Two-parent households should be a policy goal
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
At the same time, I do think people have gone a bit too far in their want to not give anyone shame. Yes - some shame is not going to help single-parent households now but I would think some societal shame would prevent people from being reckless with having kids or maybe make people think twice about leaving their partner when it really is just a rough patch.
If divorce makes outcomes 10% worse but makes divorce with children 20% less likely, maybe it's a wash?
At the very least, it seems incorrect to insist to me the downsides of shame always outweighs the benefits from it. Even if putting numbers on it is kinda farcical, but I think the point still stands.
A child of a divorce is likely to deal with anger, instability from custody agreements, custody battles, emotional fights and manipulation between parents, new relationships on both sides and the changes that come with that including issues with step siblings.
Divorce comes with so many negatives for children. A “healthy” divorce is rare from what I’ve seen to this point in my life.
We can easily see the population of divorced families, it's much harder for us to shine a light on "should be divorced but aren't". I have a hard time believing kids with a dysfunctional parent relationship at home would be better off.
For the kids, they’ll feel this for the rest of their lives regardless of any other circumstances.
Meanwhile, several US states are working against this goal by preventing women from having unwanted pregnancies. It's as though policy has consequences!
I have said something like this for years now.
Specifically, I have said:
"I don't know how much shame should be employed in a society but I suspect it is not "none"".
One possible (partial) explanation: If there is enough insurance/benefits to cover the bills after dad's death, mom is usually the primary childcare provider. So if dad's role is primarily as provider, his loss can be substantially mitigated with money.
Do people want the birthrate to go down or up? It's very easy to shame people into "you should have way more than the median income and own a house before having kids", and guess what effect that has.
Moreover, it's not necessary to force everyone in the same house. My parents and inlaws are within 20 minutes. It's great and since they are both married and happy, there's little family stress and the kids get ample time with both grandparents. God forbid, if anything were to happen to either my wife or I, they would be well taken care of.
Eventually our parents may move in or closer by, but right now, it's nice for everyone to have some separation.
More importantly, young people need a reason not to move hundreds or thousands of miles away from their stable household. Investing in community resources, local economies, and infrastructure that promotes health and opportunity are all necessary.
Case in point - Google (first hand experience).
So all that said, I imagine a hugely beneficial policy would be one where young people who leave for college would get assistance paying off student debt if and to the extent they return to their community afterward.
it would be good to make at least one of these opportunities available to more students.
Monoculture is efficient only for the group building the infrastructure.
Huh? My sister and I both live more than a thousand miles away from our stable, married parents that we are on good terms with. We went where our work took us and then met and married people in that area. My sister lives several hundred miles away from her in-laws, and my in-laws (also still married) only moved to be near us when they were no longer capable of living independently (there is no way with all of their health issues that they could take care of our kids).
This goes back a generation as well, though the distances were smaller (~400 miles of driving between me and my grandparents when I was growing up).
Moreover I know many who do live close to parents and seem estranged due to broken families/mom and dad can't stand to be in the same room, etc
1: I'm considering a full day of driving as 12 hours here. Different people tend to disagree with this number in either direction.
the question is, why is that? you said it yourself, you had one good job offer. what do we need to change that you would get better job offers at home?
in china the culture is that a young couple moves in with the husbands parents who often prepare/build their house with that in mind. (in simple terms, the master bedroom is for the couple, the grandparents move to a smaller room). the grandparents help take care of the grandchildren, and later the children take care of their parents.
but even there this is breaking apart. young people move across the country to get good jobs. sometimes the parents follow them. or they leave the children with the grandparents, sometimes not seeing them and their own children more than once a year.
Short of forcing a company to hire me, I'm not sure what can be done. There were no lack of jobs close to home (I basically went into the same profession as my dad, after all), just a lack of people who wanted to hire me specifically.
Are you just saying you and your wife have similar driving speed and endurance, or are your wife's in-laws different people from your parents?
My parents have so many reasons for not moving (Of course they want to see their grandchildren; they fly out 2-3 times a year and we visit every summer):
1. My dad only retired a year ago, and he still occasionally works on a contract basis
2. Which kid do they move to be close to; me or my sister? I'm on the west coast, she is in flyover country.
3. Having lived in the area for over 30 years they have many close friends and are actively involved in the local community.
4. Moving to either me or my sister would put them much further away from my maternal grandmother, who is in her 90s (right now only ~400 miles away from them).
After I accepted my job far away, I did hear back from a company closer (but by no means close) to my parents, it was a one year contract for less than half what I was making in a permanent position. I would have taken a pay-cut to be closer to my parents (particularly since my SO at the time refused to relocate to California), but a non-permanent position for $30k/year just didn't seem like a wise life-choice.
I'm in a similar position, and it's been a lifesaver. When our first child was ~6 months old, my wife had a gallstone attack at 11:30 at night, and my parents were able to be there in minutes, so we could get to the ER without waking our daughter up and bringing to her to a hospital in the middle of the night. I don't even want to think about how much harder that would have been without nearby parents—and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
But the stronger the incentives to start and keep such parental arrangements, the stronger the forces keeping dysfunctional and harmful relationships together, at the expense of everyone involved. People fought for divorce for a reason, that needs to be addressed somehow.
I'd much rather see policies towards solving these problems versus one that has the government getting in the middle of my marriage or parenting.
