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.
BTW, shouldn’t “widower” be the person who died and the survivor be called “widowee”?
“Etymology Middle English widewer, alteration of wedow widow, widower, from Old English wuduwa widower; akin to Old English wuduwe widow”
It's one of these more universal words of Indo-European origin: https://ids.clld.org/parameters/2-770#2/14.4/149.7
this is where we try to control for the positive material externalities that come from sharing resources among people. you dont have to buy two of everything if you share, it's cheaper to add a room than obtain a whole house and duplicate bathrooms + kitchens etc.
widows would fall afoul of this (in the sense that they've lived with that advantage for most of their lives), as well as obtain a likely wealth effect from inheritance, but it wouldn't surprise me if the entirity or majority of the marriage effect is largely just a restatement of equivalisation + social transfers/safety nets.
I was a child of divorce, and honestly it was a bit traumatizing. My parents were (and still are) often quite angry, mean and dishonest. They spent literally over $100,000 on legal fees, but "didn't have the money" to buy me a guitar.
So despite being (relatively) well off, coming from a violent, if not outright abusive at times household, suffering from parental neglect... yeah honestly that may have contributed to things like "skipping class to do drugs".
I think there's a lot of socializing that can happen in a functional two parent household that doesn't happen in single parent households, and this may be an additional advantage, in addition to equivalisation + social transfers/safety nets.
Plus as previous comments have said, if your parent has the trait "functional, responsible adult capable of having healthy relationships", that probably really increases your outcomes.
Are you actually confused by this concept?
One large barrier to breakup is how much damage a breakup will do and how much effort it entails.
If a break up is very easy then small insults will lead to break up.
A marriage contract is.. a legal contract; thereby it can be a barrier to a break up.
I have considered breaking up with my girlfriend before yet the effort of splitting our things and ensuring that she has a nice continuation of a place to live comfortably has caused me to reevaluate if the reasons I want to break up are good enough. That's all the parent was suggesting. Does the marriage contract have any bearing on keeping people together.
That’s probably why that’s all they’re looking at. It’s the only thing that can be measured as a proxy for stable relationships.
Not the ridiculous idea of people who thought they were married but were apparently not due to some technicality or bureaucratic error which they were not aware of.
(Personally, I don’t think high birth rates are a good thing. The long term survival of our species depends on curtailing global population. But that’s a different subject.)
Clearly parental support is not directly correlated with high birth rates.
That doesn't seem to be the case. The last 60 years saw plenty of anti family propaganda (same like in the US) and the numbers confirm that trend.
The only people keeping the number of kids per family high are immigrants from Africa / Middle East who haven't been indoctrinated for 60 years.
I'll give you a hint - it's quite a lot less than the number of Mormons in the US. Who are a group significantly whiter than the US general population, and with higher birth rates to boot.
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.
That aside, yeah; we live in an interesting time. Sadly, technological progress, equality, and monogamy are all positively correlated, so despite some acceleration of natural selection, this is surely a net negative for society.
corrected, thanks.
Three things.
1. Attractive is not physical attraction. While men are visual women have different criteria for attraction that is much more multivariate. Wealth, confidence, looks, power, personality. Generally, overall social status and height are the two most consistent metrics for female attraction preferences.
2. What I'm describing is a recent phenomenon. A gradual shift that we're seeing in the last decade or so, so relationships established at the beginning of 2010 and before tend to be more traditional/conservative.
3. Birth control changes the game. Evolution manifests procreation as both a conscious desire to have children and as sexual urges from men and women. Thus I may be incorrect here. It may be that thanks to birth control alpha men may not spread their progeny as much and that people in healthy monogamous relationships end up creating the next generation as hook up culture essentially is an evolutionary dead end with birth control.
There is room for considerable bias here;
1. Most generations consider their immediate neighbors more and less conservative, going back and forward respectively
2. People become more conservative with age; particularly when major investments are in play such as a home purchase and having children. It's a small coincidence that children and mortgages both take about 20 years to come to fruition.
