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Agreed. It took most of human history to build the old culture with immense social pressure to marry and have children, immense social pressure for men to provide and women to care for children, and intense taboos around divorce, births out of wedlock, even around non-marriage into old age

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.

You're saying goodbye to the old way too soon, and I'm not talking about the bad parts.

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.

Maybe you’re misreading my post. I’m not making a judgment on whether gendered roles are inferior or superior.

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

> The world needs to find different cultural norms around children such that we can have a stable population and happy children.

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.

The pessimism is unwarranted. As you glibly point out, we have survivorship bias in discussing the history of those who survived and reproduced. So shall it be one hundred or thousand years from now, discussing the rise of whatever culture or cult succeeds in keeping their sub populations fertility rate above the replacement rate.

Humanity will be just fine. There are eight billion of us and growing, and while fertility dropping is increasingly a localized economic issue, it hardly threatens our species survival. Even when population peaks (projected in a few decades), there will be billions of us for centuries to come. And it’s impossible for you or anyone else to predict how civilization and culture will change or grow over such timeframes. Imagine someone in 1623 wringing their hands over humanity’s downfall based on whatever was happening in their tiny corner of time and space.

> You don't have enough children, all of you, the fertility rate is below replacement and it is not a blip or a fluke.

How is the population still growing by almost 1% per year then?

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/population

Because there is a population 'bulge' of younger people who haven't yet had children.

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.

>it hints that single-parent homes are inferior.

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

I think your first paragraph makes some strong points. I think your second paragraph veers so far off in a policy direction that is utterly untenable, that it made me carefully re-read your first paragraph to make sure I hadn't missed something borderline insane in it.

But then we have to start asking questions about why a woman is a single mother. Is it better for children to be in a single parent household or in one where he mother is abused? Or one where the children are abused? Is living in a household with a non-contributing partner superior?

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.

You want to take children off single mothers and force them to be adopted?!

This isn't Victorian Britain.

What century are you living in.

Single parent households are inferior, so why not spell it out?

Well, sorta. In America we don't build communities as well, so a single parent is alone to raise their kids and also work.

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.

Because the politicians who suggest any such policy, when it gets to the point where people demand they explain why they're proposing it, either has to come clean, or dissemble.

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.