The ideal would be for municipally owned mid-rise apartments in mixed-use neighborhoods to become common. Vienna does this very well, but public housing has been demonized in America (and, like the lazy dad who does a chore so badly they never get asked to do it again, our federal government starved public housing support so badly that most Americans think of it as an intrinsically horrific way to live).
I understand that in Japan there is a set of federally defined zoning types. Some beaurocrat checks your proposal against the requirements of the zone you want to build in and you get your permit or rejection within days. It's difficult to comprehend the massive impact it would have for permitting to go from an expensive, multi-year dice roll to a mostly predictable process that takes days.
In no way are either of them a third 'parent'. This idea that grandparents and aunts and uncles can actually be a third parent has to die. No one who actually lives in these situations is confused as to who's who.
We lived with my grandparents as children and while again, we loved them very much and they watched and cared for us like parents... The relationship is fundamentally different.
Alloparenting is great, but 3 parents running the same household would be a nightmare in most cases.
Not generally. But creating a child necessarily involves creating a stable biological relationship primarily with two other people.
Most people across history think the biological circumstances that bring us into the world are spiritually important and making the triangle between mother-father-child healthy is good for children.
For better or worse, people care their genetic material. We can either choose to create a society that makes the best of this, or we can try to suppress it and convince people that it doesn't matter.
And yes I know that surrogacy exists. But that's a side argument that opens up a lot more questions and I don't think it really changes the fundamentals.
Multigenerational households are another popular option to deal with economic challenges.
If three-parent scenario is tried at a larger scale and if it works with small tweaks to our social contract, then why not?
But overall, this seems circuitous. The author acknowledges that inequality is both a cause and effect interacting with marriage, and cites several ways that kids are better off in two-parent families -- but the description of those comparisons makes no mention of controlling for these other factors. So one can have a lot of skepticism that a poor two-parent household, where both parents need to work long hours or multiple jobs to cover rent, where housing is less stable, where surprising costs (a broken-down car etc) turn into catastrophic disruptions, will turn out healthy successful kids. But the finding that kids do better in two parent families already selects out a number of metrics -- educational attainment, future earnings, lower rate of getting in trouble at school or with law enforcement - all of which are desirable irrespective of family structure. Those seem like better goals, which we are already pursuing just relatively ineffectively.
You want more kids to go to college? Make college cheaper, make colleges spend more money on instruction and less on administration and coaches.
Want kids to have fewer behavioral issues at school? Well, stuff that could make their home life more stable whether their parents are married or not may include safe, affordable, stable housing, and IDK, schools that don't have to do active shooter drills b/c of the real threat of being invaded by a well-armed crazy person might be nice.
Want kids to grow up to earn more? I think Piketty's focus on the share of growth that goes to capital versus labor is important. Generational wage stagnation in real terms is still critical.
Want kids to get in trouble with the law less? In my city, the police did a mass arrest of hundreds of kids skateboarding recently. No one's top concern about crime here is "too many kids are skateboarding". Maybe law enforcement should focus more on e.g. corrupt local officials, employers with systemic wage theft, landlords dangerously skipping repairs and maintenance, etc etc rather than kids on skateboards?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/opinion/single-parent-pov...
> We are often reluctant to acknowledge one of the significant drivers of child poverty — the widespread breakdown of family — for fear that to do so would be patronizing or racist.
One way to give them more money and not incentivize single parenthood (which is the issue, not divorce, and treating them as equivalent has always been wrong and is increasingly so as marriage rates drops) is to go to UBI instead of means-tested aid, or, if using means testing, use a means-testing formula which doesn't punish two-parent families.
> Children being raised by single mothers is not a good outcome.
Its a lot better than children being raised by two parents together, one of which is abusing them and/or the other parent, which any change which does more to avoid incentivizing divorce or single-parenthood more than eliminating any two-parent penalty would incentivize, especially for the poor.
UBI still incentivizes divorce. It offers unconditional financial support to single mothers.
> Abuse
We're talking about no-fault divorces. Divorce, with cause, has always been legal -- abuse, neglect, abandonment, sterility, addiction -- there have always been ways to deal with these issues.
More than half of all children will be raised in divorced households. The idea that 50% of fathers are abusing the children is absurd. There is a very clear lack of awareness on how severe each of these issues are. Yes, abuse by parents
No, it is neutral on divorce, because the support is unconditional.
> More than half of all children will be raised in divorced households.
Will be... when? And where's the evidence? The entire increase in single-mother families from the 1970s to 2019 was driven by the increase in parents who never married, not an increase in divorce-with-children. [0]
> The idea that 50% of fathers are abusing the children is absurd.
No one said that all divorce was due to abuse, but its interesting that aside from your invented numbers and inventing the claim of universality, you also changed divorce involving abuse of the other partner or a child to being exclusively about fathers and exclusively about abusing children.
[0] https://ifstudies.org/blog/children-first-why-family-structu....
Any government support subsidizes divorce. You are ignoring the fact that in the default state, without UBI (or government assistance), divorce would be naturally disincentivized because of the added financial burden on the caretaker. It substitutes the government as the provider instead of the father. It's precisely what the entire article is about.
