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Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way

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Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way

#231

Post by rayiner »

We should do more social studies research into US subcultures that have significantly different marriage norms than the mainstream US. Mormons and Asians both have strong taboos against divorce, and also have strong rates of upward mobility (i.e. much higher odds of kids from low income households ending up as high earning adults).

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.

Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way

#232

Post by RecycledEle »

thoughtpalette wrote: post #154
RecycledEle wrote: post #133

Single parents raising kids should be charged with child abuse. 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.

What an archaic way of thought. I can only hope you're not being serious.

Helping our children grow up to be successful adults is not archaic.

Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way

#233

Post by gemstones »

konschubert wrote: post #35
Retric wrote: post #2

Is 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.

On a slightly related note, why is it that one gets lynched on twitter nowadays any time one brings up that "correlation doesn't imply causation"?

Because it’s on you to show what about the correlation makes causation unlikely, and most people don’t take that step. We all know correlation isn’t causation, that’s trite and obvious. Why wouldn’t the correlation between married parents and better child outcomes be causative?

Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way

#234

Post by c-cube »

bequanna wrote: post #95
2devnull wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you live in an area with high international demand for housing? 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.

Luckily in the US you can choose to live wherever you want. If you’re priced out of a neighborhood, you can choose to live somewhere else. 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 t…

> You can also choose how many and why type of cars to have

See that's an interesting example. In most places in the US[^1] you have no realistic choice but to have at least 1 car per adult in the household. That's not quite the full extend of choice for "how many cars" one would wish for.

> what food to eat

Have you heard of "food deserts"?

[^1] this is false in a few places that were not bulldozed in the 1960s and still allow for non-car centric life. These places tend to have very high cost of living because they're desirable.

Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way

#235

Post by Boatfaceing »

dangus wrote: post #182
mensetmanusman wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany has the same fertility rate as Japan.

Sweden is a better example. Incredible parental support, high birth rates compared to the rest of Europe. (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.)

[dead]

Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way

#236

Post by fisttrain »

em-bee wrote: post #185
em-bee wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we do need more family values, but religious conservatism is not that. we also need equality between women and men, and that is where conservatism gets in the way. i suspect that lack of equality is what's driving most divorces in those conservative areas because women no longer allow themselves to be treated as being lesser than men, so they stand up for themselves and the conservative men can't handle that.

it appears that some people disagree with my comment. but i do not understand why. 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?

[flagged]

Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way

#237

Post by Boatfaceing »

lordgrenville wrote: post #90

A substacker I follow claimed that Kearney's thesis ignores a confounder, that unhappily married couples are more likely both to split up and to have kids with worse outcomes. The fairer comparison would be between unhappily married two-parent homes, and single-parent homes. Haven't read the book so can't say if this is true. https://afeteworsethandeath.substack.com/p/recent-pieces-bad...

[dead]

Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way

#238

Post by rayiner »

mvncleaninst wrote: post #207

These 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 sec…

> 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...

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.

Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way

#239

Post by kirubakaran »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #180
soeptical wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Widows/ers may have some associated confounding factors

I'm sorry to be off-topic but widows/ers just hurts my eyes. Why not use a more elegant alternative, widow(er)s? Even the uglier widow(s|ers) would be better.

Or the gender neutral, invariant noun: “widowen”

BTW, shouldn’t “widower” be the person who died and the survivor be called “widowee”?

Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way

#240

Post by laurencerowe »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #175
chomp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > 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.

> In the U.S., she says, unmarried adults who decide to live together do it for a much shorter duration than in Europe. Are there any theories about why this might be? The article doesn't seem to follow this up.

I suspect this is a result of the tax system in the US which is structured in a way that strongly incentivises parents into marriage.

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.)

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