U.S. has world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households (2019)

> there is no requirement that the role model be a parent.

Requirement no. Advantage yes.

> nobody goes into it wanting to go it alone

I think this is missing the point of the controversy. The argument at the time was that it was fine for women to chose to have a child without being married. It was not about "couples should stay together for the sake of the children".

The whole point of the TV show was "Murphy Brown was divorced, and then she decided it was fine to have a child." That is, if a single women wanted to have a child, she should. There was no need for her to first establish a working marriage first.

We went from cultural conventions dating back to the Roman empire at least and upheaved them in large part. Those were staples in the social fabric which have not yet been hewn shut. It's no wonder we're replete with relational dysfunction as we've all been untethered and left to figure it out. It's confusing for both men and women, not to mention the trans folks and those outside the heteronormal sphere. Our recent forebears have clumsily pulled the rug.

And what I mean by this is that we've, for example, still got houses built for whole families, yet the families have so often been split. The density doesn't work and there isn't enough of the intermediary to go around, and it seems like that has been a multi-decadal problem at this point, which has been growing enormously. Houses are neither fit for a return to the nest, and they aren't suited for bifurcation so neither can we expect people to live in multigenerational households nor can we expect the constituents of a family to remain in close proximity (nor should we, in many cases). That then further complicates things, once trivial obstacles require resorting whole days, perhaps weeks. And if a coparent is unreliable - by God will that drastically complicate one's life, sometimes it's easier just to cut away, whole cloth.

Whether that was a good and noble thing I can't dispute. But it was done with little foresight, and I can hardly say if my own perspective - that lack of foresight, of prescience, is just characteristic of my own privileged hindsight - but I think it's evident we're in a poorer place because of it. But it's sort of besides the point anyways as we're here and now.

And it may appear easy to just say "Well, I'll stick with ye olde convention." But I don't think it's the case as everyone, myself included, wants their cake and to eat it too. Fantasy and reality are more miscible than ever before. Apparently normal people with reams and reams of their life's perfectly orchestrated highlights on shining beaches sunken in beautiful blue oceans with perfect partners - except they're buried in debt and have median income and fight incessantly, but they copy type well enough and edit even better so nobody knows they've got skeletons in the closet. And these are the kind of standards we're all sort of inadvertently supporting. And with that unreality we convey ourselves into deeper depths. But that's old hat, everyone knows it (or everyone I know does) and yet we're still marching off in that direction because — still — nobody knows what the fuck we're doing, and it won't be plain to see until some very hard times come, I reckon.

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Studies show that the biggest indicator child economic success is having two parents. Yeah, there's a lot of indirect measurements and selection bias, but it still says overwhelmingly: 2 parents is better than 1.

https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-determine-child-succ...

It sucks, but having only one parent is a huge disadvantage.