Why Are Men More Vulnerable to Depression in Fatherhood?

> ~48% of first marriages fail, ~60% of second marriages, ~70% third marriages.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4240051/

> The Centers for Disease Control stopped gathering complete data on the number of children affected by divorce in 1988, and at that time more than one million children were affected (Cohen 2002). Since then, the incidence of divorce has continued to climb, and according to the 2009 American Community Survey, only 45.8 percent of children reach age 17 years while still living with their biologic parents who were married before or around the time of the child's birth (Fagan and Zill 2011). The majority of divorces affect younger children since 72 percent of divorces occur during the first 14 years of marriage. Because a high percentage of divorced adults remarry, and 40 percent of these remarriages also end in divorce, children may be subjected to multiple family realignments (Cohen 2002).

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-exp...

> 57% of adults under 50 who say they’re unlikely to ever have kids say a major reason is they just don’t want to; 31% of those ages 50 and older without kids cite this as a reason they never had them

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-...

> As relationships, living arrangements and family life continue to evolve for American adults, a rising share are not living with a romantic partner. A new Pew Research Center analysis of census data finds that in 2019, roughly four-in-ten adults ages 25 to 54 (38%) were unpartnered – that is, neither married nor living with a partner. This share is up sharply from 29% in 1990. Men are now more likely than women to be unpartnered, which wasn’t the case 30 years ago.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/11/family-househ...

> About 39% of U.S. family households this year included the householder’s children under 18, according to new U.S. Census Bureau estimates.

https://www.voronoiapp.com/demographics/Over-Half-of-Househo... (draw your attention to the shrinking yellow “married parent” cohort, 17.9%)

TLDR A majority of US households don’t have kids, and only 18% are households with married parents.

(Aggressively data driven; "May the odds be ever in your favor")

You can’t know until you’ve already walked through the one-way door. What about all of that aggregate regret and suffering for those who didn’t want, or don’t want after kids are here?

Humanity isn’t going to end because we empower people who don’t want kids to not have them, although the population will compress over the next 200 years (from 10B downward). There will always be parents who really want to be parents, as well as parents who thought they wanted to be but regret it.

For those who want to eat the glass, we salute you. Options for everyone else.

From an early age, aside from their siblings, they interacted primarily with adults in their world, often from different cultures and speaking different languages, and often in situations where the stakes were high (intrinsic danger imposed by the natural environment and classical physics) .

They learned to be a cohesive team, to handle responsibility within the range of their understanding, to seek and accept council, and to ignore immature behavior when it pops up in inappropriate times.

This sometimes rugged beginning has served them quite well in their lives.

After traveling from Alaska to Oregon , we traded in the cargo trailer for a camper trailer because camping was a pain in the “@&. We shipped our tools and supplies from the cargo trailer to a boatyard in Florida.

When we got to the boatyard, we spent the next two years living in our camper as we rebuilt a 50foot steel schooner.

We didn’t have much cash, so we did all of the work ourselves and salvaged steel from where we could find it.

We became great customers of the metal recyclers in the area lol.

The most expensive thing was buying the epoxy based paint and the bottom paint, which cost almost as much as we paid for the boat. (And the 500 dollars a month for the boatyard)

Other than that , thousands of grinding disks and maybe 20 harbor freight grinders lol.we found they would last through 4 or 5 brush replacements if you didn’t burn up the armatures by using brushes to the point of failure.

We spent the next few years sailing the east coast and the Caribbean, central and northern South America. We would salvage contaminated fuel and filter it and treat itfor our auxiliary engine and generator, getting paid for removing the expired diesel, and I did engine and electrical repair on other boats.

It wasn’t a comfortable life, but it was full of opportunities to teach things about life, lots of skills, and independent thinking and action. Probably the most important lessons were in risk tolerance and risk management. It’s easy to be overly risk averse in the modern world, or to limit your risk taking to avocational pursuits.

I was happy to swallow the anchor when it was time for the kids to start building their social structures and to get started in more advanced levels of education.

It was hard, and an enormous sacrifice for more than a decade, but I wouldn’t trade that experience for my kids for anything else that we could have realistically managed.

The kids grew up in an adult world, but there were lots of other boat kids, and we often stopped for months at a time. When we would be in a place for more than a month or two, the kids would enroll in local schools, which we treated like social studies/ language class, managing primary curriculum on the boat.

Anyway, I’m really happy with the results. They’re all grown and starting families of their own now, and it’s been obvious that their upbringing was key in their many successes.

They refer to it as their “cheat code” because they basically aren’t deterred by anything that they have to learn or become proficient in, and they know from experience that they can do anything they reasonably decide to do.

They have all built houses (as in personally built them) and have are finding their way in software, finance, politics, farming, robotics, and whatever else is interesting to them… basically living what most would describe as a privileged life despite having come from very modest means.