Regardless of how you slice it... an extended family household has multiple adults. That means the US leads the world in children being raised with only one adult around.
EDIT: Also, to be clear, an extended family household means that mom and dad could still be around, so it says nothing of a household with only either mom or dad (most likely mom, according to the article).
I can't see why single parent has a bridge to extended family. Single Parenthood is about parents splitting, extended family is about mutually supporting generations.
Anecdotally, I know quite a few extended family situations, but only one single parent. Non-US context.
Anecdotally, non-US, many of my friends grew up in these situations (single parent, usually mom, extended family helps take care). Brought up well, too
Apparently sometimes there are people other than your parent(s) who both want and can do a better job at actual parenting. (Say if one or both of the parents are still young and stupid/unstable or slightly insane/dead or can't be bothered.)
I interpreted that comment as "Its remarkable that India has a lower total number with so much population," implying that the rate is drastically lower."
On top of the other points, like in many other conservative cultures, much of the population leans towards staying in a bad relationship if already married because divorce is seen as worse than being a dysfunctional family, especially for women.
Generally, we agree that making sacrifices for the good of others is good morals. High rates of having children out of wedlock, and divorce, are caused in significant part by unwillingness to make the sacrifices that would ensure a stable, financially secure home for children. These days, it’s often because men lack morals and are unwilling to sacrifice personal freedom to enter and stay in marriages, to the detriment of children.
Divorce has tremendous negative consequences on children. The childhood poverty rate for children of married couples is under 7%. For the children of single parents it’s over 37%. A Stanford study found that children of divorce die five years earlier than children of intact families.
See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4240051/ (“The best scientific literature to date suggests that, with the exception of parents faced with unresolvable marital violence, children fare better when parents work at maintaining the marriage.”).
Got me, I totally made up this brand new social idea that men need fathers. It's so new and cutting edge that nobody has ever researched it or looked into it.
I see that your account is barely two weeks old, so in case you're new here, please take notice: this forum has standards [0]. You're posting in a manner that violates quite a few of the rules. Using snark and playing dumb to evade any risk of serious discussion will earn you a ban in any thread, with or without the context of your obvious undercurrent of bigotry.
As for this specific comment: you're still only pointing to hypotheses rather than evidence. And there are enough really obvious counterarguments that there's no way to pretend you're trying to engage in serious conversation.
It sounds like you're upset that I am pointing out the obviousness of thing you're requiring evidence for, and you're jumping to my use of sarcasm as a technical rule break to threaten reporting me.
I'll make my point without sarcasm then: Asking for proof that "men need fathers" is so common sense and obvious that denying it suggests to me that there is no evidence that you would accept. If you're serious and actually want me to find you studies, please describe, in detail, what evidence would change your mind. I want to have a clear understanding of the requirements and goal posts before I make effort towards that. If you don't want to do that, then unfortunately I can only conclude the question was in bad faith.
> Asking for proof that "men need fathers" is so common sense and obvious that denying it suggests to me that there is no evidence that you would accept.
You think I'm denying your claim that "men need fathers". That's because you're spoiling for a fight instead of trying to have a reasonable conversation.
Before I can take you seriously, you need to start showing some awareness that there are potential alternative explanations for what you claim is too obvious to require evidence. The questions and criticisms your comments raise and the fallacies your comments perpetrate are obvious and plentiful enough that you should be able to anticipate at least some of them yourself, and preemptively respond to them as a way of strengthening your case and making your comments substantive. Instead, you're continuing to make low-effort comments and treating this forum like a playground for your trollish behavior.
So it seems you're not interested in evidence of the thing you claim to seek, because you're not willing to define what would convince you, so that I can use that to find materials that fit your criteria. Ok, have a nice day :)
A case for why men need fathers? These Kafkaesque lines of questioning don't make it clear what people are actually upset about or want to learn more about.
Would you have the women stay with their abusers and their beaters so that the child can have “two parents”?
People don’t leave relationships because they’re good, safe and healthy.
Love is what helps a kid grow well and the comradery and care two adults can have for each other can be reflected into children no matter the gender of the adults who serve as examples.
