At the same time, I do think people have gone a bit too far in their want to not give anyone shame. Yes - some shame is not going to help single-parent households now but I would think some societal shame would prevent people from being reckless with having kids or maybe make people think twice about leaving their partner when it really is just a rough patch.
A child of a divorce is likely to deal with anger, instability from custody agreements, custody battles, emotional fights and manipulation between parents, new relationships on both sides and the changes that come with that including issues with step siblings.
Divorce comes with so many negatives for children. A “healthy” divorce is rare from what I’ve seen to this point in my life.
We can easily see the population of divorced families, it's much harder for us to shine a light on "should be divorced but aren't". I have a hard time believing kids with a dysfunctional parent relationship at home would be better off.
I have said something like this for years now.
Specifically, I have said:
"I don't know how much shame should be employed in a society but I suspect it is not "none"".
Do people want the birthrate to go down or up? It's very easy to shame people into "you should have way more than the median income and own a house before having kids", and guess what effect that has.
One possible (partial) explanation: If there is enough insurance/benefits to cover the bills after dad's death, mom is usually the primary childcare provider. So if dad's role is primarily as provider, his loss can be substantially mitigated with money.
If divorce makes outcomes 10% worse but makes divorce with children 20% less likely, maybe it's a wash?
At the very least, it seems incorrect to insist to me the downsides of shame always outweighs the benefits from it. Even if putting numbers on it is kinda farcical, but I think the point still stands.
Meanwhile, several US states are working against this goal by preventing women from having unwanted pregnancies. It's as though policy has consequences!
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 to either my wife or I, they would be well taken care of.
Eventually our parents may move in or closer by, but right now, it's nice for everyone to have some separation.
More importantly, young people need a reason not to move hundreds or thousands of miles away from their stable household. Investing in community resources, local economies, and infrastructure that promotes health and opportunity are all necessary.
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 (also still married) only moved to be near us when they were no longer capable of living independently (there is no way with all of their health issues that they could take care of our kids).
This goes back a generation as well, though the distances were smaller (~400 miles of driving between me and my grandparents when I was growing up).
I'm in a similar position, and it's been a lifesaver. When our first child was ~6 months old, my wife had a gallstone attack at 11:30 at night, and my parents were able to be there in minutes, so we could get to the ER without waking our daughter up and bringing to her to a hospital in the middle of the night. I don't even want to think about how much harder that would have been without nearby parents—and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
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.
In no way are either of them a third 'parent'. This idea that grandparents and aunts and uncles can actually be a third parent has to die. No one who actually lives in these situations is confused as to who's who.
We lived with my grandparents as children and while again, we loved them very much and they watched and cared for us like parents... The relationship is fundamentally different.
Not generally. But creating a child necessarily involves creating a stable biological relationship primarily with two other people.
Most people across history think the biological circumstances that bring us into the world are spiritually important and making the triangle between mother-father-child healthy is good for children.
For better or worse, people care their genetic material. We can either choose to create a society that makes the best of this, or we can try to suppress it and convince people that it doesn't matter.
And yes I know that surrogacy exists. But that's a side argument that opens up a lot more questions and I don't think it really changes the fundamentals.
If three-parent scenario is tried at a larger scale and if it works with small tweaks to our social contract, then why not?
Alloparenting is great, but 3 parents running the same household would be a nightmare in most cases.
Multigenerational households are another popular option to deal with economic challenges.
But overall, this seems circuitous. The author acknowledges that inequality is both a cause and effect interacting with marriage, and cites several ways that kids are better off in two-parent families -- but the description of those comparisons makes no mention of controlling for these other factors. So one can have a lot of skepticism that a poor two-parent household, where both parents need to work long hours or multiple jobs to cover rent, where housing is less stable, where surprising costs (a broken-down car etc) turn into catastrophic disruptions, will turn out healthy successful kids. But the finding that kids do better in two parent families already selects out a number of metrics -- educational attainment, future earnings, lower rate of getting in trouble at school or with law enforcement - all of which are desirable irrespective of family structure. Those seem like better goals, which we are already pursuing just relatively ineffectively.
You want more kids to go to college? Make college cheaper, make colleges spend more money on instruction and less on administration and coaches.
Want kids to have fewer behavioral issues at school? Well, stuff that could make their home life more stable whether their parents are married or not may include safe, affordable, stable housing, and IDK, schools that don't have to do active shooter drills b/c of the real threat of being invaded by a well-armed crazy person might be nice.
