Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
npr.org
npr.org
There is some research supporting the link, but not nearly enough: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-marriage-and-divorce-... (“A child born to a never-married mother in the bottom fifth of family income is 3 times more likely to stay in the bottom fifth than a child born to a continuously married mother with equally low income.”).
It’s possible that it’s not marriage per se. Both Mormons and Asians socialize children into “do what you’re obliged to do, not what you want to do.” Marriage is one aspect of that—you get married, and you stay married, and what you “want” doesn’t really matter. But it might be that mentality that also drives upward mobility rather than marriage per se.
But to bring this back to the topic on hand. It is right to study and work hard at school, it is right to be disciplined and not disrupt class, it is right to work a job and do well at the job. This is separate from the fact that you are may be a good person (nice, charitable, etc). A teenager who is good, but not working hard is being wrong. A large part of this is putting wants aside to do what is right.
The West has mostly leaned towards individualism (aka “it's a free country”) while the East Asia under the influence of Confucianism is most collective.
Collectivism has its downsides. It can be suffocating. Society also doesn’t always take into consideration an individual’s limitations when it comes to meeting societal obligations - a moot point in more individualistic societies.
Collectivism also has upsides. I’m fascinated by Mormons because they seem to me to be the most Asian white people. Mormon men have a life expectancy almost 10 years longer than other white men. They have among the highest social mobility in the country. They, along with Jews, top the charts in measures of mental well being.
And this is all happening within the context of America. They deal with the same Obamacare, seem to have basically the same school systems, etc.
Other things I'd consider:
* Longevity is associated with community, something the church is very good at
* Even elderly individuals are required to perform "a calling", giving them meaning and purpose later in life
* Mormons have a lot of children, and so when you're older you usually have a very strong social safety net
* Mormons have lower divorce rates, and divorce is correlated with greater mortality
As an agnostic and raising kids, I spend a lot of time now pondering how – if at all – to pass on as many of these benefits of Mormonism to my kids without mandating the magical beliefs, and I have to say it's difficult. But I think you do have to have some healthy middle-ground mix of conservatism and collectivisms just to strike a healthy balance with modern individualism and liberalism.
The West has mostly leaned towards individualism (aka “it's a free country”) while the East Asia under the influence of Confucianism is most collective.
Mainland China has a surprisingly high divorce rate.
How do you explain why Canada has a divorce rate less than one half of the United States?
Japan and the Netherlands have roughly the same divorce rates, and wildly different cultures.
This is a tangent but I've never heard anyone summarize Kant this way.
For Kant, "right" is a subset of "good". So there is no right action that is not good. In other words, per Kant, it's absolutely not acceptable for you to do something bad because it's "necessary" according to whatever metric.
In the 70s I would have been imprisoned for being gay, was that “right” because society deems it so?
It seems like that would be a yes, because it's doing what you want, following your natural desires, against the will / benefit of society.
Then by your own logic
>Killing is a common example of what is wrong, since if everyone killed no one would remain.
At the most basic concept, if everyone was gay then society / humans would cease to exist after the final generation.
You can even step back and say if everyone just gave into the basic sexual desires society would be worse off. it's sort of what the article implies. Ultimately the single women with kids is because people aren't doing what society deems right and having long-term monogamous relationships. We see the effect is that the children ultimately have worse outcomes.
So it seems clear that the answer to your question would be yes, but of course you can go further and say, is "prison" ever right? Or right in that case?
My own mother decided to separate from my father for her own profit, to be able to do whatever she wanted to do, whenever she wanted to. She proceeded to neglect my brother and I at the most crucial time of our growth and simultaneously blamed my father for everything. Both my brother and I have suffered bad outcomes, considering the potential and other variables. And that is with her being a pretty high-income woman (top 10% consistently). Now I am at a time in my life where I'm starting to look back on history and various facts resurface that make me understand things in a new light. I am at the point where I wonder how such an irresponsible woman even got allowed to have all the power other us.
There is something extremely wrong with our current society where women are allowed all the rights with none of the responsibility. In my opinion, such news/statistic is just the tip of the iceberg, it is something really easy to observe with no study anyway (you need the study because otherwise you will be called all kind of name for daring to hold women to any kind of standard). The problems run much deeper than that and it is way too late to do much; it will take major events to bring meaningful change.
Wow, that's incredibly reductive. Asia has approx 4.7 billion people!
Asian cultures are generally more collectivistic than individualistic compared to the West.
That's an incredible stretch.
There are a number of other factors worth mentioning:
- The philosophy of John Locke, who greatly influenced the founders
- The US is a very new country, compared to those in Europe and Asia. The only preexisting culture was the Native Americans, and you (should) know what happened to them...
- The US is a nation of immigrants who left (sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily) their previous countries and cultures.
- The US is geographically very large and open. Even within the nation of immigrants, there was a huge amount of migration to populate "the west".
- The US has a very weak central government, by design of the Constitution, and it never had a state church. There's no centralizing cultural force.
Can you back this up? Because a review of historic American literature would make our modern age of hyper-individualism 'self-help', etc, seem like a completely foreign culture.
(Democracy was seen by the founders as way to protect liberty more than liberty was seen as a way to protect democracy.)
"Don't tread on me," was a slogan of the American revolution. Ditto, "give me liberty or give me death." For many decades, drug addiction raged in the US while heroin and cocaine remained legal because a Federal law against the free trade in these drugs was seen as an unconstitutional curtailment of the individual's liberty. The starting of a Federal income tax was likewise held up for decades on the same argument.
Again, liberty has been the main organizing principle of the US since its founding, and I'd be a little surprised to learn that there are Americans with IQs above 110 that do not know that, but I guess some people are too busy to learn about history and politics.