> No one said that all divorce was due to abuse
You used it as a red herring to claim that divorce shouldn't be disincentivized. The fact that there are valid cases for divorce doesn't negate that fact that even in those cases there should be massive disincentives against it and that the overwhelming majority of divorces today likely should not be allowed because there is no valid reason for them. There's a lack of awareness about how destructive broken households and families are to children and society.
uhm, what?
either there is a valid case for divorce or there isn't. you can't have it both ways. if there is a valid case for divorce then absolutely nothing should stand in the way.
preventing divorce on its own does not help fix broken households.
i do agree that as a socety we should do everything in our power to fix broken households. and by doing that, divorces will be reduced. but this is not done by disincentivizing divorce. it is done by removing the things that are the cause for the household to break.
"Money arguments are the second leading cause of divorce, behind infidelity"
the infidelity issue is addressed by better education (teach children that when they get married, their responsibility is to take care of each other (and teach them how to do that))
and the money issue is addressed by financial support for parents. it doesn't have to be UBI, but it should be to make sure that couples have enough money to live and raise children. in germany this is achieved by guaranteeing an existence minimum, and by unconditional extra money of around 200euro per child.
disincentivizing divorce by not financially supporting the single parent is a very bad idea because it forces them to remain in an abusive relationship.
If children were not involved, I would agree with you. But because children are negatively affected by divorce, there should be disincentives for divorce. Even valid reasons for divorce have alternatives. That may include substance abuse treatment. Job programs. Marital counseling. Parenting classes. There should be pressure for parents to work through difficult marriages instead of divorce when children are involved.
> preventing divorce on its own does not help fix broken households.
I agree, but incentivizing divorce doesn't improve things either. "Broken households" are statistically still better environments for children than single parent households. I also want to point out that between 1/3 and 1/2 of marriages end in divorce, and most of them are not "broken households".
> but this is not done by disincentivizing divorce
Marriage is hard. If you're presenting mothers with the choice of divorce with favorable custody, alimony, and child support rulings, or trying to work through a bad or difficult marriage for the children's sake, it is far easier to choose the divorce, and they do. Most divorces result in worse outcomes for the children. Period. That's why they should disincentivized, and certainly shouldn't be incentivized.
> "Money arguments are the second leading cause of divorce, behind infidelity"
Infidelity may be the leading cause, but it still makes up a minority of divorces today, and in many of those cases, it's the woman who is unfaithful and files for divorce anyway (again, incentives). If you look up the leading reasons for divorce aside from infidelity, they're nearly all various forms of not getting along well. Abuse makes up a very small portion of divorces.
> the infidelity issue is addressed by better education
If you really believe this, I have a bridge to sell you. People aren't cheating because they don't know it's wrong. Plenty of highly educated people cheat.
> and the money issue is addressed by financial support for parents.
Throwing money at parents isn't going to prevent divorce (and we want to prevent divorce), unless you're saying only married couples get the money.
> In Germany...
Divorce rates in Germany are similar to the US, so whatever you're doing, it's not working there either.
> disincentivizing divorce by not financially supporting the single parent is a very bad idea because it forces them to remain in an abusive relationship.
Again, a very, very, very small fraction of divorces are the result of abuse. It's a red herring that ignores the real problem -- the overwhelming majority of divorces occurring today result in worse outcomes for children. The state has a duty to protect children from the negative consequences of divorce, ergo, the state should disincentivize divorce.
Infidelity may be the leading cause, but it still makes up a minority of divorces today
i didn't see the statistics. i assumed it meant there are more divorces caused by it than by financial problems, and that the remaining causes are other problems. (eg: 40% infidelity, 30% money, 20% other, 10% abuse. something like that)
People aren't cheating because they don't know it's wrong
that's not where i was going with education. the problem as i see it is, that people are cheating because they don't feel valued enough by their partner or they don't value their partner enough, and that i believe can absolutely be addressed with education. i don't mean teaching them that it is wrong, but teaching them how to value their partner more so they or their partner don't even develop the desire to cheat in the first place.
Throwing money at parents isn't going to prevent divorce
but it should remove money as a reason for divorce.
Divorce rates in Germany are similar to the US, so whatever you're doing, it's not working there either.
well, i think that is to simple as a comparison. again, not having seen the statistics, i expect that in germany not many divorces are cause by financial difficulties, and most are cause by people not having learned to get along. which too, can be addressed by education. i would suspect that in germany, having a much less conservative culture, divorce rates would be even higher if financial problems were added to the mix. so for all i know, the money part should be working. germany has other problems instead.
the state should disincentivize divorce
yes, but not through simply taking away money but by addressing the actual root causes. it should be more difficult to divorce, but once divorce actually happens the parent taking the children should be financially supported. but i just thought of another approach: more equally shared custody. i believe this is the norm in germany. that way, there is no financial benefit because both parents have equal costs.
In the US, many states have family court systems with statutory and/or systemic biases against fathers. Mothers are typically given majority custody of the children and deference when it comes to making decisions about the children.
Single mothers often qualify for government assistance that they wouldn't qualify for as a married woman. Tax credits and deductions are awarded to the parent with majority custody (which is typically women).
Fathers typically contribute more to the financial assets of the marriage, yet are typically lucky to receive 50% of marital assets in a divorce. Men typically have higher long-term earnings than women in the US (for reasons that aren't discriminatory), and courts typically award the lower earning spouse some percentage of the higher-earning spouses future income in a divorce (even when there aren't children).
When it comes to paying for costs related to raising children (school tuition, sports, fees, medical costs), the higher earning spouse is typically ordered to pay a higher proportion of the costs (like 60-70%).