Agreed. But the issue with bias is that the biased person is unable to visualize their own bias. They always think the other party is biased. Unfortunately I believe that out of both of us here, the bias actually lies with you but you're unable to see it. Here's why:
>1. Most generations consider their immediate neighbors more and less conservative, going back and forward respectively
Yeah, but i'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a general trend towards liberalism. The past decade brought about a general liberal movement outside of the one where people get more conservative with age.
That much is obvious. Society is shifting towards more and more woke-ism, feminism which is good in some ways but in other ways it's becoming extremist on those fronts. It's so extreme that many of the liberal policies in California are causing an exodus where people move to more conservative states like arizona and texas.
>2. People become more conservative with age; particularly when major investments are in play such as a home purchase and having children. It's a small coincidence that children and mortgages both take about 20 years to come to fruition.
I'm talking Monogamy and polygamy. Not finances or investments or law. For example in the 60s women sex before marriage was not normal. Now a body count of 5+ among women before marriage is considered normal. But you realize this has nothing to do with mortgages, children or major investments.
The bias here lies with the fact that you see things through the lens of politics. I'm talking about anthropology and biology. It's human Behavior and psychology... Not politics.
###
I'll sum this up.
The female's mating strategy is the dual mating strategy (genetics vs resources). Historically women had to find some balance in this (should i marry the prince or the struggling artist - plot of tianic). Modern society satifies the resources side of the equation (whether that be overt welfare or covert welfare (getting a student loan + going to college + paper pushing corporate job)), leaving women the freedom to completely maximize the genetics side. The men providing the genetics side has no incentive to stick around to fulfill the resources side.
Sadly, I’m about to hop off the train, but if someone replies that they are interested, I’ll provide a writup that will surprise you.
I am simply regurgitating academic facts. This is markedly different from "assumptions."
Assumptions.
You assume that most of human history that women were not equal. This is actually, quite false[1]. Only in recent western history were they unequal. This by no means dismisses the fact that women were, in fact, oppressed for several dozen of the last generations and for most of the western world. However, this is NOT long enough to create any kind of genetic pressure.
> In anthropology there's a saying that monogamy benefits men while polygamy benefits women...
I googled this "saying" and it was only your post that came up. Did you just make this up? lol
> If a woman sleeps with another man then the partner may end up raising and spending resources on another mans child.
Sure, if you have the emotional maturity of a 16 year old, this makes a lot of sense.
> Thus all men have intense instincts to basically end an entire relationship once a woman has a single sexual affair.
No, these are not "instincts", they are a loss of trust in a partner and no relationship can survive if there isn't trust. Open relationships exist, polygamy is a thing. I can assure you.
> where women are totally ok with their husbands fucking prostitutes
I think this just proves my point... trust is essential. Sex is just sex unless you attach something special to it.
> Basically we live in an era of changing social norms and it's accelerating natural selection.
I would absolutely love to see a citation for how natural selection is "accelerating" because, if anything, it is the opposite. We're having fewer children in most developed countries, not more.[2]
:sigh:
Let me tell you what is actually going on now. Women tend to work together, more so than men[3]. What this means, is that there are entire communities where they talk about who they go on dates with. I'm not even making this up.[4] This means if you are a creep, no one will date you because you are a creep. Do something stupid, every woman will know about it on your next date. So, no, there isn't some mysterious "beta" or "alpha" bullshit, it's just that women are smart enough to work together to make sure they don't date the wrong person.
Your entire comment is built on a pile of assumptions and leaps of logic that are barely coherent, with no references to back them up.
[1]: https://phys.org/news/2023-10-prehistoric-gender-roles-women...
[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46118103
[3]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797620956632
[4]: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/are-we-dating-the-s...
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.67680...
You present a source with women being hunters. I never denied this. I here present a source of female and male unequal-ness as a comprehensive study across time and culture. Which do you think is more relevant to the conversation at hand? Which resource was strategically picked to fulfill some biased agenda? Obviously not the comprehensive study.
>I googled this "saying" and it was only your post that came up. Did you just make this up? lol
I googled it too and found multiple resources within minutes. The reason you didn't find it is obvious. You're not conducting a logical search with intent. You're conducting a biased search. You don't agree with me so you don't want to find a source. So subconciously you spend less effort and end up finding nothing. Typical.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-funda... https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2015/polygyny_health...