> More women are deciding to have children and also remain single. Almost half of all babies born in the U.S. were born to unmarried women in 2019, a dramatic increase since 1960, when only 5% of births were to unmarried mothers. And it's not because of divorce; today's unpartnered mothers are also more likely to have never been married.
They go from "single" to "unmarried" back to "unpartnered" without batting an eye. The statistics they cite are about marriage yet they are generalized to all single women. It doesn't make sense.
At least the author of the book is aware of this:
> In the U.S., she says, unmarried adults who decide to live together do it for a much shorter duration than in Europe. [...] "If you just look in the data, marriage is what delivers kids a stable, long-term, two-parent household in this country."
In my opinion looking into what's driving that difference between couples in the US and Europe would be worth a discussion on its own.
The problem is especially acute in the underclass, and American underclass differs a lot from European underclass.
For example, a lot of the Western European poor are Muslims (in countries that keep the relevant statistics, Muslim immigrants and their descendants tend to score below average on income and educational outcomes), who are nevertheless socially very conservative and don't tend to have kids out of wedlock. Having kids out of wedlock is much more typical among secular Europeans, including highly educated ones.
In the US, the trend leaders when it comes to having kids out of wedlock are the poorest parts of the population, mostly blacks, where "unmarried" and "unpartnered" tend to go hand-in-hand.
I know you’re talking about “trend leaders”. But you must have forgotten about Native Americans and Latinos. Native Americans and black people tend to have children out of wedlock at about the same rate. Latinos have children out of wedlock at a high but lower rate. But there are more Latinos in the United States than there are black people, so there’s actually more Latino children born out of wedlock. And Latinos have the highest birth rate too.
Same goes for white people in the United States. If the rate for black people is about 70% and the rate for white people is about 30%, there are still hundreds of thousands more white children born out of wedlock than black children each year in the United States.
(Sorry, the whole “trend leader” thing rubs me the wrong. It’s like when people talk about welfare recipients based on race. Someone always says “X percentage of black people are on welfare, tsk.” But then when you look at the numbers, Native Americans have the higher percentage within their own race. But again, most welfare recipients are white so there are literally hundreds of thousands more white people on welfare than black people lol. Why doesn’t that fact get a “tsk”?)
Someone replied to you saying/asking “aren’t black people religious”. Your “mostly black” comment limited the discussion. Imagine if you had said “mostly Latinos” instead. There could have been a discussion about Catholicism. There could have been something more, something else at least.
Otherwise no - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu...
In the US, the category of non-marriage stable long term relationships is very small. The veneer of christian morality still exists in America, even if the substance has rotted away. So anyone who is in a stable long term relationship tends to just go ahead and paper things up. Even people in unstable relationships tend to just get married and have three or four divorces.
Unmarried people who got children then get married on paper just because of Christian morality, especially in the South
That confuses simple analysis because most positive outcomes will strongly correlate marriage, and any researcher who has biases for whatever reason is probably not going to adequately correct for that.
Divorce is significantly more common for bipolar, paranoid, and schizophrenic people for example. So I think we need to look at widows or something to control for those kinds of issues.
In my personal opinion. I think what she’s stumbled on is yet again proof of Americans hyper individuality rearing its ugly face. The Europeans can stay together longer without the marriage piece of paper because
1) Selfishness derived from hyper individuality doesn’t drive people to nope out of relationships at the first sign of minuscule problems or one side not getting their way
2) Since over there not everything is an economical benefit proposal people value the relationship with different metrics than our countrymen and women do.
"I don't know exactly what it is about marriage, but it is a very practical matter," says Kearney, chafing at all the criticism. "If you just look in the data, marriage is what delivers kids a stable, long-term, two-parent household in this country."
The data is clear, however understanding the root causes is important because it impacts what approaches are most useful. If the relationships themselves are important the having a high school class in maintaining healthy relationship could be useful. If it’s the broader issues then we need to address those issues.
Source: https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/divorce-rate-by-count...
If that was not clear, I am saying that women are the variable that is messing everything up, and as a recipient of this reality I think anyone who believe otherwise is either a fool or politically motivated for some reason.
The most glaring trait responsible for lack of marriage is female hypergamy. Previously women being of generally unequal/lower status then men and overall a smaller pool of candidates (no online dating) would be forced to be more egalitarian in mate selection. It was easy for a woman to find a man who got paid more than them because this was most men.
Now that women are doing better and having relatively more equal pay with men hypergamy is rearing it's head in a more pronounced fashion. Female selection preferences are much more strict because if women are getting paid equally with men then they must find men that are paid more as well and this is obviously a much smaller pool than when women had no jobs.
This along with exposure to the top men via online dating, women can now match with the top men in the entire city rather then the top men in her social circle. And this is exactly what you see in the online dating statistics.
The top 20% of men match with the top 80% of women and the bottom 20% of women match with the bottom 80% of men. I mean as progressive as you want to be there's no denying what I'm saying here as this data is just glaring. It spits in the face of people who say otherwise as it's measuring current dating behavior. Individualism is part of the story because it does push for more power for women overall. But it is in the end this individualism among women that is changing the game in the US. But not just the US, other countries as well.
So what's going on is you have a few men who have an abundance of choice. They're never going to settle because when men have an abundance of choice they switch their mating strategy from monogamy to harlem style polygamy. And then the rest of the men have a much harder time finding anyone at all.
This is actually more beneficial to women from certain theoretical perspectives. In anthropology there's a saying that monogamy benefits men while polygamy benefits women and general female behavior shows it. Basically for the best genes and resources, women generally prefer to "share" a top alpha man with other women over being in an exclusive monogamous relationship with a beta male.