I'm more than confident you don't mean to imply that a child gains benefit specifically because a biological man has an outie and a biological woman has an innie and because innie and outie go together and that that's the "love" that only a man and a woman can have together in that particular "arrangement" and that, again, a child benefits from that.
So, since a child's life isn't impacted by the specific configuration that a penis and vagina can happen to join in, what do you mean?
It sure seems like a trick question, because it seems like you want me to define man and woman in a way that you can say "ha gotcha." Instead, I'm leaving the definition of man and woman to you, and only requiring that you know there is a difference. "AB" doesn't refer to the genital configuration, but it is a required component of the arrangement. Whatever a man is to you, in addition to having a penis, that's "A". Whatever a woman is to you, in addition to having a vagina, that's "B". If you don't see how that's a unique arrangement, then I'm afraid I can't continue to explain it while also assuming your interactions are in good faith.
Alright, so it's not genitals, cool, cool and it's somehow "gender"-based that makes love across genders to be interesting.
Which philosophy of thought do you follow where gender would have an impact? Is this an argument about dominant / submissive? breadwinner / caretaker? Something else?
According to the team, there are almost 20 quadrillion ants on Earth right now. That’s a 20 followed by 15 zeroes, which is a number that’s hard to really get your head around.
You're confused. Just because there is an advantage in one area that does not make something optimal. Moms and dads are great. What actually matters tho is that children are exposed to men and women who love and support them so that they can learn from them and from the dynamics of their relationships.
Okay. So you don't believe having both male and female parents is an advantage over having same sex on s anymore? I'm not talking about optimal. I'm talking about better than the alternative. All else being equal, should we prefer to place a child in sate custody with a mother and father or to same sex parents. By your statement on it being advantageous above, I'd say we should prefer mom and dad. But now you're contradicting yourself
> Okay. So you don't believe having both male and female parents is an advantage over having same sex on s anymore?
Living with both a mother and father can certainly have its perks. The main one being easy accessibility to a role model of both sexes. There are plenty of other situations that would provide that same advantage though.
Families come in all kinds of configurations, especially when you get into multi-family/generational living situations, none of which is inherently better or worse for the child by sole virtue of the sex of the those involved.
Child A living with a mother and father isn't guaranteed to be better off than Child B living with two fathers. Just like Child B isn't guaranteed to be worse off than Child C who lives with a mother and a grandmother and a grandfather even through there are benefits to having more people in the home caring for and watching over the child. If you didn't grow up in a household with both your parents and grandparents you didn't have that advantage, but you weren't disadvantaged because of that either.
It's like saying that having two kids, one a boy and one a girl is "best". It absolutely has its advantages sure, but that doesn't make it best or mean that anything other than that is "worse".
There's a layer below what is being said here and the implication thereof that I'm afraid you may be missing.
It doesn't actually matter what is "best", what matters is what is possible. The world doesn't run on "best", ever. It runs on "good enough" or "better". When people push for the ideology that I read as you asking for us to agree on, the results tend to be harmful.
You say "two parents that birth their child and stay together are best". The words gets twisted "being a single parent hurts your child"; "having a step parent hurts your child"; "having same-sex guardians hurts the child". Then the policy gets made that harms even further, "same sex couples cannot adopt", "divorce is illegal"; or, the lesser form, harm is caused to the child through broken families who have been tricked into believing that "it's good for them to stay together for the sake of the child".
Stances and arguments and acquiescing to those perspectives has a tendency to walk down very harmful paths very quickly; and, if it's not your intent to push or argue for the policies listed above, it absolutely is what the people you're referencing will push or have pushed, or people who come after you will push.
Freakonomics most recent podcast episode was about this very topic, and the data that indicates how valuable two-parent households can be to the parents and the children.
The legality and acceptability of divorce isn't mentioned but I think it should be. Single parents will be rarer in countries where divorce isn't a viable option but that doesn't mean the children are raised in healthier environments.
That’s part of it, but having a “baby mama” (i.e. never married/living together in the first place), is also an issue. I know a guy that is 21 that has already fathered 4 children with 3 women, and is supporting none of them. It’s sad.
Yeah, this sort of statistic seems vague enough that you can draw whatever conclusions you'd like out of it. To draw any sort of real conclusions you'd have to dig a lot deeper.