What happens next is when presented with sources against his own agenda the naysayer starts to nitpick. Starts to find as many flaws with the source as he can.
Where this saying came from. Where I first heard it was in the UCLA anthropology department. It was stated by the professor and the text book. The professor btw, was female, and so am i.
>Sure, if you have the emotional maturity of a 16 year old, this makes a lot of sense.
This isn't a response. It's an attack please present evidence. It's called paternity fraud and it's a real genetic strategy both in humans and in animals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternity_fraud
https://canadiancrc.com/newspaper_articles/Globe_and_Mail_Mo...
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-02-op-zuk.r...
>No, these are not "instincts", they are a loss of trust in a partner and no relationship can survive if there isn't trust. Open relationships exist, polygamy is a thing. I can assure you.
Polygamy is a thing. I didn't deny this in my arguments. It exists but it is beneficial to women not to men.
>I would absolutely love to see a citation for how natural selection is "accelerating" because, if anything, it is the opposite. We're having fewer children in most developed countries, not more.[2]
Having fewer children is part of natural selection. It means the children that were not "had" are naturally selected out. Natural selection happens either by not being born or being killed before reproduction. I don't think you understand.
When countries have fewer children it means MORE children are being UNSELECTED. and the natural selection process is becoming more vicious and thus "accelerating".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
>Your entire comment is built on a pile of assumptions and leaps of logic that are barely coherent, with no references to back them up.
I posted sources.
>Let me tell you what is actually going on now. Women tend to work together, more so than men[3]. What this means, is that there are entire communities where they talk about who they go on dates with. I'm not even making this up.[4] This means if you are a creep, no one will date you because you are a creep. Do something stupid, every woman will know about it on your next date. So, no, there isn't some mysterious "beta" or "alpha" bullshit, it's just that women are smart enough to work together to make sure they don't date the wrong person.
Yes that society is our current society. We have entire facebook groups where we identify and red flag men who we don't want to date. As a woman we only want to date alphas. I won't date someone who makes less than me. Alphas exist in the animal world, it makes no sense to suddenly deny the existence of alphas in the human world.
Clearly there are men who are more powerful and more attractive than others. Those men are basically "alphas". Women like you and me tend to work together to improve our own successes. That means polygamous relationships with the top men. This is what I want and this is what you want.
What confuses me is that often your arguments are in agreement with mine. I don't think you're maintaining a logical stream of consistent thought.
Apologies, I'm typing this on a busy train.
We are, in fact, in agreement on much. However, we are viewing reality through different lenses.
> I here present a source of female and male unequal-ness as a comprehensive study across time and culture.
It seems to focus mostly on the last 1-2k years, and not so much on the hundreds of thousands of years before that. You said:
> For MOST of human civilization genders were not equal so both sexes evolved traits that are also unequal.
(emphasis mine). For most of human civilization, was a very, very long time and most written records have (unfortunately) been lost prior to a few thousand years ago. That was the part I was rebutting, because it was an invalid premise that is then used to deduce that there was some kind of genetic pre-disposition that was used throughout the remainder of your comment.
> I googled it too and found multiple resources within minutes.
I couldn't find the quote: "monogamy benefits men while polygamy benefits women and general female behavior shows it" since you made it sound like it was a popular thing. I admit, I didn't bother researching the entire topic, since it wasn't "a saying".
I'm not debating who it is useful for, I was saying that it is a non-issue. Women and men cheat, and cheating is when one person in a relationship breaks the rules of that relationship. It doesn't matter if it is an open relationship, monogamous relationship, polygamous relationship, friends with benefits, swingers, platonic friendship, or whatever. If you break the rules, you can't be trusted and the relationship must be ended.
In a monogamous relationship, one of those rules is usually against sex with another person. There's no "instincts" there, they broke the rules. End of discussion. The fact that it was sexual intercourse is a non-issue. The rules of the relationship were broken.
> It's an attack please present evidence.