Men on the other hand don't accept this strategy because they are providers of resources. If a woman sleeps with another man then the partner may end up raising and spending resources on another mans child. Thus all men have intense instincts to basically end an entire relationship once a woman has a single sexual affair.
You can actually see how this behavior plays out in certain countries like Japan where women are totally ok with their husbands fucking prostitutes. As long as that man "loves" them and is providing resources for them, fucking a prostitute without love is totally ok for japanese women. Source: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/i9qS5vDXLSI
Basically we live in an era of changing social norms and it's accelerating natural selection. The majority of men born today will not pass on their genes. Traits of alpha males including height, confidence will be expressed to a greater extent in future generations and it's possible for the trend to continue roughly culling the bottom 80% of men out of the evolutionary process.
Women are slowly getting the upper hand in terms of natural selection, and for men to get the upper hand usually they have to reintroduce monogamy back into the society as this guarantees a mate for every man. Monogamy is the more beneficial strategy to men overall because very few men can actually benefit from polygamy just by the nature of the way numbers work. Monogamous restrictions are pervasive enough throughout human civilization that some women have even evolved monogamous instincts via sexual selection as men actually actively seek these traits out in women.
This is basically what's going on from the most scientific point of view. It's not politically correct so a lot of people vehemently disagree. Of course everything I say here is speaking to a general truth. There are plenty of exceptions but those exceptions do not negate the existence of the general truth.
Also important to note is that parental attention has a large impact on academic outcomes of kids [2], so in single parent households where the parent doesn't have the time to provide sufficient attention, the kids suffer at school compared to their two-parent peers.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C44&q=two...
[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00131911.2013.78...
All people, kids and adults, have a finite level of emotional and mental energy that they have to “dispense” in everyday life. If you are a couple that’s dealing with marital strife, this is emotional overhead that gets diverted to dealing with that instead of your kids.
Same goes for kids. A child that’s struggling to comprehend why parents decided to leave each other will be using that emotional energy to process it instead of focusing on personal growth.
This is not taking into account the divorce process is costly, with money diverted to lawyers, instead of being pooled and applied to improve family life.
Also, persons who divorce early in a relationship may not have taken the time to understand compatibility with each other, may be emotionally immature and impulsive. The lack of insight might be something that perpetuates into other aspects of their life.
There are, obviously, relationship patterns where it takes a long time for one partner to realize the other one has gradually become more and more abusive and controlling, either because they have low self-confidence or self-esteem. This somewhat tracks the concept of emotional maturity, but this is difficult to talk about as this form of framing puts the blame onto the abused partner.
When parties choose not to fight, it's not near as costly. This said there is a new set of costs incurred in creating and managing two households in most cases.
> In the U.S., she says, unmarried adults who decide to live together do it for a much shorter duration than in Europe. Children in many of these households are more likely to experience two or three parental partnerships by age 15.
Its a stability thing.
Are there any theories about why this might be? The article doesn't seem to follow this up.
These same people, when they find a suitable spouse, are more likely to tough it out when things get unpleasant in the belief their spouse is fundamentally a good person.
In marriage just like at work, you don’t judge someone by one event. People may have a bad day. Or they are sick and not themselves. Instead you should judge their actions over a long period of time. If someone has always been there for you, appreciated you and delivered what they promised, and for some reason hurt you today; you are more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Divorce is also more common for selfish and self-centered people, and I would argue that those traits do not make for good parents. (which is not to say that a good person should remain married to such a spouse --- arguably the only thing worse than a good divorce is a bad marriage)
Ages ago, I worked at a school for boys, and one could pretty much map negative trats of the parents to corresponding unsocial behaviours on the part of the child.
My parents were both teachers, and it was a very commonly held belief among teachers that you could predict a kid's academic outcome reasonably well by simply learning about their parent(s) behaviors and home life. Kids' academic achievement has little to do with the quality of schools, quality of teachers, wealth or poverty of the area, but has everything to do with the positive and negative traits of their parents.
Divorce being more common now, but adding
Family sizes decreasing over time.
Families moving farther away and not able to support each other as readily.
Fewer friends with kids reducing the number of potential helpers with ones kids in time crunched/emergency situations.
is that really a significant factor? i'd think that the number of people suffering from mental issues is a minority, and even if in their group are more divorces, those should only be a fraction of the total number of divorces.
~2.8% of the population has bipolar disorder. The odds that one partner at the start of a relationship is bipolar should be ~5.6%. 1% of the population is schizophrenic so ~2% of the population. We aren’t quite up to 7.6% of relationships just from those 2 groups because there’s overlap but it does stack.
Granted I haven’t done the research to pin down exact numbers but higher rates of divorce operates in both directions. So stable couples are healthier than average and divorced couples are worse than average.
>In the book, released last month, Kearney points out a rather obvious fact: Children raised by two parents have a much higher chance of success than those raised by one. Yet she goes even further to argue that whether parents are married or not impacts their children's success.
However, my late aunt was schizophrenic and stayed married for her entire adult life, so who knows.
Perhaps a third process correlates them.
https://afeteworsethandeath.substack.com/p/recent-pieces-bad...
Then what is the proposed solution? Pointing out the problem is the easy part. But if you want more people to be married, and if they're currently choosing not to get married, then you need to either force them to get married against their will (institutionalized shotgun marriages) or incentivize them to get married by offering benefits to married couples. The former produces miserable, abusive marriages and traumatized children. And as for the latter, as a country we're already utterly incapable of allocating funding for the aid of childrearing--where's the guaranteed maternity/paternity leave? where's the socialized childcare?--so pardon me if I don't quite see that solution as politically feasible.