For example, women usually get more custody, but that’s also because men often don’t seek custody. Men who seek custody are awarded it at similar rates as women, IIRC.
It’s also not true that men are “lucky” to get 50% of the assets. That’s the default position in community property states.
And it still doesn’t explain how women are incentivized to divorce, given that despite some of the things above, women still fare worse in divorce than men do. Child support and alimony are, on average, something like softens the blow for the lower-earning spouse, not a path to a higher standard of living than was enjoyed in the marriage.
FWIW, I’m divorced and pay child support and the lion’s share of kid expenses, including school tuition. And yet I wouldn’t trade my financial position for my ex’s. This is true for almost every divorced man I know, and I know a lot at this point.
Yes, 50% communal property is the default position. It is frequently modified to account for things like lower income (or the greater expense of having the children more). There's a reason why the story of the wife keeping the house and the man moving into a crummy apartment are practically cliche at this point.
> And it still doesn’t explain how women are incentivized to divorce, given that despite some of the things above, women still fare worse in divorce than men do.
Women file 70% of divorces. For college-educated women, it's nearly 90%. There's clearly an incentive for women. Men typically earn more income than women. Men have larger savings and retirement accounts. Men are more likely to have pensions. Men are more likely to own businesses and other assets. Divorce gives women a claim to all these things, even into the future, in ways that they would never have had in marriage.
Alimony and child support are both incentives for women (who typically earn less income and are more likely to not work at all). Even in 50/50 custody, the higher earning parent will pay child support.
You are right that fathers may still have nominally more income even after you account for alimony and child support transfers. But that doesn't mean it's still not an incentive. From a woman's perspective, she's earning the exact same income that she would be earning anyway, plus alimony and child support. It's still an incentive for her even if the man is earning nominally more. Just because Elon Musk and Tiger Woods are still wealthy after divorce, and likely still wealthier than their former spouses, the women definitely benefitted from those divorces and the men didn't.
The money has to go toward producing the outcome, and since the likely causes of the positive outcomes are values-based[1], just giving money doesn't cut it. At least, that's what the economic evidence appears to show.
[1] Values-based: Values meaning attitudes toward hard-work, sacrifice, self-control, and especially education. These values have nothing to do with gender roles, race, or ethnicity.
The reason people are reluctant to really explore the nature and role of the “breakdown of the family” (especially people like Kristof who throw it out as a facile explanation, who are not at all, contrary to his description, uncommon, this line being standard on both the Republican Right and the Democratic center-right) is that that breakdown is itself a result of policies that are patronizing and racist, both in which family models they favor and in which communities they undermine family structures of all kinds.
If we valued free speech more, we might be able to have more open, honest conversations in the public realm here.
In a society where people are easily fired, or have their lives disrupted in other ways, for expressing the wrong opinion or saying the wrong thing, there is no upside to having this conversation. The only rational decision is to ignore the question and move on.
The fewer conversations we have, the less likely we are to be able to solve problems.
Progressive discourse has turned so ideological that perfectly normal mainstream conversations make people anxious.
People shiver to even discuss the idea/benefits of a heterosexual marriage. As if its some rogue legacy structure. As if single parent situations are some higher moral good to strive for.
A portion of men, especially the lower classes, are facing severe issues. But this can hardly be addressed as the very idea of men in need of social justice does not fit the "all men are oppressors" narrative.
These politics achieve worse outcomes, not better ones, and they alienate vast groups of people.
And therein lies the problem. We've seen for years how every call for minimum wage increases or labor rights is met with "You're only worth what the market will bear. If you want more money and better treatment, you'd better make yourself worth more to the market!", yet when the shoe is on the other foot, and the labor market favors workers, policymakers treat it as an _emergency_ requiring immediate correction. Unemployment expansion was cancelled at the state level (despite evidence that people on unemployment assistance find work faster), employers strongly resisted any call for wage increases or working condition improvements, opting to whine "No one wants to work anymore" to anyone who would listen, and the Federal Reserve started hiking rates as quickly as it could despite little evidence that inflation was caused by anything other than supply chain difficulties.
The unspoken yet universal policy preference of our governments is to weaken and impoverish workers to the greatest extent possible to ensure enough of us are compliant and desperate enough to take any job at any wage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K1tqDyN4xE
Tim Gurner was recently excoriated for saying the quiet part out loud from the perspective of the rich and powerful: "The governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment" so we can have less "arrogance" from workers.
there is another approach besides just a higher minimum wage.
provide better education to everyone so that they can achieve higher qufications and get better jobs. that will solve the problem of minimum wage jobs because noone wants those anymore. (but, just to be clear, i am not against raising the minimum wage, just that by itself it's not really going to solve the problem)
Child support makes sense in theory, but is butchered in practice. The judgements often have little to do with how much it actually costs to support the child and is more about a percentage of income.
Let's not forget, the state is the third party in a divorce. They do not want to support anyone when they can force one of the other parties to do so.
[1] https://calmatters.org/projects/california-keeps-millions-in...
In fact, a large chunk of existing tax law deals with all the possible combinations of households with children and parents, where the parents may or may not be living together, and may or may not be married to each other. It is designed to fairly accomodate unmarried people, not to encourage marriage.
A vengeful judge and spouse can easily wreck one’s finances unfairly.
