U.S. has world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households (2019)
pewresearch.org
pewresearch.org
But I can't even imagine trying to gather statistics for that with surveys.
Children grow up perfectly fine making bonds with non-parents. (See also the father/mother figure trope.) They may do it even if the parent(s) exist but were not fit for the role.
In many countries extended families can help sort this out. It is only a bigger problem if you have a single parent + no extended family support. I imagine social services (is that what they're called) or teachers compensate for the extended family role in countries like US?
https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-determine-child-succ...
It sucks, but having only one parent is a huge disadvantage.
Teachers are part of large state institutions, paid workers. They're not going to finance someone's surgery, rent, or groceries. Offloading this kind of stuff onto the state doesn't work well because the situations aren't legible and the type of support required necessitates a great deal of intimacy on the part of the benefactor and a great deal of vulnerability on the part of recipient not to mention a legitimate impetus from both parties to make things right.
I'm restrained in my ability to extrapolate, but from my personal intimate, experiences extended families don't exist in the US. We've built ourselves out of that. And even a couple hours of driving becomes a huge barrier when seeking child care. Let alone half a dozen, and that's in the cases where parents/children aren't estranged which is an increasingly common phenomena. Between that and economy, and economics... Families may well span the whole continent and it's simply infeasible to support one another.
Children with both parents also very often do not grow up fine if they are in certain socioeconomic divisions. That needs to be eliminated from the equation before any such generalizations.
people unfit for parenting are most likely mentally ill or they are put in an impossible situation with unreasonable demands and no outside support.
western couples are less likely to do that which means that kids there will suffer more especially if their parents are openly fighting, and divorce helps them settle because happier parents makes for happier kids.
What evidence do you have that “Asian” parents (whomever that refers to) show more devotion to their children? Or that “western” couples show less care?
Extended family situations, kids living with grandparents or aunts and uncles, seems more common in poorer places (mentioned in the article), so it’s likely lots of kids grow up with relatives but not with married parents.
the difference is noticeable.
chinese will sacrifice everything for their children. until recently they had to because there was no pension system, and the only way to get by when you are to old to work was to have your children care for you.
I live in SE Asia now. I see lots of devoted parents making sacrifices, just like most parents everywhere.
I’ve seen selfish and negligent parents in the US, and in SE Asia. Those parents occur everywhere.
Some Asian cultures emphasize the extended family, and children taking care of their parents later in life, perhaps more than Americans or westerners emphasize that.
America doesn’t have much of a pension system either, and lots of adult children care for their aging parents.
I come from South Asia. It’s my observation that Americans are far less willing to sacrifice their personal happiness and well being for their kids.
You know what you don’t see in America? Children working in factories. Baby girls left at orphanages or sold. You do see parents going into debt to pay for school, sports and other activities, deferring retirement, buying phones and cars for their kids.
Generalizations that include vast numbers of people from different places and cultures don’t make any sense to begin with. Cambodia and Japan, both Asian, have very different outcomes for children. America likewise doesn’t describe a single culture or set of traditions. Some countries and cultures make divorce difficult or impossible, the USA does not.
Anecdotally, as an American parent, I have seen far more parents centering their lives around children and making sacrifices than I have seen selfish and neglectful parents — even after divorce. In rural Thailand you see many children raised by grandparents or other relatives because the parents dropped them off to do their own thing. And you see devoted parents caring for their children too.
I can’t generalize anything about Thai parents from those observations. I suspect that opinions about how much parents care for children, anecdotal and generalized, derive mainly from misinterpreting cultural differences.
most likely caused by extreme poverty.
children in factories happens in the US too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35137873
also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_selling#United_States
selling babies is a form of adoption that was common in the US too before adoption became acceptable. people in the US still give up children for adoption.
treatment of girls is a specific asian problem, driven by their culture and the dependency to have a son to care for them in old age, but it is changing.