I present to you: adoption. It's when a man (or woman) raises another man's child as their own. The adopted even get to inherit property in some parts of the world.
> As a woman we only want to date alphas. I won't date someone who makes less than me. Alphas exist in the animal world, it makes no sense to suddenly deny the existence of alphas in the human world.
Well, there is no such thing as "alphas." This comes from a debunked paper that got popular 50 years ago ... we are not wolves and even wolves don't have "alpha males" in the popular sense.[1] A pack of wolves is simply a family and it makes sense that mom & dad would/should be the only ones having sex instead of brothers/sisters. Even when it is a mixed family, the breeding pair changes, come and go.
Instead of saying that women want "alphas," I think it is simpler to just state the reality of the situation: women want men who can pay child support / alimony, in the event things go sideways. When shit hits the fan, you don't want a hot guy with no future (maybe sometimes, actually), you want a guy who can (monetarily) care for your children that you'll be inevitably stuck with because our society sucks at taking care of single mothers. Women have even come up with creative solutions to ensure they don't end up with "losers" getting them pregnant. Fixing society's issues here is probably the way to unfuck large portions of our society, but it is unlikely to happen because it is stuck in a feedback loop -- there is still a patriarchy who has no desire to fix this.
Anyway, like I said, I think we are saying the same stuff, just different ways of seeing it.
[1]: https://www.wolf.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/267alphastat...
please; I'm always keen on counterpoints to /r9k/ ideology
It's unfortunate that these things are happening to men but that's just reality.
Please be logical and rational rather than accusatory.
Curious though, have you thought about changing your perspective to increase your evolutionary fitness?
Edit: The question was added to their comment after I clicked reply.
Well-paid women are much more likely to date men who make less than them. What matters today is that the household is happy and overall has enough financial stability between both earners combined.
> 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.
*harem, not Harlem. Also "harem-style" polygamy is rare in the USA, the most common form by far is "kitchen-table polygamy". In this version, it's actually easier for arbitrary random men to find mates because women in stable poly relationships happily have sex with a wide variety of men "on the side", and can carve out space and time to give those men chances to earn a strong relationship with those women.
> Thus all men have intense instincts to basically end an entire relationship once a woman has a single sexual affair.
Anywhere "affair" is a thing, anyone has intense instincts to end the relationship, because of a catastrophic breakdown of trust. In the vast majority of poly relationships in the USA, women having sex with other men isn't an "affair" and doesn't trigger this type of reaction.
Of course the stats play out this way. But it doesn't change the fact women WANT to date men who get paid higher than them.
Think about it. Men do not care how much a woman gets paid. In fact they have a slight preference for women who get paid less. So given that a rich woman has the same attraction level on average as a poor woman, their performance will be on average identical. Meaning they date a man with the same average salary.
Then of course rich women on average will be more likely to have more money than a man with an average salary. Use your critical thinking here. The statistics have to play out this way.
But none of it changes what women want and none of it changes female behavior. We want men who are better than us. We want the best and we demand it.
>harem, not Harlem. Also "harem-style" polygamy is rare in the USA, the most common form by far is "kitchen-table polygamy". In this version, it's actually easier for arbitrary random men to find mates because women in stable poly relationships happily have sex with a wide variety of men "on the side", and can carve out space and time to give those men chances to earn a strong relationship with those women.
Assume that agreed upon polygamy is so rare that it's existence is negligible. I'm talking about people who get married to multiple wives.
What is common is hookup culture. This is the real "polygamy" in the US right now. So take for example my hypergamous instincts make me desire this really hot rich guy. But that guy is so desirable that he has many many options. On some level I know this but it doesn't matter... I want him and I don't mind the fact that he fucked other women and he doesn't mind who I fucked either because he's an alpha male who has an abundance of choice.
The average male who I don't care for and is invisible to me, usually tries to get into an ltr. It's the best option for him due to a dearth of choices. For him it is critical that the woman he is with did not have intercourse with anyone else. This isn't some "thing" I made up that desire in men is scientifically verified to be a distinct instinct than women. Yes. Science as in actual science not some hand wavy stuff that's from most of your reply.