Want kids to grow up to earn more? I think Piketty's focus on the share of growth that goes to capital versus labor is important. Generational wage stagnation in real terms is still critical.
Want kids to get in trouble with the law less? In my city, the police did a mass arrest of hundreds of kids skateboarding recently. No one's top concern about crime here is "too many kids are skateboarding". Maybe law enforcement should focus more on e.g. corrupt local officials, employers with systemic wage theft, landlords dangerously skipping repairs and maintenance, etc etc rather than kids on skateboards?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/opinion/single-parent-pov...
> We are often reluctant to acknowledge one of the significant drivers of child poverty — the widespread breakdown of family — for fear that to do so would be patronizing or racist.
The money has to go toward producing the outcome, and since the likely causes of the positive outcomes are values-based[1], just giving money doesn't cut it. At least, that's what the economic evidence appears to show.
[1] Values-based: Values meaning attitudes toward hard-work, sacrifice, self-control, and especially education. These values have nothing to do with gender roles, race, or ethnicity.
The reason people are reluctant to really explore the nature and role of the “breakdown of the family” (especially people like Kristof who throw it out as a facile explanation, who are not at all, contrary to his description, uncommon, this line being standard on both the Republican Right and the Democratic center-right) is that that breakdown is itself a result of policies that are patronizing and racist, both in which family models they favor and in which communities they undermine family structures of all kinds.
If we valued free speech more, we might be able to have more open, honest conversations in the public realm here.
In a society where people are easily fired, or have their lives disrupted in other ways, for expressing the wrong opinion or saying the wrong thing, there is no upside to having this conversation. The only rational decision is to ignore the question and move on.
The fewer conversations we have, the less likely we are to be able to solve problems.
Progressive discourse has turned so ideological that perfectly normal mainstream conversations make people anxious.
People shiver to even discuss the idea/benefits of a heterosexual marriage. As if its some rogue legacy structure. As if single parent situations are some higher moral good to strive for.
A portion of men, especially the lower classes, are facing severe issues. But this can hardly be addressed as the very idea of men in need of social justice does not fit the "all men are oppressors" narrative.
These politics achieve worse outcomes, not better ones, and they alienate vast groups of people.
And therein lies the problem. We've seen for years how every call for minimum wage increases or labor rights is met with "You're only worth what the market will bear. If you want more money and better treatment, you'd better make yourself worth more to the market!", yet when the shoe is on the other foot, and the labor market favors workers, policymakers treat it as an _emergency_ requiring immediate correction. Unemployment expansion was cancelled at the state level (despite evidence that people on unemployment assistance find work faster), employers strongly resisted any call for wage increases or working condition improvements, opting to whine "No one wants to work anymore" to anyone who would listen, and the Federal Reserve started hiking rates as quickly as it could despite little evidence that inflation was caused by anything other than supply chain difficulties.
The unspoken yet universal policy preference of our governments is to weaken and impoverish workers to the greatest extent possible to ensure enough of us are compliant and desperate enough to take any job at any wage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K1tqDyN4xE
Tim Gurner was recently excoriated for saying the quiet part out loud from the perspective of the rich and powerful: "The governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment" so we can have less "arrogance" from workers.
there is another approach besides just a higher minimum wage.
provide better education to everyone so that they can achieve higher qufications and get better jobs. that will solve the problem of minimum wage jobs because noone wants those anymore. (but, just to be clear, i am not against raising the minimum wage, just that by itself it's not really going to solve the problem)
In fact, a large chunk of existing tax law deals with all the possible combinations of households with children and parents, where the parents may or may not be living together, and may or may not be married to each other. It is designed to fairly accomodate unmarried people, not to encourage marriage.
A vengeful judge and spouse can easily wreck one’s finances unfairly.
Child support makes sense in theory, but is butchered in practice. The judgements often have little to do with how much it actually costs to support the child and is more about a percentage of income.
Let's not forget, the state is the third party in a divorce. They do not want to support anyone when they can force one of the other parties to do so.
However, there are also plenty of welfare programs that are means tested so marriage is ruled out.