In rural Thailand you see many children raised by grandparents
that is simply asian culture. it happens in china too. the motivation here is that the parents are not just off to do their own thing, but are off to work their ass off so their kids can have a future. that's not selfish or neglectful but in their eyes, the ultimate sacrifice.
Are children being taught how to parent? Are girls playing with baby dolls and cook sets and dollhouses? Are they babysitting as teenagers? Are boys taught the roles and responsibilities of husbands and fathers? Do they have younger siblings to supervise for a while, when the parents aren't around? Do they know what it's like to change a diaper, feed an infant, do household chores?
I mean, we expend a lot of energy shoving kids into STEM and soccer and ballet dancing, and they deserve space to play and be children, but what are they going to be when they grow up? Not everyone makes a conscious choice to become a parent.
The problem is "bad relationship" is a broad and fuzzy concept, often conveniently left undefined or defined selectively to bolster a particular position.
There are definitely situations where divorce is probably good for the kids (e.g. the more extreme ones, like physical abuse). However there are other perhaps more common situations where divorce is on the whole harmful to the kids (e.g. mom and dad just don't have "that spark" for each other anymore).
If it's large then maybe divorce should be mentioned. If it's small then maybe there's little reason to mention divorce.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/when-did-marriage-become-a-...
In June 2022, there were 7.3 million families, an increase of 1 million (15.3%) since June 2012. Of these:
* 6.2 million (84.2%) were couple families
* 1.0 million (14.2%) were one parent families with 79.9% of these being single mothers
* 118,000 (1.6%) were classified as 'other families', where at least two people were related in some way other than as a couple or as a parent and child (such as adult-age siblings)
Single parent USA: 23%
Single parent world: 7%
Extended family USA: 8%
Extended family world: 38%
EDIT: Also, to be clear, an extended family household means that mom and dad could still be around, so it says nothing of a household with only either mom or dad (most likely mom, according to the article).
Anecdotally, I know quite a few extended family situations, but only one single parent. Non-US context.
Apparently sometimes there are people other than your parent(s) who both want and can do a better job at actual parenting. (Say if one or both of the parents are still young and stupid/unstable or slightly insane/dead or can't be bothered.)
It might not even be detected on surveys. The parent would say they were a single parent if asked, which is true, but family pitches in a ton.
And what I mean by this is that we've, for example, still got houses built for whole families, yet the families have so often been split. The density doesn't work and there isn't enough of the intermediary to go around, and it seems like that has been a multi-decadal problem at this point, which has been growing enormously. Houses are neither fit for a return to the nest, and they aren't suited for bifurcation so neither can we expect people to live in multigenerational households nor can we expect the constituents of a family to remain in close proximity (nor should we, in many cases). That then further complicates things, once trivial obstacles require resorting whole days, perhaps weeks. And if a coparent is unreliable - by God will that drastically complicate one's life, sometimes it's easier just to cut away, whole cloth.
Whether that was a good and noble thing I can't dispute. But it was done with little foresight, and I can hardly say if my own perspective - that lack of foresight, of prescience, is just characteristic of my own privileged hindsight - but I think it's evident we're in a poorer place because of it. But it's sort of besides the point anyways as we're here and now.
And it may appear easy to just say "Well, I'll stick with ye olde convention." But I don't think it's the case as everyone, myself included, wants their cake and to eat it too. Fantasy and reality are more miscible than ever before. Apparently normal people with reams and reams of their life's perfectly orchestrated highlights on shining beaches sunken in beautiful blue oceans with perfect partners - except they're buried in debt and have median income and fight incessantly, but they copy type well enough and edit even better so nobody knows they've got skeletons in the closet. And these are the kind of standards we're all sort of inadvertently supporting. And with that unreality we convey ourselves into deeper depths. But that's old hat, everyone knows it (or everyone I know does) and yet we're still marching off in that direction because — still — nobody knows what the fuck we're doing, and it won't be plain to see until some very hard times come, I reckon.