However, there are also plenty of welfare programs that are means tested so marriage is ruled out.
(One of the leading theories for the number of babies born out of wedlock rising so much since the early 1960s is the end of the shotgun wedding: the baby daddy counters by pointing out that the mom will lose out on a lot of benefits if she gets married)
This hardly mattered years ago, but with median wages getting around 70k+, a lot more people pay this penalty for getting married.
In the US at least, the financial and legal incentives for women to divorce is far, far greater.
As it stands, men already don’t look at women for their financial prospects like women do towards men. If we can change this aspect of our culture, I think this will give to one of the largest rises in two parent households.
I don’t expect it to ever change though.
I'm nervous and concerned that I'm not human. I distinctly remember having a childhood and living a human life, but those might just be uploaded memories. What is my best course of action to get to the bottom of this mystery?
> Multiple studies document a causal link between the economic struggles of men and the growth in single-mother families.
> To give disadvantaged children better futures, policy makers should promote widespread employment and economic security among a wider segment of the population—particularly non-college-educated men.
It is simply no longer the case.
for me an equal relation ship means that each of our wishes, goals and needs are of equal importance. it can mean that both partners work and split housework equally, but it also can mean something different.
why is that better than everyone just realizing their own wishes and goals? because this way a space for cooperation is created because we'll both end up working on and supporting each others goals or wishes, and also each of us are able to notice if there is a conflict between each of our goals and wishes, and then we can work them out.
Some mothers have 5-15 kids!
Also that time has passed. All of Asia including south and south east are basically at replacement rate. Africa averages higher but not by a whole lot more and that number is dropping quickly.
There’s a reason women from wealthy families never work and dedicate all their time to raising kids.
(Removed: "Cloudflare DNS blocks archive.ph.")
Edit: Cloudflare clarifies below.
In some circles, the mere suggestion that this should be a policy goal is insulting, as it hints that single-parent homes are inferior. Our government isn't really allowed to prefer one over the other, even if it would result in less misery.
Furthermore, the tools that government has at its disposal to encourage two-parent households are few and clumsy. No decision to stay together has ever hinged on a slightly higher tax exemption, or some other priority access to the bureaucracy.
The writer's room of some Hollywood sitcom has more power than Congress in these matters. I doubt very much that they are interested in giving up on the show that makes jokes that discourage such, but even if they did, that's one show when the real culprit is the entire weight of the entertainment industry.
We might as well talk about how it should be a policy goal to raise the speed of light to 750,000 miles per second.
A single parent with a strong local community of caregivers who can help perform the work of raising a kid in their community is probably not worse off than the standard, alienated two parent household in America.
So while what you say might be true in America, I don't think it's axiomatic.
The latter is obvious lying and deflection, and that's a PR disaster. The former is an absolute shitstorm. Single-parent celebrities that have five different kids by four different baby-daddies go on talk shows and Twitter, start calling you a Nazi. Whatever passes for newspaper editorials now days start whining for the next 6 months that it's anti-inclusive and undermines diversity. Invitations at colleges to speak at graduation are rescinded, some of your campaign donors stop taking your calls even though the mid-terms are coming up in less than a year. LGBT activists then crawl out of the woodwork saying that what we really need aren't two-parent households, because anyone can be a parent. We just need two-plus income families, and that poly-amory is superior because it can potentially bring four or more incomes into the house. Only cis-bigots really want just two parents there.
And then you back off. Not a battle worth fighting. None of this, even if it worked, could be milked for votes in an effort to get promoted from the House to the Senate (or the White House). And since it would be attacked from day one with the possibility that it might fail, why even try? It's far from a sure thing. All we know is the correlation, not the causation.
Yeah they are, expecially for the average childrens in average single household (struggling single-mothers). The idea that being a single mother is heroic is dumb and a disservice for everybody, expecially the children involved. At best single-parents are Martyrs. Obviously there are the exceptions but data shows that single-parent households are extremily more likely to live in poverty or near poverty.
I believe that children in struggling (financially & other) households should be given in temporary adopotion into stable families (with a set of incentives or child support checks) till one of the original parent find enough stability to fully take care of them. "It takes a village to grow a kid 2.0" approach
This isn't Victorian Britain.
What century are you living in.
Can we control for confounding variables like education level and age at first conception because maybe the answer isn't "single parenthood is awful" but "women shouldn't have children so young" or "it turns out poor people just do worse than wealthy people". The first likely boils down to the 2nd.
I have seen so many varieties of single motherhood and couple parenthood that I'm not convince that single parenthood is inherently a problem. I think it's more poverty. Single motherhood often couples with poverty, although not always now that women are more educated. But I've seen dual income households that matched a single parent household have the same kind of struggles.
Perhaps we should just ask why our social net is so weak that being a single earner means you can't raise a child. Anyone can lose their partner and they shouldn't have to scramble to pick literally anyone just to ensure their kids are cared for.
That world is gone, and probably for the better in many ways.
The world needs to find different cultural norms around children such that we can have a stable population and happy children.
For most of human history, raising a family was not really a choice, culturally speaking, it was a mandate. Currently we’ve gone the other direction, and raising a family is a lifestyle decision like hiking the Appalachian trail, and partway through your partner may decide it is not for them.
From a freedom perspective this is ok but socially I think this is precarious. We’ve given up our stable optimum of centuries and clearly not yet found a new one.