Exactly: having to bond with a crazy or abusive parent is what's actually unhealthy, not lacking a parent.
Children grow up perfectly fine making bonds with non-parents. (See also the father/mother figure trope.) They may do it even if the parent(s) exist but were not fit for the role.
In many countries extended families can help sort this out.
It is only a bigger problem if you have a single parent + no extended family support. I imagine social services (is that what they're called) or teachers compensate for the extended family role in countries like US?
Studies show that the biggest indicator child economic success is having two parents. Yeah, there's a lot of indirect measurements and selection bias, but it still says overwhelmingly: 2 parents is better than 1.
In the US with high prices, lacking social safety net and lacking extended family support if you have 1 parent you are struggling financially so sure. But elsewhere 2 parents is better than one only as long as you're not one of those cases where 1 parent is crap, in which case if you have extended family support firing a crappy parent is much more preferable. You won't find stats for this of course.
Lone parent children can grow up fine. They very often do not.
Teachers are part of large state institutions, paid workers. They're not going to finance someone's surgery, rent, or groceries. Offloading this kind of stuff onto the state doesn't work well because the situations aren't legible and the type of support required necessitates a great deal of intimacy on the part of the benefactor and a great deal of vulnerability on the part of recipient not to mention a legitimate impetus from both parties to make things right.
I'm restrained in my ability to extrapolate, but from my personal intimate, experiences extended families don't exist in the US. We've built ourselves out of that. And even a couple hours of driving becomes a huge barrier when seeking child care. Let alone half a dozen, and that's in the cases where parents/children aren't estranged which is an increasingly common phenomena. Between that and economy, and economics... Families may well span the whole continent and it's simply infeasible to support one another.
Moreover few people have close friends. Men in particular report having no close friends. That means that a single mother is going to be hard pressed to find a male friend to introduce to her child and as the book 'the two parent privilege' states, stepfathers are not equivalent.
> Lone parent children can grow up fine. They very often do not.
Children with both parents also very often do not grow up fine if they are in certain socioeconomic divisions. That needs to be eliminated from the equation before any such generalizations.
only very few divorces are with an abusive parent. most divorces are a disagreement between the parents without involving the kids. in those cases, the parents solving their dispute without divorce would be better. but if they can't, and the children loose access to one parent, they will be worse of.
a few maybe, but many, i highly doubt. that would imply that humans in general are unable to figure out how be a parent by learning from their own parents which is generally the vector for learning this.
people unfit for parenting are most likely mentally ill or they are put in an impossible situation with unreasonable demands and no outside support.
The interesting comparison is between the US and Europe, where divorce is also widely accepted. Americans have more children than Europeans, and American children are more likely to live in single-parent households than European children. These two are probably connected. Americans are more likely to have children in situations where Europeans choose not to.
The idea that divorce can be “healthier” for kids than unhappy parents is self-serving rationalization. Divorce is I’m extremely emotionally and financially disruptive to kids. As an asian married into a white family, the unhappy marriages on my side of the family seem way better for the kids than the unstable relationships on my wife’s side of the family. (But the parents are probably happier divorced/remarried. That’s the trade off.)
could it be that asian devotion for kids is stronger such that even if the marriage is unhappy they will do their best to make sure the kids are ok?
western couples are less likely to do that which means that kids there will suffer more especially if their parents are openly fighting, and divorce helps them settle because happier parents makes for happier kids.
That’s possible. But the financial impact of divorce is extreme. It’s passing a financial handicap onto the next generation. My wife still remembers having to give up sports and dance because splitting up the household meant the money wasn’t there anymore.
“Asian” and “western” describe huge and varied populations with little in common. One refers to a geographic designation, the other to a shared set of cultural norms and economic development.
What evidence do you have that “Asian” parents (whomever that refers to) show more devotion to their children? Or that “western” couples show less care?
Extended family situations, kids living with grandparents or aunts and uncles, seems more common in poorer places (mentioned in the article), so it’s likely lots of kids grow up with relatives but not with married parents.
i lived in china and in europe for more than a decade, also in other asian and western countries.
the difference is noticeable.
chinese will sacrifice everything for their children. until recently they had to because there was no pension system, and the only way to get by when you are to old to work was to have your children care for you.