Reading well regarded works such as The Roman Family (1992)
https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Roman_Family.htm...
strongly supports that in Roman times, just as today, there was no single concept of family. While the “nuclear family” was central, divorce was common, as was remarriage, resulting in blended families. If a parent died, a child was sometimes fostered by extended family.
It appears that one of the greatest differences between classic Roman times and modern US customs might be the extent of extended family support, that difference perhaps also seperating modern US customs from many other modern countries.
And does it retell of the common Roman, or of the Roman elite? These tales may be radically different, from what I understand.
I expect the Christianized Romans would have had more laborious conventions such as we see with the Catholic Church in the middle ages. But I'm extrapolating.
Your "latter Christianized Roman Empire" was the dag end of a rotting corpse .. you might be thinking of the Byzantine Empire (aka Eastern Roman Empire)
Republican Rome and to a much much greater degree Empire Rome were not entirely homogenous, the Empire integrating many cultures (such as the Arabian divisions building Roman forts in Britain) .. much as modern USofA does with it's large latin and many other demographic populations.
The Roman Family picture would need to be broken down almost as much as the US Family picture - I suspect the single parent rates in the US might vary considerably by ethnicity .. although it's interesting the the article linked above (IIRC) suggests that Christian V. non Christian rates are more or less the same.
My presumption is that the later Roman empire, despite its collapse, did inform the later customs of Europe, particularly in religion if only due to incidental diffusion. And by that dint also affected the custom of marriage, divorce and perhaps more importantly the status and autonomy of women, though I've all but forgotten precisely how this all played out. And I may very well be mistaken.
I would also posit that it has less to do with religion and more to do with [perceived] female autonomy, value, mobility, economics, and the abatement of the stigma of divorce. The religious aspect having only been the foundational institution of the customs which have been carried (somewhat steadily) forward for nearly 1500 years let's say - a tradition which has suffered a colossal usurpation in society's working memory.
I think it's important to note that women with children are not necessarily unbounded as are women without, I think it would be difficult quantify pre- and post-divorce expectation shifts, but I believe it would be an incisive question. But if the expectations aren't grounded in reality the decision weighing process would lead to poorer outcomes.
Why later?
Roman Law was the foundation of modern Western Law and it dates back to Republican Rome with a lot of fleshing out during peak classic Empire Rome.
Both Greek (pre Rome) and Roman attitudes toward women have persisted to this day; in Greek stories Telemachus tells Penelope to shut up, and Philomena has her tongue ripped out by Tereus so she cannot speak of her rape .. these are the templates for the active, loaded silencing of women today in public life.
On that theme you might enjoy Mary Beard's Women in Power lecture (part of a series).
[ Dame Winifred Mary Beard, DBE, FSA, FBA, FRSL, English scholar of Ancient Rome ] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Beard_(classicist)
[ text ] https://archive.md/mAoSZ
if i got married to a normal earning woman id lose 2500$ in benifits total a month. This includes 560$ towards rental assistance.
And when i start working ill lose 500$ a month and probably 250$ in food stamps.
But if i just dont work i can raise my son like a parent should. Which is first priority.
E, Maryland. A town with slightly lower than average rental costs,, but great livability statistics. We have a two floor, two bedroom apartment with listed price of 720$.
I wonder if Canada would be the same without the indigenous cultural and French influence
Loyal workers are selectively and ironically targeted for exploitation [1]
People who read the GameFaq [2] already know this is how society works. Loyalty is punished, lazy cheating rewarded. Even children watching porn know the drill "She doesn't want it, but really she does. No means she wants it." That's the entire book. Extended version:
1) Select a Target, 2) Approach and Open, 3) Demonstrate Value, 4) Disarm Obstacles, 5) Isolate Target, 6) Create Emotional Connection, 7) Seduction Location Extract, 8) Pump Buying Temperature, 9) Make Physical Connection, 10) Blast Last-Minute Resistance
PS: 11) Believe nothing the entire time, 12) Reduce the opponent's value to nothing so the only redemption is intercourse, 13) You're interacting with a video game character of absolutely no value whatsoever except for the score, 14) All is Increment++, 15) Ditch in a way where there's no long term connections, 16) Be on the lookout for the next level (existence only reward the most useless. How else are you going to administratively golf, while stealing every professor in the University's money, while swearing about missing a shot on a completely flat grass lawn?)