I've found this attitude in a lot of people. I think it's designed to shut down ideas that they don't like. At least that tends to happen.
Describing a problem builds awareness. It's the first step to a solution. Insisting on a solution is just another way of ignoring a problem.
And everything has problems.
This is not a position paper. This paper is a finding of fact.
Demanding that they must advocate something is an anathema to proper science.
And, saying that "pointing out the problem is the easy part" indicates to me you're not in the sciences. It's laughable, even.
so let's be more constructive and explore possible solutions to this problem as well, and not just argue about the problem itself.
i do agree that the political landscape in the US makes addressing this problem difficult. the only option i see is to develop grassroots support for this issue by changing peoples opinions on the need to support parenting and having children.
The other option we are seeing now is women in general will greatly reduce or stop having children.
Couple this in with two members of a family required to work to afford housing and healthcare the entire entire traditionalist appeal is going to fall apart due to complete unworkability.
But im afraid pandora's box has been opened and i don't see a way to fix this that doesn't involve alot of people losing rights/individualism (which im opposed too).
If that is not possible, then the solution is not to have children, which is a 100% fair choice.
The ones who have no difficulty managing themselves often just opt out entirely.
A more equitable solution than socialized childcare that recognizes that homemaker is a valuable job that lots of women (50% of those with children) would prefer to do would be to increase the refundable child tax credit. Then you could use that money for hired childcare or to "hire yourself" as a caretaker according to your preference (obviously men could also be the homemaker if that's what the couple wants).
People in general like the addition economic freedom from making more money. Even starting at WWII women started working in huge numbers in the US and that number has increased ever since. The sending the money back in tax credits barely works in a single income house because the otherside in the massive increase of available workers in the US is the massive inflation of assets. When one person works solely to afford a house, the other person can't take a break to have a child. Now add in the out of control costs of healthcare tied to your job no one in the younger generation is going to want to have a child.
> Despite efforts to promote gender equality in occupations and professions, many women still choose to stay at home or work part-time. In the United States, for example, a 2015 Gallup survey found that more than half of women with children under age 18 would prefer to stay at home over working outside the home. Also, nearly 40 percent of women without children under age 18 indicated that they preferred the homemaker role.
Let the phrasing sink in. Despite efforts, women still prefer that role. It's quite clear from context that their preference is wrong.
As far as economics goes, people wildly overstate how unachievable it is. Having a stay-at-home parent is not something reserved for the 1%, and in fact many poorer people do it for economic reasons. People have been taught not to want it, so they don't try to figure out how to make it work.
[0] https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/more-women-stay-...
It isn't a valuable job, economically speaking. It's an anachronism and essentially a luxury for couples where one parent makes enough to support the entire household. Not only this, but it essentially puts all of the pressure on the working parent to economically hold up the household
The cases where it economically makes sense are practically nonexistent in 2023
Honestly I don't know how you could even make an economic statement about it that doesn't boil down to a tautology unless you're also willing to say e.g. teachers aren't an economically valuable job.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/03/almost-1-...
No one needs to take responsibility anymore, live life to the full, have sex with 200 people, take drugs and experiment, and eventually at 40 try and have a child with IVF because at that point that’s your only shot. If you don’t like who you had it with after 5 years, just leave them, it’s fine. Oh and then pass off your children’s moral social education to bad schools.
That’s also not a good plan. Neither is the one you talked about, but society definitely needs to find a golden middle ground, because something is really bad right now. The progressive liberal path really doesn’t work in the long run.
I think men marry in the hope of binding their partner; fat chance. Marriage gives the partner a claim on a big chunk of the man's assets, so it incentivizes women to divorce their husbands. The great majority of divorces are initiated by the wife. I'm not sure why women marry; I'm not a woman, but maybe the reason is the same.
Marriage is an outdated custom. People should learn how to live together without submitting to these ancient legal customs.
Source: I'm twice married, and twice divorced; both partnerships lasted 15+ years. I'll never marry again.
In fact, they've both survived; I'm now friends with both exes. But the contracts caused us all a lot of damage.
[Edit] I'm all for people having the same rights regardless of who their partner is. I'm fine with "equal marriage" in that sense; at the same time, I want to say "Don't do it!" It's like saying everyone should have the same right to walk into the path of an express train.
It's good for some people, apparently; it looks to me that a subset of religious-minded people have relationships that marriage contracts don't screw up.
could you elaborate on that, if it is possible to do so without revealing personal details? maybe in contrast what you see as a difference in the relationships of religious minded people?
the only thing i can think of is open relationships without a commitment to each other. but even there i don't think that the contract itself would be the problem but different expectations of each partner. the problem of the contract is that it wouldn't be aligned with those expectations.
marriage is for people who want to commit to each other. divorce happens when that commitment is no longer a priority.
In many countries people who get divorced unnecessary are subject to social stigmatization. This stigma seems to be a necessary ingredient of a successful marriage culture, and the loss of it is why marriage in the US has stopped working.
Marriage in the US is essentially Russian roulette with your finances, although the odds of losing are a lot worse.
Mainly in the west is it unfair and broken that way. Perhaps they should look into fixing their marriage/divorce contracts.
Most people are aware of such things and can't quite figure how to explain it to someone who isn't, or can't figure out Google. Hence the stare.
I won't go through each nonsense reason in turn, but this one is pertinent:
> Accountability and Conflict Resolution > > Resolution Mechanisms: Marriage often compels couples to work out their differences and disputes in a more committed manner, as there is more at stake.
The opposite is true. People take marriage as a binary thing, and over-react to "last straw" situations. They get divorced, and that's the end. People in committed relationships work things out, because there's a whole lot of grey.
