Education education and education.
Good one of course.
It's not hard. Really
Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
201–210 of 431 posts
Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
#202"Their book suggests that 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." 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…
>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 fam…
>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.
Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Queen Elisabeth owned a whole country in the 16th century. 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 societ…
>> That's one women, and a strange example to cite 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.
> 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.
I don't think that's clear.
As for recent history, here's some US labor force participation data from 1948 to the present. Notice the stark contrast at the beginning. https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/03/women-in-the-labor-f...
Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the article: > 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 par…
the partnership started the moment they decided to have a child. so why even have a child with someone who is unreliable?
Because women have a limited window to have children and have to work with the options available. A woman can’t put off kids indefinitely waiting for partners to stabilize financially, emotionally etc.
Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this just a lazy version of the "welfare queen" argument? By all metrics it's cheaper to be married. Better tax benefits, lower housing and insurance costs when you bundle, etc.
> 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
Obviously this calculus does not include the cost of a divorce.
Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, because either parent could have menial issues. Especially when you include things like gambling addiction which are also linked to divorce. ~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 th…
Maybe nonstable are less likely to have relationships / kids
Sure, which is why you want actual real research.
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.
Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
#207These types of articles are doing the opposite of what they're trying to do. How exactly is framing marriage in purely economic terms supposed to encourage marriage? How is reducing people down to an income stream, a college diploma, genitalia, etc going to encourage marriage?
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
Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
#208Is it that marriage itself is beneficial or that people capable of maintaining a relationship make better parents? 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.
Obligatory note that it’s unethical to do a real control experiment at society wide levels, so we will never untangle causation/correlation.
Which is why I was suggesting widows, they should be more directly comparable to single mothers after you correct for income.
Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
#209> Where are the dads? > 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
Welfare doesn't end good marriages, it makes ending bad marriages (more) possible.
Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
#210> Where are the dads? > 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
In contrast to your argument though, Europe has comparatively higher welfare across the board, but the US has the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households.
In America single parents get more access to welfare programs than married ones so they are specifically incentivizing divorce. It isn’t a function of the welfare state level in general it’s this disparate incentive.