Its only an MMO overrun with exploit users. It's just Game Theory. Backstabbing must win. Existence forces backstabbing to win. All it does is lie about being nice while being ** underneath. "Merica..."
Look at all venture capital, same strategy. "Innovate. Disrupt. Paradigm shift. We're pivoting to FinTech/AI/Social/VR/Quantum/Nano/Cyber/Cloud/Mindshare/Frameworks". Only ninja/wizard/blood ninjas need apply. "Round A/B/IPO/exit/Burn the world behind you." PS: Be rewarded with more IPOs for successfully burning money (I'm looking at you "New"man of WeWork).
Look at military innovation "Say whatever's necessary (blah, blah, warfighters, thoughts/prayers). Believe nothing. Close. Get money / rank advancement. Leave." [4]
And thus "why are there so many single children?" Because existence rewards humans for playing like Fight Club. Gotta travel around setting up franchises.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game:_Penetrating_the_Secr...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory
[4] https://www.military.com/daily-news/opinions/2023/09/19/inno...
Its more of a “one adult in the house” study
Here's an editorial by the Brookings Institution from 2012 about the controversy.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/twenty-years-later-it-tur...
Of course, ideally, people just shouldn't be having kids if they're not absolutely sure that they want to be raising children. The best salve we have for the overall problem is access to birth control.
I think this is missing the point of the controversy. The argument at the time was that it was fine for women to chose to have a child without being married. It was not about "couples should stay together for the sake of the children".
The whole point of the TV show was "Murphy Brown was divorced, and then she decided it was fine to have a child." That is, if a single women wanted to have a child, she should. There was no need for her to first establish a working marriage first.
Here's how the Wikipedia plot synopsis describes it: "In the show's 1991–92 season, Murphy became pregnant. When her baby's father (ex-husband and current underground radical Jake Lowenstein) expressed his unwillingness to give up his own lifestyle to be a parent, Murphy chose to have the child and raise it alone." If you were to see a real-life woman in the same circumstance, what would you advise that she do instead? And why are we blaming the mother for the problem of deadbeat fathers?
And the implication that "love" isn't desirable in a marriage because it's a modern idea is laughable. Child mortality rates less than 80% are a relatively new innovation; shall we get rid of those too? Loving marriages are a good thing. But by all means, if you want to spend the rest of your life co-habitating with someone you loathe, by my guest.
Do you believe majority of bad marriages are abusive?
Statistics show that neither do divorces and single parents.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4240051/ (“The best scientific literature to date suggests that, with the exception of parents faced with unresolvable marital violence, children fare better when parents work at maintaining the marriage.”).
> Children exposed to abusive marriages are predisposed to considering abusive marriages normal, therefore perpetuating the cycle.
Abuse used to be a ground for divorce prior to modern no-fault divorce.
> And the implication that "love" isn't desirable in a marriage because it's a modern idea is laughable.
Obviously it’s desirable. But if you take a shot at your love marriage, and then you “fall out of love,” should you be able to inflict the financial and emotional damage of divorce on your kids?
You stated that birth control is more available now than ever. Aggregate statistics might be more illuminating than not even an anecdote. I’d like to see a source that shows more birth control access in America than there was several years ago.
So is the implication that the US has much higher rates of those marriages? If so, why? Look for the root cause.
The strict implication is that the US has higher rates of people leaving relationships that result in children.
Perhaps:
* Marriage rates are lower, with more children out of wedlock, AND|OR
* US citizens are more prone to leave a bad relationship, whereas other places see more people staying despite a bad relationship, AND|OR
* US early relationships have a higher rate of one spouse being incarcerated than other countries, AND|OR
* { etc. ponder longer and add more reasons }
Things are rarely as simple as the first thought that occurs.