I lived in America for most of my life. I raised three children. Every parent I’ve known, myself included, and my own parents, made sacrifices for their children and would sacrifice more if necessary.
I live in SE Asia now. I see lots of devoted parents making sacrifices, just like most parents everywhere.
I’ve seen selfish and negligent parents in the US, and in SE Asia. Those parents occur everywhere.
Some Asian cultures emphasize the extended family, and children taking care of their parents later in life, perhaps more than Americans or westerners emphasize that.
America doesn’t have much of a pension system either, and lots of adult children care for their aging parents.
> What evidence do you have that “Asian” parents (whomever that refers to) show more devotion to their children? Or that “western” couples show less care?
I come from South Asia. It’s my observation that Americans are far less willing to sacrifice their personal happiness and well being for their kids.
You know what you don’t see in America? Children working in factories. Baby girls left at orphanages or sold. You do see parents going into debt to pay for school, sports and other activities, deferring retirement, buying phones and cars for their kids.
Generalizations that include vast numbers of people from different places and cultures don’t make any sense to begin with. Cambodia and Japan, both Asian, have very different outcomes for children. America likewise doesn’t describe a single culture or set of traditions. Some countries and cultures make divorce difficult or impossible, the USA does not.
Anecdotally, as an American parent, I have seen far more parents centering their lives around children and making sacrifices than I have seen selfish and neglectful parents — even after divorce. In rural Thailand you see many children raised by grandparents or other relatives because the parents dropped them off to do their own thing. And you see devoted parents caring for their children too.
I can’t generalize anything about Thai parents from those observations. I suspect that opinions about how much parents care for children, anecdotal and generalized, derive mainly from misinterpreting cultural differences.
selling babies is a form of adoption that was common in the US too before adoption became acceptable. people in the US still give up children for adoption.
treatment of girls is a specific asian problem, driven by their culture and the dependency to have a son to care for them in old age, but it is changing.
In rural Thailand you see many children raised by grandparents
that is simply asian culture. it happens in china too. the motivation here is that the parents are not just off to do their own thing, but are off to work their ass off so their kids can have a future. that's not selfish or neglectful but in their eyes, the ultimate sacrifice.
It may be said that it's good to separate children from an incompetent or abusive parent, but how did they get this way?
Are children being taught how to parent? Are girls playing with baby dolls and cook sets and dollhouses? Are they babysitting as teenagers? Are boys taught the roles and responsibilities of husbands and fathers? Do they have younger siblings to supervise for a while, when the parents aren't around? Do they know what it's like to change a diaper, feed an infant, do household chores?
I mean, we expend a lot of energy shoving kids into STEM and soccer and ballet dancing, and they deserve space to play and be children, but what are they going to be when they grow up? Not everyone makes a conscious choice to become a parent.
> Personally, I think growing up without the freedom leave a bad relationship would be enough on its own to make the environment qualify as unhealthy.
The problem is "bad relationship" is a broad and fuzzy concept, often conveniently left undefined or defined selectively to bolster a particular position.
There are definitely situations where divorce is probably good for the kids (e.g. the more extreme ones, like physical abuse). However there are other perhaps more common situations where divorce is on the whole harmful to the kids (e.g. mom and dad just don't have "that spark" for each other anymore).
One of the larger blank "No Data" areas is Australia (total pop. ~ 24 million (ish)) which is a bit slack on the Pew side given the ease of getting accurate data for the country:
In June 2022, there were 7.3 million families, an increase of 1 million (15.3%) since June 2012. Of these:
* 6.2 million (84.2%) were couple families
* 1.0 million (14.2%) were one parent families with 79.9% of these being single mothers
* 118,000 (1.6%) were classified as 'other families', where at least two people were related in some way other than as a couple or as a parent and child (such as adult-age siblings)
Not surprising. A part of the cultural war in the US (in 1992) was that it was fine, even encouraged, for a woman to be a single parent. The controversy started between Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown (a fictional character that decided to become a single mother). The MSM at the time was extremely supportive of Murphy Brown's position.
Here's an editorial by the Brookings Institution from 2012 about the controversy.