>Anywhere "affair" is a thing, anyone has intense instincts to end the relationship, because of a catastrophic breakdown of trust. In the vast majority of poly relationships in the USA, women having sex with other men isn't an "affair" and doesn't trigger this type of reaction.
Wrong. Again human emotions stem from primal desires and instincts not from arbitrary rules of trust. The topic you are going on about has been studied and the studies show you are utterly and completely wrong. Stop looking at official polygamous marriages. Agreements like that are so rare it's negligible. This is the point: Men are not ok with women having sexual affairs in general and women are a bit more on with it and these two differences stem from biology not some made up relationship rules. Citation:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/per.654 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14747049060040...
This also explains my emotions. Why I'm more willing to hook up with a man who's done well with a lot of woman and why men in general don't like to marry women with high body counts.
Source: https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/divorce-rate-by-count...
For example, Swedes have it drilled into their heads from an early age that "everyone deserves a home". This is not the case in America, where "poor people deserve to be poor because they're lazy, cut welfare, universal health care is socialism" is an acceptable statement, and in fact the basically party line for one of the two major political parties.
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.
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.
Europe generally taxes incomes individually and offers parental leave to help when one of the parents is out of the workforce with a baby. In the US there's just the pooling of tax allowances.
For dual income households in very high cost of living areas though you need to balance the benefits of pooling tax allowances while only one of you is working with the reduction in mortgage interest tax deduction (which has the same maximum for both a married couple or unmarried single filers.)
the gain from married to Married filing separately is insignificant.
Lions are smarter than us.
I think there are cultural reasons why Americans are more likely to get married too, but don't discount the financial incentives since they are pretty substantial for new parents. Remember this is a country with no right to paid maternity leave!
Take an example of an unmarried couple in San Francisco earning the median salary for the city of roughly $100,000/year each. As they both earn the same amount and get their health insurance through their respective employers so getting married has no immediate financial impact on them.
They then decide to have a baby and one of them wants to take a year off to be with their young baby. They need health insurance but if they are unmarried and go on their partners health plan then that part of the health benefit is not tax deductible for their partner. If they get married they will pay maybe $12,000/year less in tax by filing jointly. ($7k federal tax, $3k state tax, $2k from deductible health benefits though maybe one partner would qualify for medicare.)
So I think the financial considerations are a big part of why Americans choose to get married more than Europeans. As someone who moved here as an adult I find it so weird that it's talked about so much! Having children in a stable unmarried partnership is completely unremarkable for my friends and family in Europe.
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.
(did a sustained stint as a volunteer guardian ad litem [1] and occasionally provide advice to others performing the work)
Just because something defines 90% of the result, it doesn't mean you must just give-up and not work on that remaining 10%.
The same applies to the luck vs. hard work problem people keep missing the point about.
[1] https://www.nycfoodpolicy.org/states-that-have-passed-univer...
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.
Still something like 16-25% of the overall population has some form of diagnosable mental illness, couples have 2 people, and divorced are more likely to have various conditions. So the effect size would need to be huge for this not to be relevant.
Most studies agree that bipolar disorder is not evenly distributed across the sexes. Schizophrenia is roughly equal but occurs for men before/during peak childbearing years, and for women happens after.
I don’t think that actually impacts the statistics here the way you think it would.
Suppose 2% of the population had X. If 1% of women had X, ~3% of men would have X and therefore ~4% of couples would.
Nailing down the differences in divorce rates, age of onset, differences in rates of relationship formation, etc are all worth considering. But my point was simply it’s significant not that I had calculated some exact number.
>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.
It's on the person who is implying a causation to state why they think that there is such a causal relationship.
Marriage success and child success have so many other things that they are correlated to: Home ownership, IQ, wealth, zip code, parental educational background, ability to talk about feelings, empath, conflict skill, ...,
So somebody comes around and picks "Marriage" out of this huge list, and somehow now the burden is supposed to be on the listeners to disprove it?
It's seems clear that socio economic status has an enormous influence on child outcomes and is clearly intertwined with other factors.
Do better.