Unfortunately, the world is dead. It can play around with cultural norms as if they are toys for whatever time it has left, but the diagnosis is terminal.
You don't have enough children, all of you, the fertility rate is below replacement and it is not a blip or a fluke. Children who grow up in your world are discouraged from even liking the idea of having children of their own some day. They grow up hearing all the same dumb jokes on sitcoms about how horrible it is to get married, to be pregnant, to raise children. The internalize it, and the next generation is smaller than the last. This isn't reversible.
> For most of human history, raising a family was not really a choice, culturally speaking
Only because if it was a choice, then you wouldn't be here to casually quip about "human history". A humanity that doesn't raise families has no future, there can be no one a thousand years from now to talk about past history.
Organisms that do not reproduce become extinct. It's been hardwired into our biology since day one. Talking about it as if it were some choice is bizarre and indicative of a lack of self-comprehension. Might as well talk about not having a choice in whether you breathe or eat.
The same people who talk about dangerous and virulent memes, the so-called "disinformation" are no more immune than those who wallow in the things.
> We’ve given up our stable optimum of centuries and clearly not yet found a new one.
Good news. You still have -30 years to find one.
How is the population still growing by almost 1% per year then?
For a very simplified model, imagine at t=0 there were only 'x' people all of whom were twenty-years-old.
Run time forward to t=20 - some of the twenty-year-olds will have died, so the surviving population will be maybe 0.95x, but also some will have had kids, let's say the fertility rate is 1.0 children per woman, so the group as a whole will have had roughly 0.25x children. This means the population has grown to 1.2x despite lower than replacement fertility.
I'm talking about the roles. Even in the most advanced progressive societies women continue to select for male providers (marry up) whilst they continue to do more care-related tasks.
In other words, gendered roles continue to exist. None of which should be shocking because the idea that it's 100% a construct and men and women are entirely egalitarian is an academic fantasy not rooted in anything.
I’m saying that a number of societal taboos that generally prevented women from accessing economic freedom, no longer exist
You will not be shunned for being a spinster
You will not be shunned for divorce
You will not be shamed for failing to have a baby for your husband.
And so on
Short of making these things illegal, we can’t just magically revive long-gone taboos, even if one thinks we should. Consequently, their absence should be assumed. Hence my statement “we need new cultural norms” - a way to encourage the formation of healthy and successful family units without relying on the shame of spinsterism/divorce
1) they can't afford it, or
2) they don't have a reasonable apartment/home (same thing as 1. really)
3) they don't want to give up their lifestyle
4) they're genuinely afraid the future is dystopian and dark (which is rather interesting since I can't imagine a future more dystopian than one without children)
So if you want to fix the society to want to have children again you have to make it
1) affordable,
2) less inconvenient,
3) (not really sure what to do about being afraid of the future)
if that sounds like socialism... too bad. Capitalism evidently makes people prefer capital (both money and time) over children.
1) affordable,
2) less inconvenient,
Sweden has done about as much as any country reasonably can do address those two, and it hasn't had much effect on improving the birth rate.
This is important to note because “should I have children” is kind of a novel question, especially for women, in the context of human history.
If you go back a century or three, women (especially from a middle class or upper class family) were expected to wed. And wives were expected to bear and care for children.
Choice was not particularly involved, and most career paths were unavailable for self-sufficiency in the first place.
A question like “would I be happier advancing my career as a scientist or choosing to raise children” is a foreign question a century ago. Now it is a question that the modern woman must grapple with.
This is similar to what you are saying, but it’s the social side of the coin rather than the economic one: an upper middle class family may easily be able to afford raising children, yet the wife still does not want to sacrifice her career which embodies her ambitions, her passions, and her sense of worth.
Also back then a lot (heard numbers like 25%) of women didn't have children. Not sure what this changes about the equation given that it probably wasn't their choice either, but it sounds like a lot.
And that "selfish" attitude worked over the past 2-3 generations - why go through the hassle of raising kids when the government will anyway provide you pension and assistance when you get old? The costs of kids are privately born but the benefits are socialized in terms of taxes and welfare programs. And now you are looking at South Korea with a 0.7 TFR, with other nations not far behind.
It will be interesting to see how South Korea and Japan deal with it. A range of outcomes are possible - a "Ship of Theseus" scenario with these cultures getting slowly replaced by immigrants, awesome future based on awesome robots, dystopian future based on overhyped AI tech, complete collapse of social programs as the young refuse to care for the previous generations who either preferred partying or were worked to bone by their corporate culture, or a soft landing where the society actually get its act together.
I can. A future where children are all poisoned and enslaved to grind a little bit more value out of a dying-anyway civilization is, to me, nastier than one that voluntarily calls it quits before things get that bad.
But also: Very few childless people think nobody should have children. More than we need to pool our resources into supporting those who are going to be born anyway.
When people are free to WANT children and decide on how many, it's going to be 0, 1 or 2. Which might average out to 1.5 - 1.8 in most countries, far below replacement level.
There's nothing you can do financially to truly move the needle. Even people with no immediate financial challenges tend to not have more than 2 children.
Why not? Because a 3rd, 4th, .... adds no value whilst it does add immense logistical nightmares.
When you love children, 2 will keep you plenty busy. When you have 4 you'll have an issue with your car and home. You'll be spending most of your time driving them around to their schools, sports, hobbies, whatever.