I've been in a relationship longer than most married couples I know, and I'm still seeing divorces every day at my kids school.
>> Literally everything is not unique to marriage, or made _worse_ by marriage.
The words "literally" and"everything" have real meanings. Maybe go through "literally everything". The first two on the list, for example, and consider many different jurisdictions.
The cherry picked example is even wrong. In many jurisdictions couples are legally compelled to go to marriage counseling or similar. Australia has it for couples with kids, several US states have it. So there are all the regular reasons to try to resolve things, plus added reasons.
The anecdote is nothing more than that. No one is claiming marriage is a cure all for all relationships. No one is claiming only marriages are durable relationships. But the idea that there is no practical reason to get married is absurd. Just making a loud, expensive, public announcement that "I'll do x" is known to make it more likely that you'll do x.
They do indeed, and I used them correctly :)
> In many jurisdictions couples are legally compelled to go to marriage counseling or similar. Australia has it for couples with kids
That's pretty messed up. Really? If you have kids, you are legally required to get married in Australia? I couldn't find anything about that, and I find it difficult to believe.
> The anecdote is nothing more than that
K, but I still don't see marriage working in my immediate circle, nor wider society. I don't need a scientific study to draw conclusions from that.
But I'll bite - if you decide to settle down with a partner you match with very well on tons of actually important stuff, including how your future together could look like while lacking any significant (yet known) drawbacks, and you want to raise kid(s) together, then the question is why not. Without the kids part, less reasons but why not.
The inexperienced people (in my case immature kids/teens, I've answered similar but better formed question couple of times already) think its just a paper signed, and contractual obligations stemming from it. Far from it, at least for us. It changed our relationship, for the better, made it stronger and not only due to longer cancellation procedure. Do I have some peer-reviewed study for that? Of course not, just my personal 2 cents.
The reasons I extracted for why someone would want to choose marriage.
* "Why not"
* Changes the relationship for the better
* The relationship has longer cancellation procedure.
But to each their own.
I can come up with a few very good reasons why not, but the question was why.
You mention that after you decided "why not", and got married, you in fact saw your relationship get "stronger and not only due to longer cancellation procedure". I'm happy it's working out for you, but would suggest it's not because you got married.
If you make it through the difficult confrontations your relationship gains robustness and is better for your offspring.
Marriage turns dysfunctional dynamics from small time private affairs into society mediated wars of attrition.
It stops nothing and magnifies the damage and misery one party can inflict on another in worst case scenarios.
A typical Silicon Valley contested divorce costs $250-450k, and 5-10 years before it concludes last I checked.
I have no data, but I'd bet there are more 40 year olds in relationships of over 20 years than there are married people.
The problem with American relationships is that it deals with two people.
A marriage is the full joining of two full families. By marrying my wife, I made my uncle related to my wife's uncle, so they better kind of get along. Indeed I have a vested interest in them getting along because it benefits my children.
A wedding provides a formal and socially acceptable way for these sorts of interactions to occur. If I just moved in with my wife... What are the chances her distant cousins would meet mine? Zero, I imagine. A wedding brings them together and benefits everyone.
But most Americans don't really have extended families so I see why weddings seem strange.
I hadn't thought of the extended family benefit, and that's maybe a good one. Though I will say from all I can tell, our families have had the same level of mingling that they would have had we got married. Could be wrong though.
But yes, many western cultures don't really have close extended families, so even this point is mostly null.
I have an inkling as to why people get married in the west, but I don't want to be set on fire here ;)
But maybe if marriage were more prevalent culturally, they would have?
> But yes, many western cultures don't really have close extended families, so even this point is mostly null.
Western culture is also rife with divorce, which creates a culture in which extended family doesn't actually want to meet, since divorce is like 50/50. Of course, in subcultures in America, like Mormons, certain Asian cultures, traditional Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Amish, etc, there is quite a bit of extended family, and these cultures heavily discourage divorce.
So it's pretty hard to detangle causation and correlation? Does extended family prevent divorce? or do intact nuclear families cause extended families? Or is it a feedback loop, that reinforces another? In that case, what is the most prudent action any individual can take to put the process in the right direction?
People commit immoral acts in all cultures.
https://mattbruenig.com/2023/09/20/doing-the-marriage-thing-...
https://mattbruenig.com/2023/09/30/response-to-douthat-on-tw...
> One of the biggest issues is that women seem to be giving up on men, particularly those without college degrees
this is about what i would expect from npr
it has nothing to do with welfare starting in the 1960s where you can visibly see a breakup in families by incentivizing divorce, its.... college
By all metrics it's cheaper to be married. Better tax benefits, lower housing and insurance costs when you bundle, etc.
yeah maybe if you do prenup it is
I find this attitude applies to everything people don't want to hear. Anything that requires real change, effort, and difficulty seems to be met with anger and attack. It's so much easier to follow the accepted easy road of ignorance.
> "I'm not prioritizing one. I'm just recognizing the data and the evidence and the reality."
Good luck with that. People don't want data and evidence, they want to give their kids iPads at age 1 so they themselves can "have it all", they want to leave relationships the moment they realise compromise means not getting everything you want, they want to down pills to combat symptoms instead of working on where those symptoms are coming from.
I may be making a bad guess, but if I had to I feel I would get the "If these women would just stay married like a traditional relationship demands, then all these problems go away" answer from you.
Now, I'll also make an assumption that you are also going to have a hard time admitting that this is a multi-generational problem caused by male lead institutions treating women like second class citizens where they have massively unequal power. Add in a little equality and you can no longer treat your partner like an optionless slave.
I don't imagine that kind of intellectual self-pleasuring is really convincing many other people, though.
You're making a bad guess ;) I meant none of what you said, and am in fact against marriage (but that's another story).
