, etc.

You're comparing a dual-parent household to a single-parent household and claiming that if they made the same amount of money, the children would be equally well off. I'm not sure where you get this idea.

Right. Even when the kids are old enough to be in school full-time, there's still lots of "free" labor that's being left out of the GP's reasoning. A single parent's earning power would need to be significantly higher than a 1950's man's earning power and/or they'd need the same earning power with significantly more non-work hours per week.

And there is ample evidence to suggest that the incentive structures created by the very same Great Society anti-poverty measures are the most responsible for this tragic fact.

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