(One of the leading theories for the number of babies born out of wedlock rising so much since the early 1960s is the end of the shotgun wedding: the baby daddy counters by pointing out that the mom will lose out on a lot of benefits if she gets married)
This hardly mattered years ago, but with median wages getting around 70k+, a lot more people pay this penalty for getting married.
In the US at least, the financial and legal incentives for women to divorce is far, far greater.
As it stands, men already don’t look at women for their financial prospects like women do towards men. If we can change this aspect of our culture, I think this will give to one of the largest rises in two parent households.
I don’t expect it to ever change though.
> Multiple studies document a causal link between the economic struggles of men and the growth in single-mother families.
> To give disadvantaged children better futures, policy makers should promote widespread employment and economic security among a wider segment of the population—particularly non-college-educated men.
(Removed: "Cloudflare DNS blocks archive.ph.")
Edit: Cloudflare clarifies below.
I'm nervous and concerned that I'm not human. I distinctly remember having a childhood and living a human life, but those might just be uploaded memories. What is my best course of action to get to the bottom of this mystery?
In some circles, the mere suggestion that this should be a policy goal is insulting, as it hints that single-parent homes are inferior. Our government isn't really allowed to prefer one over the other, even if it would result in less misery.
Furthermore, the tools that government has at its disposal to encourage two-parent households are few and clumsy. No decision to stay together has ever hinged on a slightly higher tax exemption, or some other priority access to the bureaucracy.
The writer's room of some Hollywood sitcom has more power than Congress in these matters. I doubt very much that they are interested in giving up on the show that makes jokes that discourage such, but even if they did, that's one show when the real culprit is the entire weight of the entertainment industry.
We might as well talk about how it should be a policy goal to raise the speed of light to 750,000 miles per second.
That world is gone, and probably for the better in many ways.
The world needs to find different cultural norms around children such that we can have a stable population and happy children.
For most of human history, raising a family was not really a choice, culturally speaking, it was a mandate. Currently we’ve gone the other direction, and raising a family is a lifestyle decision like hiking the Appalachian trail, and partway through your partner may decide it is not for them.
From a freedom perspective this is ok but socially I think this is precarious. We’ve given up our stable optimum of centuries and clearly not yet found a new one.
I'm talking about the roles. Even in the most advanced progressive societies women continue to select for male providers (marry up) whilst they continue to do more care-related tasks.
In other words, gendered roles continue to exist. None of which should be shocking because the idea that it's 100% a construct and men and women are entirely egalitarian is an academic fantasy not rooted in anything.
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 up in your world are discouraged from even liking the idea of having children of their own some day. They grow up hearing all the same dumb jokes on sitcoms about how horrible it is to get married, to be pregnant, to raise children. The internalize it, and the next generation is smaller than the last. This isn't reversible.
> For most of human history, raising a family was not really a choice, culturally speaking
Only because if it was a choice, then you wouldn't be here to casually quip about "human history". A humanity that doesn't raise families has no future, there can be no one a thousand years from now to talk about past history.
Organisms that do not reproduce become extinct. It's been hardwired into our biology since day one. Talking about it as if it were some choice is bizarre and indicative of a lack of self-comprehension. Might as well talk about not having a choice in whether you breathe or eat.
The same people who talk about dangerous and virulent memes, the so-called "disinformation" are no more immune than those who wallow in the things.
> We’ve given up our stable optimum of centuries and clearly not yet found a new one.
Good news. You still have -30 years to find one.
Yeah they are, expecially for the average childrens in average single household (struggling single-mothers). The idea that being a single mother is heroic is dumb and a disservice for everybody, expecially the children involved. At best single-parents are Martyrs. Obviously there are the exceptions but data shows that single-parent households are extremily more likely to live in poverty or near poverty.
I believe that children in struggling (financially & other) households should be given in temporary adopotion into stable families (with a set of incentives or child support checks) till one of the original parent find enough stability to fully take care of them. "It takes a village to grow a kid 2.0" approach
Can we control for confounding variables like education level and age at first conception because maybe the answer isn't "single parenthood is awful" but "women shouldn't have children so young" or "it turns out poor people just do worse than wealthy people". The first likely boils down to the 2nd.
I have seen so many varieties of single motherhood and couple parenthood that I'm not convince that single parenthood is inherently a problem. I think it's more poverty. Single motherhood often couples with poverty, although not always now that women are more educated. But I've seen dual income households that matched a single parent household have the same kind of struggles.
