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
#2Is 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.
Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
#3[deleted]
Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
#4"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 money.
"Kearney says she wants to grab the attention of both conservatives who say they care about children's well-being and progressives reluctant to talk about family structures, because the link between single parenting, inequality and mobility in America is too strong to deny."
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 family or other things.
Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
#5America is moving the other way because all the wealth and power has been sucked up by the 0.1% and a large majority are too tired, stressed, and poor.
Everything stems from this.
Too much wealth tied up in the health insurance scam to switch to single payer, so people stay bound to their employment, and they can't afford time off or visits to the doctor because nothing is completely covered anymore.
Too much wealth available to politicians and getting elected requires massive funding, so already rich folk are the vast majority of elected officials now. Which means they're completely out of touch of what a poor person's life consists of nowadays.
Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
#6> Kearney says she's not advocating that children live in a household filled with marital tension or where parents are unhappy or mistreating each other.
Then what is the proposed solution? Pointing out the problem is the easy part. But if you want more people to be married, and if they're currently choosing not to get married, then you need to either force them to get married against their will (institutionalized shotgun marriages) or incentivize them to get married by offering benefits to married couples. The former produces miserable, abusive marriages and traumatized children. And as for the latter, as a country we're already utterly incapable of allocating funding for the aid of childrearing--where's the guaranteed maternity/paternity leave? where's the socialized childcare?--so pardon me if I don't quite see that solution as politically feasible.
Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
#7[flagged]
Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
#8Anecdote incoming. Usual disclaimers apply. I genuinely am not sure what true numbers are.
Couple#1
They are married for a good while with three kids. He is a cop in Chicago; she has semi-random kid watching gigs. While it did not happen, they did openly discuss strategic divorce to ease their financial situation.
Couple#2
She works corpo job. He works a cash only contracting job. They are married in every sense, but legally. Two kids. She would not marry for fear of losing existing benefits.
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There are some benefits to being married, but the 'benefits of kids while not married' outweigh those. And you can't argue against those cuz then you are taking food away from the hungry.
Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
#9Is 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.
I was wondering about that, too. The data are very clear: if you grow up with married parents, you will do better. But, should everyone be rushing off to get married, or is marriage selective for people who will do better? Or is it partly selective, and also partly forcing yourself to work through a marriage makes you a better person?
Re: Children of married parents do better, but America is moving the other way
#10Is 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.
Possibly some of the poor outcomes are due to married people being more likely to be able to sustain a stable relationship. There are a lot of factors confounded with marriage, and it doesn’t seem like the author controlled for them (this is an article about a book and not a peer reviewed study). She explicitly mentioned that married couples are more likely to have a better household income and that single moms are less likely to have support from outside family members. So I suspect that outcomes might be better for a single parent with the income and family support the same as a married couple, but that situation is rare. Similarly, if you forced two people to get married and have kids when they didn’t want to, those kids probably aren’t going to get the same benefit of growing up in a married household.