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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

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly you're not seeing the answers you're given as compelling because of your perspective. I can speak from an Islamic perspective and say that sexual relationships are considered immoral outside of marriage, so a man and woman cannot create a family and have kids unless they get married.

> sexual relationships are considered immoral outside of marriage, so a man and woman cannot create a family and have kids unless they get married. People commit immoral acts in all cultures.

And they have to hide them or get the (expected) backlash.

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

#392
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t let the reality that this was in response to a statement that implied a universal reality that it’s impossible to raise a family on a single income be lost on you. I’m the sole breadwinner, my wife and I have six kids, and I don’t make fantastic money for being a developer ($60,000/year- took a haircut for this role for the 100% work from home). We make it work.

there is a hair in your comment that probably should not be there...

no, haircut is now a phrase that doesn't only apply to hair due to the flexibility of human language =)

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

#393
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there are effects of marriage, it seems fairly obvious that they are due to the explicit commitment that the two people have made to each other, not the government’s tickbox. Are you actually confused by this concept?

Let's tone down the aggressive comments please. 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 ha…

The effect you describe could be sufficiently studied by comparing married partners to unmarried long term partners.

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.

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

#394
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting married forces difficult confrontations that many relationships get to bypass by breaking up. If you make it through the difficult confrontations your relationship gains robustness and is better for your offspring.

Ho man. Clearly you’ve never sat in family court for any length of time. Marriage turns dysfunctional dynamics from small time private affairs into society mediated wars of attrition. It stops nothing and magnifies the damage and misery one party can inflict on another in worst case scenarios. A typical Silicon Valley contested divorce costs $250-450k, and 5-10 years before it concludes last I checked.

Judging the institution by its edge cases may put blinders on one’s conclusion.

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

#395
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting married forces difficult confrontations that many relationships get to bypass by breaking up. If you make it through the difficult confrontations your relationship gains robustness and is better for your offspring.

I find it's the opposite. Marriages break up because it's a binary thing; they either get through the "last straw", or they get divorced. Contrast that with people in committed relationships who have a sea of grey to work with, and eventually make it work when it could have been a divorce if they were married. I have no data, but I'd bet there are more 40 year olds in relationships of over 20 years than there are mar…

Marriage as an institution is mostly about offspring. A sea of grey might be where children drown.

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

#396
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ho man. Clearly you’ve never sat in family court for any length of time. Marriage turns dysfunctional dynamics from small time private affairs into society mediated wars of attrition. It stops nothing and magnifies the damage and misery one party can inflict on another in worst case scenarios. A typical Silicon Valley contested divorce costs $250-450k, and 5-10 years before it concludes last I checked.

Judging the institution by its edge cases may put blinders on one’s conclusion.

Ignoring an institutions (common) edge cases will definitely put blinders on one’s conclusions.

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

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This question is answered in the interview. She is saying that a household with a stable long lasting relationship is what’s driving these better outcomes. She’s also saying that in America marriage (unfortunately) seems to be the only way to keep people together for a long while (long enough for a child to not experience a parade of parents by the time they are 15 according to the article). In my personal opinion. I…

Yes hyper individuality is part of it. The other part of it is gender equality. For most of human civilization genders were not equal so both sexes evolved traits that are also unequal. 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 egal…

> 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.

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.

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

#398
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

ok, fair enough. would it help to elaborate on the points? let me try: by more family values i mean: value family more. that implies better financial support and less taxes for having children, parental leave, counseling and other measures that help parents stay together. but also raising the image of being a parent in society in general. religious conservatism refers to older family values where the woman submits to…

i hate to be that guy but... source?

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

#399
post #297

As someone from Europe, I can't understand the inability of mainstream US culture and media to disentangle marriage from long term stable relationships. Take this paragraph from the article: > More women are deciding to have children and also remain single. Almost half of all babies born in the U.S. were born to unmarried women in 2019, a dramatic increase since 1960, when only 5% of births were to unmarried mothers.…

"In my opinion looking into what's driving that difference between couples in the US and Europe would be worth a discussion on its own." The problem is especially acute in the underclass, and American underclass differs a lot from European underclass. For example, a lot of the Western European poor are Muslims (in countries that keep the relevant statistics, Muslim immigrants and their descendants tend to score below…

> In the US, the trend leaders when it comes to having kids out of wedlock are the poorest parts of the population, mostly blacks, where "unmarried" and "unpartnered" tend to go hand-in-hand.

I know you’re talking about “trend leaders”. But you must have forgotten about Native Americans and Latinos. Native Americans and black people tend to have children out of wedlock at about the same rate. Latinos have children out of wedlock at a high but lower rate. But there are more Latinos in the United States than there are black people, so there’s actually more Latino children born out of wedlock. And Latinos have the highest birth rate too.

Same goes for white people in the United States. If the rate for black people is about 70% and the rate for white people is about 30%, there are still hundreds of thousands more white children born out of wedlock than black children each year in the United States.

(Sorry, the whole “trend leader” thing rubs me the wrong. It’s like when people talk about welfare recipients based on race. Someone always says “X percentage of black people are on welfare, tsk.” But then when you look at the numbers, Native Americans have the higher percentage within their own race. But again, most welfare recipients are white so there are literally hundreds of thousands more white people on welfare than black people lol. Why doesn’t that fact get a “tsk”?)

Someone replied to you saying/asking “aren’t black people religious”. Your “mostly black” comment limited the discussion. Imagine if you had said “mostly Latinos” instead. There could have been a discussion about Catholicism. There could have been something more, something else at least.

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

#400
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok, fair enough. would it help to elaborate on the points? let me try: by more family values i mean: value family more. that implies better financial support and less taxes for having children, parental leave, counseling and other measures that help parents stay together. but also raising the image of being a parent in society in general. religious conservatism refers to older family values where the woman submits to…

i hate to be that guy but... source?

source for what specifically?

more family support? compare the support for parents available in the US vs most other countries in the world, in particular the EU and read the comments here.

equality between men and women? again, there is plenty of evidence worldwide that we have not achieved that. not by a long shot.

the only thing that is not self-evident is the relationship between religious conservatism and divorce. that's one i am not sure about myself. but it is at least supported by a few others here.

here is one study supporting that point: https://www.asanet.org/women-more-likely-men-initiate-divorc...

results support the feminist assertion that some women experience heterosexual marriage as oppressive or uncomfortable.

“I think that marriage as an institution has been a little bit slow to catch up with expectations for gender equality,”

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