Nothing better than a father and mother in a stable, loving relationship for a child. Yes, let’s encourage this.
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).