> Kearney notes that families headed by a single mother are five times more likely to live in poverty than families headed by a married couple.
> Most single mothers start from behind; they're less likely to have a college education or a high income. Single motherhood is a lot less prevalent in higher-educated women.
> Data also shows that many single mothers don't have help from any other adult, like a grandparent or other family member. That means it's mom who both supports the family financially and serves as the primary caregiver.
> many women don't marry the father of their child not because they reject the concept of marriage, but because they do not see him as a reliable source of economic security or stability.
This doesn't look like a "moral" problem (family values, yadda yadda). It looks more like a monetary problem.
There's a grain of truth and a grain of falsity to this statement. It's true that indiscriminately "throwing" money doesn't necessarily fix monetary problems. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that the problem can be solved without addressing the economic conditions that seem to have created it. Certainly, lecturing people about "family values", which has been happening for many decades, hasn't fixed anything.
Lower socioeconomic classes have less resource. Less resource means children do worse. Calling Captain Obvious.
Presumably, if a father was pulling his economic weight, the mother would marry him. The issue is that a male in a lower socioeconomic class is likely not pulling his own weight due to a lack of jobs.
So, if you want more marriage, improve the job prospects for the lower socioeocnomic classes that make up big chunks of the population.
Take this for example:
> not because they reject the concept of marriage, but because they do not see him as a reliable source of economic security or stability.
It's really disgusting what they're doing here. They don't talk about whether you love the other person, or whether you complement each other... no, they talk about economics. They talk about "what's good for me and my bank account"
The tone of this article: it reads like it was written by a sociopath. You ask the author "why do people get married" and hear this stupid shit about economics and "benefits to society", nothing about love or trust or any of the actual reasons. People can't just get along for some reason, economics has to insert itself into everything and liquidate whatever trust and spontaneity it can find
That’s how poor people think. Marriage is one of the most important economic decisions you’ll make for yourself and your children. And if you look at what the country’s economic elites actually do, they very much take economics into account, even if indirectly. A huge fraction of my friends from law school got married to other people from school. Part of that is that they’re around their classmates. But the social structure around then also gently nudges them into those decisions. My Asian parents didn’t hide the fact that my wife’s credentials played a major role in winning their approval, but I suspect the same dynamic manifested in a more subtle form among my classmates with American parents.
You can be in love, be in a stable long term relationship, raise children together etc. without being married.
Being married means entering a trilateral pact between two people, and the state. It can make sense to do so for a lot of reasons, e.g. tax benefits (in particular in the US, as opposed to many other OECD countries).
That people conflate this arrangement with the government with what's going on in their personal lives is just fluff. It's understandable given cultural inertia, but if you really get down to it that's all it is.
> The tone of this article: it reads like it was written by a sociopath
The mediaeval Catholic philosopher/theologian Thomas Aquinas argued [0] that the primary purpose of marriage is for the good of children, by giving them certainty about their own paternity. A long way from modern ideas about “marriage for love” or “compatibility”-but I don’t think it it is sociopathic
[0] https://www.newadvent.org/summa/5041.htm#article1 - that is the Supplement to the Summa so not written by Aquinas himself, rather written by his students after his death - although it is believed to be based on their notes and recollections of his lectures
I meant to say “from birth” (think one word type another; a “thinko”?)
Everything stems from this.
Too much wealth tied up in the health insurance scam to switch to single payer, so people stay bound to their employment, and they can't afford time off or visits to the doctor because nothing is completely covered anymore.
Too much wealth available to politicians and getting elected requires massive funding, so already rich folk are the vast majority of elected officials now. Which means they're completely out of touch of what a poor person's life consists of nowadays.
If it’s a matter of relative wealth disparity, there have been plenty of eras (probably the majority of recorded human history) in which the kings and nobles had a similar wealth gap to their poorest married subjects as we see today between the 1% and the 99%.
I’m not defending wealth disparity; simply suggesting there’s likely another cause for the marriage-rate collapse.
In the past that you're talking about, women were not allowed to be independent, i.e., own property or obtain jobs that could support a family. So women had little choice but to get married.
As long as non-marriage is a realistic choice for women, the marriage rates will never be as high as they were when society made women subservient.
That is maybe half true or not true at all. Women could own property and could be somewhat independent. Queen Elisabeth owned a whole country in the 16th century. In general not only women but men as well had a duty to their families and had to do what their parents demanded of them. And marriage was high on the list of things parents expected from their children whether they were male or female.
That's one women, and a strange example to cite, because my comment was in response to a discussion about the disparity of wealth ("kings and nobles had a similar wealth gap to their poorest married subjects as we see today between the 1% and the 99%). Obviously, queens have no trouble raising successful children, but that doesn't help anyone else in society. (It should be noted, however, that Elizabeth I was the so-called "Virgin Queen" who had no children.)
Why? She an example of a very well known women completely in charge of a future empire in the 16th century. I thought it was clear there were also untold numbers of ordinary women who were also completely in charge of their own households from ancient times till modern age. It is kind of hard to give an example of a woman nobody would know.
The reason for marriage collapse is lack of well paying manufacturing jobs.
The American Economic Institute - https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20180010
Brookings Institute study - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-marriage-gap-the-impa...
This kind of feels like part of the problem here.
Manufacturing jobs used to exist.
Manufacturing jobs used to exist in high numbers.
Manufacturing jobs that didn’t require a high school education existed in high numbers.
Manufacturing jobs that paid well and provided a pension and didn’t require high education existed in high numbers.
It isn’t always a choice, but often it is. Many people can live on one income but choose a lifestyle that requires two.