It's not an economic issue, as tempting as it is to think that. When given the choice to want children, most still want them, just not many.
When most relationships are hetero, just calling out hetero pairing as a proxy is.. perfectly fair. That's not some kind of secret exclusionary dogwhistle just to use common language.
If parents are almost always a man and a woman and you say "kids with a mom and a dad"... you're just using the English language.
Dogpiling someone and attempting to shame them for "a lack of inclusivity" isn't some kind of meaningful attack, it's just a failure to be a useful communicator.
Anyway, I'm not the one failing to communicate usefully here. Did you actually read the original comment? It has no meaningful content. It is just a more verbose way of saying less than the title of the article -- unless you read it literally, in which case it's an explicitly homophobic way of restating the title.
I'm not aware of any ways to create a child without that.
Call them a "sperm maker" and an "egg haver" if it makes you feel better but that's reality.
Encouraging both of those people to take on the role of mother and father and parent together isn't some crazy, outlandish idea.
If we're making things up wholecloth, the best outcome for any child is to be ejected into deep space cryogenically frozen to be collected by an insterstellar AI and raised in a zoo. At least then they won't have to deal with their abusive biological parents.
It makes sense as they have no male role models. Not at home and close to none in most of their schooling trajectory.
Also, frankly, the suggestion that fathers are optional or even unnecessary is quite sexist. Just because we’re generally inured to anti-male sexism doesn’t keep it from being objectively wrong.
Do I have evidence? No.
Do you have any evidence that any other form of parenting is just as good?
Or do you refuse to post your evidence until other people post theirs, like some kind of standoff?
You have definitely read something into it that was not actually stated
That's not just a good rule of thumb, its a Constitutional rule in the US (though the standard to meet varies depending on the kind of discrimination from a very low standard—the rational basis test—to a very high standard—strict scrutiny.)
That's quite a stretch honestly.
Whether it's primarily by gender composition or by biological relationship, what you are proposing is strictly additional discrimination over the alternative you asked to be justified of supporting two-parent families generally and without discrimination among them.
As such, you should bear the burden of supporting that additional discrimination as desirable, rather than your interlocutor bearing the burden of justifying its absence as desirable.
Have a good one.
1. Taking a certain cognitive stance toward P (for example, believing it, rejecting it or withholding judgement) would require rejecting or doubting a vast number of your current beliefs,
2. You have no independent positive reason to reject or doubt all those other beliefs, and
3. You have no compelling reason to take up that cognitive stance toward P.
Then it is more rational for you Not to take that cognitive stance toward P.
---
This is basic logic. If you're proposing a system of raising children that goes against the vast majority of cultures spanning thousands of years then it's on the proposer of the new system to come up with the evidence that it's just as good.
HN at its best.
Force unhappy couples together? You think that is good for the children?!
A more charitable and common sense way to read it would be to reduce stressors on couples with children, a huge one being childcare arrangement and expenses. Especially so if granny and granda aren't around or capable of helping. Tax credits, stuff like that goes a long way.
By creating evidence-based policies that support and encourage nucleic families through education and counseling at accessible institutions for potential and actual family members.
Get evidence around how to support and encourage these structures.
Figure out how to provide access to those mechanisms.
Put it into policy.
With all due respect, none of that is gobbledygook and it's just rephrased.
Saying "lets get evidence and make things better" isn't a solution.
It's gobbledegook.
If you are pointing out that this story requires more detail to be useful for specific applications, I don't disagree.
But this is in response to a comment which appears to be so narrow as to think the only option is to pay people to remain married, so given the context, my response is coherent, reasonable, and makes perfect sense.
Rather, you've simply said "those words don't make sense" (they do, and I've spelled it out) or "those are empty statements" (they aren't, and I've substatiated them).
So unless you get specific, there's nothing for me to address.
Edit: I've just taken the time now to look over your other comments on this topic, and it appears that you are being systematically disingenous and uncharitable across the board here to other commenters. I'll just take it as a signal that you're not here for fair play and that there's little point in engaging with you. So, moving on.
Kids are fun and all but they are on some level a sacrifice. You give up part of your soul for them. At the end of the day you should expect them to walk out the door not needing you at all and count yourself lucky if they say thank you.
There's no one (or there shouldn't be anyone) who can force people to stay together. That said, they should stay together. I mean, I think they should stay together if they don't have kids because they made a commitment and who wants to look in the mirror in the morning seeing someone who doesn't honor that but if you have children that should be double.
Divorce is legal.
Kids absolutely benefit from stable, nurturing surroundings. But that could take so many other forms: multi-generational families, co-parenting, “it takes a village to raise a child”, queer families, polyamorous families; teens might find they benefit more from chosen families. Cultures around the world and across time have used many other systems to help parent. Focusing on the nuclear family is a distraction from the real aim and it might even cause more problems than it solves.
I doubt you will be able to prove, or show, that the nuclear family has even slightly higher rates of abuse per 100,000 than any of the other modern forms of family you have suggested. Until ~2013 with the legalization of gay marriage when it then became an unmentionable issue, even left-wing websites like The Atlantic, and mainstream publications like the BBC, were warning about how domestic abuse in LGBTQ relationships is at least possibly higher than a traditional marriage.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/a-same-se...
Should every vehicle made be wheelchair accessible because some people have wheelchairs? Same logic here.