Perhaps we should just ask why our social net is so weak that being a single earner means you can't raise a child. Anyone can lose their partner and they shouldn't have to scramble to pick literally anyone just to ensure their kids are cared for.
This isn't Victorian Britain.
What century are you living in.
A single parent with a strong local community of caregivers who can help perform the work of raising a kid in their community is probably not worse off than the standard, alienated two parent household in America.
So while what you say might be true in America, I don't think it's axiomatic.
The latter is obvious lying and deflection, and that's a PR disaster. The former is an absolute shitstorm. Single-parent celebrities that have five different kids by four different baby-daddies go on talk shows and Twitter, start calling you a Nazi. Whatever passes for newspaper editorials now days start whining for the next 6 months that it's anti-inclusive and undermines diversity. Invitations at colleges to speak at graduation are rescinded, some of your campaign donors stop taking your calls even though the mid-terms are coming up in less than a year. LGBT activists then crawl out of the woodwork saying that what we really need aren't two-parent households, because anyone can be a parent. We just need two-plus income families, and that poly-amory is superior because it can potentially bring four or more incomes into the house. Only cis-bigots really want just two parents there.
And then you back off. Not a battle worth fighting. None of this, even if it worked, could be milked for votes in an effort to get promoted from the House to the Senate (or the White House). And since it would be attacked from day one with the possibility that it might fail, why even try? It's far from a sure thing. All we know is the correlation, not the causation.
1) they can't afford it, or
2) they don't have a reasonable apartment/home (same thing as 1. really)
3) they don't want to give up their lifestyle
4) they're genuinely afraid the future is dystopian and dark (which is rather interesting since I can't imagine a future more dystopian than one without children)
So if you want to fix the society to want to have children again you have to make it
1) affordable,
2) less inconvenient,
3) (not really sure what to do about being afraid of the future)
if that sounds like socialism... too bad. Capitalism evidently makes people prefer capital (both money and time) over children.
This is important to note because “should I have children” is kind of a novel question, especially for women, in the context of human history.
If you go back a century or three, women (especially from a middle class or upper class family) were expected to wed. And wives were expected to bear and care for children.
Choice was not particularly involved, and most career paths were unavailable for self-sufficiency in the first place.
A question like “would I be happier advancing my career as a scientist or choosing to raise children” is a foreign question a century ago. Now it is a question that the modern woman must grapple with.
This is similar to what you are saying, but it’s the social side of the coin rather than the economic one: an upper middle class family may easily be able to afford raising children, yet the wife still does not want to sacrifice her career which embodies her ambitions, her passions, and her sense of worth.
And that "selfish" attitude worked over the past 2-3 generations - why go through the hassle of raising kids when the government will anyway provide you pension and assistance when you get old? The costs of kids are privately born but the benefits are socialized in terms of taxes and welfare programs. And now you are looking at South Korea with a 0.7 TFR, with other nations not far behind.
It will be interesting to see how South Korea and Japan deal with it. A range of outcomes are possible - a "Ship of Theseus" scenario with these cultures getting slowly replaced by immigrants, awesome future based on awesome robots, dystopian future based on overhyped AI tech, complete collapse of social programs as the young refuse to care for the previous generations who either preferred partying or were worked to bone by their corporate culture, or a soft landing where the society actually get its act together.
Also back then a lot (heard numbers like 25%) of women didn't have children. Not sure what this changes about the equation given that it probably wasn't their choice either, but it sounds like a lot.
1) affordable,
2) less inconvenient,
Sweden has done about as much as any country reasonably can do address those two, and it hasn't had much effect on improving the birth rate.
I can. A future where children are all poisoned and enslaved to grind a little bit more value out of a dying-anyway civilization is, to me, nastier than one that voluntarily calls it quits before things get that bad.
But also: Very few childless people think nobody should have children. More than we need to pool our resources into supporting those who are going to be born anyway.
When people are free to WANT children and decide on how many, it's going to be 0, 1 or 2. Which might average out to 1.5 - 1.8 in most countries, far below replacement level.
There's nothing you can do financially to truly move the needle. Even people with no immediate financial challenges tend to not have more than 2 children.
Why not? Because a 3rd, 4th, .... adds no value whilst it does add immense logistical nightmares.
When you love children, 2 will keep you plenty busy. When you have 4 you'll have an issue with your car and home. You'll be spending most of your time driving them around to their schools, sports, hobbies, whatever.