Not all of the US is a hot spot for high paid immigrants, yet. Displacement is a real thing. Not everyone can change states or nations to make the finances work out.
I’m the sole breadwinner, my wife and I have six kids, and I don’t make fantastic money for being a developer ($60,000/year- took a haircut for this role for the 100% work from home). We make it work.
You can also choose how many and why type of cars to have, what food to eat, how much to spend on vacations, etc.
Hell, you can even choose where and what you do for work! What a country!
Many people will choose higher spending power with two incomes rather than take a step down to live on one.
Where there is a will, there is a way.
Won't. Some can't, but we can't tell how many.
Why didn’t women entering the workforce lead to growth and more jobs being created ?
If a family had to make X to live comfortable before, now you can do so with each of you making half that as long as it adds up to X. People shouldn’t settle for less, but they do even if only a few percent… where before people didn’t to the same degree because it had more immediate impact.
This in turn is one of the several market forces that has contributed to deflated wages.
If you leave this out of your response, do you believe that you're still conveying the same message?
I do.
In late 1960 we peaked with somewhere around 47% of households having children. It is now around 26%
In 1990 the number of married couples in the US started to flatline even though the population is up 40% since then.
But it also should put pressure on parents to stay together once the children are conceived.
In the Middle Ages, children were an investment. You fed them and clothed them and raised them for just a few years before they started to pay off. As soon as they were physically able to walk and listen to instructions, children began to work, usually on the family farm.
This human capital that a couple could grow themselves made marriage and child-rearing a highly profitable activity. It led to generational wealth, which marriage existed to secure and apportion.
This is no longer true in modern city life. Children are a luxury good, not capital. They don’t produce any wealth for their parents. They simply consume enormous resources until they move out and start their own independent lives.
Wealth inequality is strongly correlated but ultimately not the root cause -- it is rather precarity that causes many of our social ills.
Specifically, less high paying manufacturing (labor) jobs.
There’s lot of studies that show that marriage rates have decreased because of…
- the decrease in union power
- globalization (offshoring)
- technological innovation
Read them here:
American Economic Institute - https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20180010
Brookings Institute - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-marriage-gap-the-impa...
How do you think the wealthy got wealthy without selfishness?
You seem to be implying that it isn't the inequality, but that all those poor people should stop being selfish.
If only those poor people would stop being selfish, the wealth inequality wouldn't be a problem.
LOL.
Most inherit it. Then lose it. That’s the typical path of wealth. Rarely, it’s amassed by someone who starts with little. Here these people, the ones who create rather than squander wealth, are called “selfish” often by the wealth squanderers, the children of abundance.
https://www.thelangelfirm.com/debt-collection-defense-blog/2...
If selfishness isn't a good general explanation for Pareto distributions, is there a reason that it's particularly explanatory for wealth distribution?
You could measure selfishness in small experimental scenarios and try to correlate it with the wealth of the subjects. Does that evidence exist?
Almost everything.
One issue is that although most Western countries have Paid Parental Leave (except for US) pregnancy still puts women at a career disadvantage. Because companies can sometimes find out that either (a) the person's role was unnecessary or (b) their replacement is better.
And so especially for women in senior positions it's just not worth the risk.
Another is around the cost and availability of child care. Current global shortage is a real issue.
the equality part of the issue could be addressed with men getting equal parental leave, but it doesn't solve the actual problem.
we really need to support parenting more, deemphasize the importance of career and emphasize the importance of having children.
1. Obamacare was promised to save families $2500 per year. Instead healthcare costs have predictably nearly doubled.
2. A few decades ago the government actively discouraged medical schools from enrolling enough would-be doctors because they had a misguided belief that the country would have too many.
You’re right.
Wealth inequality means less jobs for the lower class. Specifically, less high paying manufacturing (labor) jobs.
There’s lot of studies that show that marriage rates have decreased because of…
- the decrease in union power
- globalization (offshoring)
- technological innovation
Read them here:
American Economic Institute - https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20180010
Brookings Institute - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-marriage-gap-the-impa...
And how do you explain how very poor countries where the top 1% have wealth comparable to wealthy American peers and 99% of the country has less income American middle class had 100 years ago and they have no problems with marriages?
Do they have marital rape laws? Domestic abuse laws? Do they have no fault divorce laws?
How do they handle common law property? Custody laws? Parental rights?
What education do they provide to young women? What institutions do they have supporting female financial independence?
What role does organized religion and specifically church leadership play in the day to day lives of women?
The answer to your question is culture. Wealth simply fuels culture, it is not the source of it.
the problem in "rich countries" is that affordable places to live are missing. so being poor without government support to pay for a home causes you to be homeless.
> many women don't marry the father of their child not because they reject the concept of marriage, but because they do not see him as a reliable source of economic security or stability.
If you think of marriage as purely a business partnership, would you go into business with someone who is unreliable?
It's better to be a sole proprietorship than have your entire business brought down by a bad partner, where both partners are liable for the bad partner's actions and decisions.
i accept that it can be difficult, and that people can be blinded by love but if i already know that a person is unreliable enough that i don't want to marry them, then why have a child from them?
Assuming they "decided".
> so why even have a child with someone who is unreliable?
Because you want a child? Sperm donor.
The problem is now even dual incomes are not enough. So when squeezed, guess what, people get stressed and start crumbling.
Finances are a component of marriage, not the driver.
How could I miss that it's fundamentally part of everyone's martial vows?? /S
Marriage is about love, companionship, and children. Particularly because of children there will always be a significant economic component. But it's not the driver, it's a supporting component.
>Everything stems from this.
No, not it doesn't. If you think that wealth distribution is the cause of all of today's problems, you need to do more exploration.
