How do we know that the causal relationship is this way and not the other way around, if there is one at all? Raising children and generating income at the same time requires teamwork in most cases. That's immediately obvious, and there's probably not much more to it than that.
Two-parent households should be a policy goal
131–140 of 291 posts
Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most relationships, especially with kids, are heterosexual.
In what way is that a response to this discussion?
> It feels extremely unusual to me to specifically call out a mother/father relationship if they weren't intending to exclude queer relationships
When most relationships are hetero, just calling out hetero pairing as a proxy is.. perfectly fair. That's not some kind of secret exclusionary dogwhistle just to use common language.
If parents are almost always a man and a woman and you say "kids with a mom and a dad"... you're just using the English language.
Dogpiling someone and attempting to shame them for "a lack of inclusivity" isn't some kind of meaningful attack, it's just a failure to be a useful communicator.
Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or we could increase supply. A very small percentage of SFHs is owned by investors and those are still red out which fills a some needs that buying a home doesn't. The solution is to build, build, build. That's gonna bring prices down and houses will naturally become a less attractive investment. They shouldn't be a investment object anyways, just like food shouldn't be.
We also need to be careful about what we build - it can't just be more SFH. The ideal would be for municipally owned mid-rise apartments in mixed-use neighborhoods to become common. Vienna does this very well, but public housing has been demonized in America (and, like the lazy dad who does a chore so badly they never get asked to do it again, our federal government starved public housing support so badly that most A…
Just allowing the type of housing you describe to be built by anyone would probably go a long way. I think another key ingredients is smoothing out and accelerating the permitting process. Shutting down hyper-local input that drags everything out is also a must. Someone wanted to convert a bunch of SFHs across the street from me into exactly what you describe and community protests shut it down. Happens all the time. People just hate change when it's near them.
I understand that in Japan there is a set of federally defined zoning types. Some beaurocrat checks your proposal against the requirements of the zone you want to build in and you get your permit or rejection within days. It's difficult to comprehend the massive impact it would have for permitting to go from an expensive, multi-year dice roll to a mostly predictable process that takes days.
Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal
#134Nothing better than a father and mother in a stable, loving relationship for a child. Yes, let’s encourage this.
Encourage how? Force unhappy couples together? You think that is good for the children?!
Yes. In many cases taking away the power from a parent can force them to “behave” in a way that provides an overall better outcome for the child.
Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
You want people to go to marriage school?! Honestly what planet are you living on.
It's the science fiction world called, "The Planet of People Who Look Before They Leap." There are awesome marriage schools, called couples counseling, and a lot of people do just that before getting married to help expose some of the gotchas that you don't realize before getting married (lots more farts basically). Should it be "policy?" Hell no, but it would probably help new families a lot for people to do it.
The policy shouldn't make it mandatory. It would be interesting to see what a free session would do.
Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal
#136Flipping the script from "both parents working to stay afloat" to "a stay at home parent in every home" takes strong financial incentives. But the stronger the incentives to start and keep such parental arrangements, the stronger the forces keeping dysfunctional and harmful relationships together, at the expense of everyone involved. People fought for divorce for a reason, that needs to be addressed somehow.
Those incentives will be self manifesting. If every household did this we would have a much smaller labor force, essentially forcing companies to pay more.
Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we are concerned about poverty, maybe we could just give them money? I understand the fairly small child tax credit had a huge positive impact on child poverty.
And further incentivize divorce? It's a dual-headed problem. Much of what has fueled the breakdown of family structure are policies that incentivize women to become single mothers. Children being raised by single mothers is not a good outcome. We need to stop pretending that it is.
No, just do UBI or a version of UBI that's only for kids. That way you get rid of the harmful step function we always pack into social programs.
Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
A multi generational household occurs naturally when grandma and grandpa had a stable two parent households and now mom and dad do too. Moreover, it's not necessary to force everyone in the same house. My parents and inlaws are within 20 minutes. It's great and since they are both married and happy, there's little family stress and the kids get ample time with both grandparents. God forbid, if anything were to happen…
> A multi generational household occurs naturally when grandma and grandpa had a stable two parent households and now mom and dad do too. Huh? My sister and I both live more than a thousand miles away from our stable, married parents that we are on good terms with. We went where our work took us and then met and married people in that area. My sister lives several hundred miles away from her in-laws, and my in-laws (…
I suppose I should revise my comment to mean that I don't think living together is a necessity. Just in close proximity.
Moreover I know many who do live close to parents and seem estranged due to broken families/mom and dad can't stand to be in the same room, etc
Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. It took most of human history to build the old culture with immense social pressure to marry and have children, immense social pressure for men to provide and women to care for children, and intense taboos around divorce, births out of wedlock, even around non-marriage into old age That world is gone, and probably for the better in many ways. The world needs to find different cultural norms around children su…
> The world needs to find different cultural norms around children such that we can have a stable population and happy children. Unfortunately, the world is dead. It can play around with cultural norms as if they are toys for whatever time it has left, but the diagnosis is terminal. You don't have enough children, all of you, the fertility rate is below replacement and it is not a blip or a fluke. Children who grow u…
> You don't have enough children, all of you, the fertility rate is below replacement and it is not a blip or a fluke.
How is the population still growing by almost 1% per year then?
Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal
#140The tax credits for married people here in the US seem to be part of this type of policy, no?
Being single parent can also file for the deduction. Receiving supposal and child support after tax also encourages divorce, which also encourages the benefiting party not to go to work or do works that doesn't pay taxes. I'd say the current policy is more encouraging of divorce than two-parent household.
Spousal support is an archaic holdover that doesn’t belong anymore and child support should not be a thing offered in at fault divorces. For the latter I’m not sure how you can go about implementing that ethically though. If the dad cheated, fine, he should pay child support. If the mom cheats, maybe the state can subsidize daycare while the mom is forced to work. Otherwise there are no consequences for the mom who can just “divorce him and take his house and half his money”.