It's not an economic issue, as tempting as it is to think that. When given the choice to want children, most still want them, just not many.
Do I have evidence? No.
Do you have any evidence that any other form of parenting is just as good?
1. Taking a certain cognitive stance toward P (for example, believing it, rejecting it or withholding judgement) would require rejecting or doubting a vast number of your current beliefs,
2. You have no independent positive reason to reject or doubt all those other beliefs, and
3. You have no compelling reason to take up that cognitive stance toward P.
Then it is more rational for you Not to take that cognitive stance toward P.
---
This is basic logic. If you're proposing a system of raising children that goes against the vast majority of cultures spanning thousands of years then it's on the proposer of the new system to come up with the evidence that it's just as good.
Also, frankly, the suggestion that fathers are optional or even unnecessary is quite sexist. Just because we’re generally inured to anti-male sexism doesn’t keep it from being objectively wrong.
Force unhappy couples together? You think that is good for the children?!
A more charitable and common sense way to read it would be to reduce stressors on couples with children, a huge one being childcare arrangement and expenses. Especially so if granny and granda aren't around or capable of helping. Tax credits, stuff like that goes a long way.
By creating evidence-based policies that support and encourage nucleic families through education and counseling at accessible institutions for potential and actual family members.
Kids are fun and all but they are on some level a sacrifice. You give up part of your soul for them. At the end of the day you should expect them to walk out the door not needing you at all and count yourself lucky if they say thank you.
There's no one (or there shouldn't be anyone) who can force people to stay together. That said, they should stay together. I mean, I think they should stay together if they don't have kids because they made a commitment and who wants to look in the mirror in the morning seeing someone who doesn't honor that but if you have children that should be double.
Kids absolutely benefit from stable, nurturing surroundings. But that could take so many other forms: multi-generational families, co-parenting, “it takes a village to raise a child”, queer families, polyamorous families; teens might find they benefit more from chosen families. Cultures around the world and across time have used many other systems to help parent. Focusing on the nuclear family is a distraction from the real aim and it might even cause more problems than it solves.
Should every vehicle made be wheelchair accessible because some people have wheelchairs? Same logic here.
I doubt you will be able to prove, or show, that the nuclear family has even slightly higher rates of abuse per 100,000 than any of the other modern forms of family you have suggested. Until ~2013 with the legalization of gay marriage when it then became an unmentionable issue, even left-wing websites like The Atlantic, and mainstream publications like the BBC, were warning about how domestic abuse in LGBTQ relationships is at least possibly higher than a traditional marriage.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/a-same-se...
Arguing that children with married parents fare better, thus promoting two-parent families, is akin to suggesting that since blue cars have fewer accidents, everyone should drive a blue car.
Pressuring dissatisfied couples to stay together or marry benefits no one.
The article fails to provide actionable recommendations on promoting marriage.
I largely agree, but the idea of promoting two parent households isn't antithetical to your statement. You could have programs that are meant to ensure that couples get married for the right reasons, with the right skills, etc. It's likely a marriage prep/ed course would result in fewer divorces, just as drivers ed results in better drivers.
Ine example, if your primary discussion about what happens if the marriage doesn't work out happens after the fact, then you were ill prepared. Better to have that discussion while on good terms going into it - like a collaborative prenup consultation at least.
Is marriage required or just a two parent household ?
Honestly what planet are you living on.
As it turns out, The Moynihan Report [1] was 100% accurate and its predictions on where things were going to head have come true.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For...
> Welfare policies made things worse by denying benefits to families with adult males in residence. Fathers and husbands had to leave — or hide in the closet when social workers came to check. (quoted from a review [1])
[1] https://www.npr.org/2012/01/19/145343942/in-st-louis-an-urba...
I don't have an Atlantic account, so I can't comment on the whole article [2], but when I read anything like:
> Two-parent households should be a policy goal.
I start to get a little don't-tread-on-me-ish. I don't think having The Man deciding family structures is what the government is for.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_family#/media/File:Fam...
[2] If you're so eager to sell a policy idea why shoot yourself in the foot by putting it behind a login?
It also spells out the advantage of marriage, even unhappy marriage: kids get in less trouble, have fewer problems, and are happier with better outcomes.
Relationships are much more about your ability to handle conflict and invest time than who the other person is.