My reading of the situation is that if you are born into a disadvantaged household, you are going to struggle to get ahead because of how the system works. I don't think marriage is going to suddenly solve that or make a significant impact - the people I know where the father isn't in the picture, their situation wouldn't be any better if he was, and for some, the situation would be worse.
I suppose the book might do more to prove out a causal link but the reasoning in the article doesn't inspire enough confidence for me to chance investing the time reading it.
Whatever causes a non-marriage outcome for households didn’t happen to them: addiction, unemployment, disease, violence, etc
Bad things didn’t happen = success
The challenge for society is resiliency in avoiding bad outcomes in the face of bad situations
Couple#1
They are married for a good while with three kids. He is a cop in Chicago; she has semi-random kid watching gigs. While it did not happen, they did openly discuss strategic divorce to ease their financial situation.
Couple#2
She works corpo job. He works a cash only contracting job. They are married in every sense, but legally. Two kids. She would not marry for fear of losing existing benefits.
###
There are some benefits to being married, but the 'benefits of kids while not married' outweigh those. And you can't argue against those cuz then you are taking food away from the hungry.
in austria/germany at least what matters is household income. if you live together you get supported together. being married has no disadvantage.
I have zero idea how common that situation is though, but I know someone who structures their life around snap benefits ( or whatever they are called now ) and its kinda ridiculous, because her monthly benedit is on par with our family's grocery budget. I struggled not to report it as fraud ( the person in question is not poor; they are using - abusing?- the system ).
that seems to be the problem then. i think generally, hiding the income of a divorced partner is difficult so making your first scenario less likely in many places.
and the other case would also require one partner to maintain credible evidence that they actually live apart and do not support each other. where i come from this is not easy to do.
if you live in an area where this is possible then that's a disappointing state of local legislation.
either way i doubt there is a large number of people doing this. at least i hope not. and it may as well be considered fraud.
i wouldn't bother reporting it though, because it is not going to improve your own life.
Its worth noting that this issue has been discussed for a long time, and while the article acts as if the promotion of marriage in the face of trends the other way on a “think about the children” basis was a novel suggestion of the author, this is not at all the case; it’s been suggested for decades, been the basis of vast amounts of unsuccessful, even at the “step one” of actually influencing the marriage trend, public policy at the state and federal level (the latter as far back as the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act).
And there has been lots of analysis suggesting that marriage, per se, is not driving most of the difference, but things like income and parenting style are [0], and that those correlate with propensity to marry (but are not themselves driven by marriage), so promoting marriage is likely barking up the wrong tree.
[0] e.g., https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-marriage-effect-money...
Marriage is not a magical thing that fixes economic problems, even if you want to keep turning the clock back and make certain acts outside of marriage illegal. The only thing that fixes economic problems is money.
"Kearney says she wants to grab the attention of both conservatives who say they care about children's well-being and progressives reluctant to talk about family structures, because the link between single parenting, inequality and mobility in America is too strong to deny."
Marriage is not a magical thing that creates good family structures, and parents can be deadbeat parents even within a marriage. It might give people motivation to stick around, but families that "stick together for the children" can have A) abuse, and B) the same sort of economic problems as unmarried if one or both parents aren't working. What does enable good family structures is support, provided by extended family or other things.
Speaking as a parent, I’m not sure this is true. If I didn’t have my wife, then I would need to take twice as many sick days for my kids, which would be very tough on my career. I wouldn’t have an extra salary (or if she didn’t work, then a full time person caring for my kids). I wouldn’t have someone to split school pickup/drop off with, which again would be very taxing on my career. I’d still need the same amount of space in my home with or without my wife. And all of this also means that we have more time for child/parent interactions at home.
So yeah, I think there’s huge benefits to having a spouse around while raising kids.
We're talking about on average though. Those things might happen, but only in a very small number of cases, and on average forcing a marriage to "work" might still be better.
For the children yes, and in a time when you had little information and were told it was your purpose in life to have children this might have worked.
Today this is just going to lead people to say "Well, fuck having children", and with the US child fertility rate at 1.64 this seems to be the 'average' decision that has been taken.
The real work is done by blood relatives, aunts, uncles and grandparents or paid help.
Mutual babysitting clubs are a form of paid help. I babysit for you and you babysit for me
This is what a lot of people seem to believe --- people who've never bothered to look at the actual evidence --- or who refuse to accept it once they see.
A detailed county by county survey of the entire country shows that the most religious and conservative parts of the country have higher divorces rates by far.
Getting married in the Bible Belt and giving money to the church seems to *create* a lot of one parent families.
https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2014/01/16/imp...
This is also pointless if they didn’t control for ethnicity. The South has a greater percentage of African-Americans who have higher rates of divorce. The problems beleaguering black communities has more to do with just living in religious or conservative counties
Further, southern states do generally experience more divorce than areas like New England and CA.
am i misunderstanding what conservatism is?
or do people disagree with the idea of equality between men and women?
or with the idea that valuing family more would be better?
She doesn't need to grab the attention of conservatives because her findings already support their pre-existing beliefs, like it says earlier in the article. I get the feeling she felt like she needed to phrase this very delicately.
Not quite, because the other solution to the problem is giving people access to sexual education and birth control so that they can decide to have children only after they find someone they're willing to marry, which are so famously contrary to conservative beliefs that they've based 40 years of political campaigning around their opposition.
There's no way to meet anyone, so there's no point to think about it. Live life without worrying about it.
Good one of course.
It's not hard. Really
there we go. blaming men right off the bat.
Get married before you engage in reproductive or recreational pseduo-reproductive activities.
If your spouse does, find another widow(er) in the same spot and marry them for the kids.
It's not that hard. People knew this 4,000 years ago.