The “progress” is in identifying the useful factors in nurturing people and providing societal tools to support those factors. Encouraging one model above all others got us into the pickle we’re in today.
disagree. having children as a goal in itself needs to be incentivized, financially and otherwise. germany is doing that by giving parents extra money unconditionally, among other things.
I can see how that might be of short-to-medium term benefit to an individual nation. I'll have to be less flippant with my arguments in future.
We can easily go down a rabbit hole there that's different from the one I was initially exploring. I'm gonna back-track:
The article and its defenders are arguing for even more media and legal support to encourage two-parent nuclear families. I argue that amplifying the already-common structure with stronger legal stature, and the cultural assumptions that will bring, is of detriment to the culture. I'm not saying "kids don't need stable families", they clearly benefit from that. But I am saying "that thing you call a stable family doesn't always look like two adults and their kids in one home". There are many, many other successful forms. The important factors are predictable, comfortable support from involved caregivers, ideally with a range of opinions. We should be centring the care and support on the children (and in fact, on people in general), rather than on "a two adult family". Centering on the family like that effectively outsources care to the family, making the assumption that "the family" can handle it. There are too many cases of two adult homes failing those they're assumed to support. There are even more cases of single-adult homes struggling to care for their kids because the system is built around "the nuclear family" and rejects supporting alternatives.
Your "I'd rather be born as a random person in modern society than a random person in a pre-historical hunter gatherer society" has no relevance that argument.
The hypothesis we are entertaining here: things that humans have no experience with over evolutionary timescales tend to be bad for us. Ice cream for example, has more sugar, fat and salt than anything humans had access to until very recently; evolutionarily speaking, we have no experience with it. Ditto alcohol and heroin.
Nor is it a particularly well-formulated or convincing hypothesis, your cherry-picked examples notwithstanding. We don’t have evolutionary-timescale experience with medicine, electricity, the written word, or democracy either. How we think prehistorical people groups may have arranged their societies is almost completely irrelevant for modern policymakers, which is what this article is actually about. We have a long list of better ways to make this decision than “Hmm, well, how do uncontacted Amazon tribes of a few dozen people structure things? Perhaps we should just copy that in our nation of 300 million people?”
Whatever. I’m sick of the disinterested majority pretending real problems don’t exist and actively working against systems that would help more people, more fairly, because they’re not willing to use their imagination and compassion.
Your use of hunter-gather societies is a distraction. We don’t need to lean on poorly understood histories when we have contemporary examples to work with.
Also, “nuclear/extended” is two distinct categories, not one. And “polygamous” is a subset of polyamorous and carries some unhealthy ultra-patriarchal connotations and assumptions (I mean, I’m making some assumptions about what you mean).
Arguing that children with married parents fare better, thus promoting two-parent families, is akin to suggesting that since blue cars have fewer accidents, everyone should drive a blue car.
Pressuring dissatisfied couples to stay together or marry benefits no one.
The article fails to provide actionable recommendations on promoting marriage.
By what metric?
How?
what young people see as love is often just desire. the desire to be loved. they think if they love someone the other will automatically love them back. they don't understand that loving someone requires wishing the best for that person, unconditionally.
i love you because you are a human being and i want that all your wishes and goals come true.
but for a healthy and happy relationship this is not enough. we need to align our wishes and goals and work together to achieve them.
providing an environment where young people can learn that, is our job as society.
As it turns out, The Moynihan Report [1] was 100% accurate and its predictions on where things were going to head have come true.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For...
> Welfare policies made things worse by denying benefits to families with adult males in residence. Fathers and husbands had to leave — or hide in the closet when social workers came to check. (quoted from a review [1])
[1] https://www.npr.org/2012/01/19/145343942/in-st-louis-an-urba...
It also spells out the advantage of marriage, even unhappy marriage: kids get in less trouble, have fewer problems, and are happier with better outcomes.
Relationships are much more about your ability to handle conflict and invest time than who the other person is.
I largely agree, but the idea of promoting two parent households isn't antithetical to your statement. You could have programs that are meant to ensure that couples get married for the right reasons, with the right skills, etc. It's likely a marriage prep/ed course would result in fewer divorces, just as drivers ed results in better drivers.
Ine example, if your primary discussion about what happens if the marriage doesn't work out happens after the fact, then you were ill prepared. Better to have that discussion while on good terms going into it - like a collaborative prenup consultation at least.
Honestly what planet are you living on.
Catholics have significantly lower divorce rates: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/28161/catholics-cont...
From my priest friends, I've heard horror stories of couples they've managed to convince not to marry. We are talking couples who could not agree on kids, or who had major family issues or resentment, or couldn't agree on finances.
It's best for everyone if these just don't marry.
There are awesome marriage schools, called couples counseling, and a lot of people do just that before getting married to help expose some of the gotchas that you don't realize before getting married (lots more farts basically). Should it be "policy?" Hell no, but it would probably help new families a lot for people to do it.
Is marriage required or just a two parent household ?
I don't have an Atlantic account, so I can't comment on the whole article [2], but when I read anything like:
> Two-parent households should be a policy goal.
I start to get a little don't-tread-on-me-ish. I don't think having The Man deciding family structures is what the government is for.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_family#/media/File:Fam...
[2] If you're so eager to sell a policy idea why shoot yourself in the foot by putting it behind a login?