I find the argument here to be so incomplete that it verges on silly. Raising a child is difficult, and nobody goes into it wanting to go it alone. The question is not "is single parenthood bad", it's "is single parenthood worse than the alternative of forcing parents to stay together despite a toxic, loveless, or unfaithful marriage".
Of course, ideally, people just shouldn't be having kids if they're not absolutely sure that they want to be raising children. The best salve we have for the overall problem is access to birth control.
I think this is missing the point of the controversy. The argument at the time was that it was fine for women to chose to have a child without being married. It was not about "couples should stay together for the sake of the children".
The whole point of the TV show was "Murphy Brown was divorced, and then she decided it was fine to have a child." That is, if a single women wanted to have a child, she should. There was no need for her to first establish a working marriage first.
> The whole point of the TV show was "Murphy Brown was divorced, and then she decided it was fine to have a child."
Here's how the Wikipedia plot synopsis describes it: "In the show's 1991–92 season, Murphy became pregnant. When her baby's father (ex-husband and current underground radical Jake Lowenstein) expressed his unwillingness to give up his own lifestyle to be a parent, Murphy chose to have the child and raise it alone." If you were to see a real-life woman in the same circumstance, what would you advise that she do instead? And why are we blaming the mother for the problem of deadbeat fathers?
Worse for everyone involved. Adults in bad marriages do not make for good parents. Children exposed to abusive marriages are predisposed to considering abusive marriages normal, therefore perpetuating the cycle.
And the implication that "love" isn't desirable in a marriage because it's a modern idea is laughable. Child mortality rates less than 80% are a relatively new innovation; shall we get rid of those too? Loving marriages are a good thing. But by all means, if you want to spend the rest of your life co-habitating with someone you loathe, by my guest.
>> Adults in bad marriages do not make for good parents. Children exposed to abusive marriages are predisposed to considering abusive marriages normal, therefore perpetuating the cycle.
Do you believe majority of bad marriages are abusive?
> Worse for everyone involved. Adults in bad marriages do not make for good parents.
Statistics show that neither do divorces and single parents.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4240051/ (“The best scientific literature to date suggests that, with the exception of parents faced with unresolvable marital violence, children fare better when parents work at maintaining the marriage.”).
> Children exposed to abusive marriages are predisposed to considering abusive marriages normal, therefore perpetuating the cycle.
Abuse used to be a ground for divorce prior to modern no-fault divorce.
> And the implication that "love" isn't desirable in a marriage because it's a modern idea is laughable.
Obviously it’s desirable. But if you take a shot at your love marriage, and then you “fall out of love,” should you be able to inflict the financial and emotional damage of divorce on your kids?
It’s funny that more birth control is still touted as a possible solution when it has never been more available and the situation has never been worse.
Birth control is currently under attack in the USA. This makes it less accessible to the public.
You stated that birth control is more available now than ever. Aggregate statistics might be more illuminating than not even an anecdote. I’d like to see a source that shows more birth control access in America than there was several years ago.
LBJ's Great Society created, arguably intentionally, a very steep economic incentive to break up two parent households for people in poverty - the "baby momma" phenomenon didn't just come out of nowhere.
We went from cultural conventions dating back to the Roman empire at least and upheaved them in large part. Those were staples in the social fabric which have not yet been hewn shut. It's no wonder we're replete with relational dysfunction as we've all been untethered and left to figure it out. It's confusing for both men and women, not to mention the trans folks and those outside the heteronormal sphere. Our recent forebears have clumsily pulled the rug.
And what I mean by this is that we've, for example, still got houses built for whole families, yet the families have so often been split. The density doesn't work and there isn't enough of the intermediary to go around, and it seems like that has been a multi-decadal problem at this point, which has been growing enormously. Houses are neither fit for a return to the nest, and they aren't suited for bifurcation so neither can we expect people to live in multigenerational households nor can we expect the constituents of a family to remain in close proximity (nor should we, in many cases). That then further complicates things, once trivial obstacles require resorting whole days, perhaps weeks. And if a coparent is unreliable - by God will that drastically complicate one's life, sometimes it's easier just to cut away, whole cloth.
Whether that was a good and noble thing I can't dispute. But it was done with little foresight, and I can hardly say if my own perspective - that lack of foresight, of prescience, is just characteristic of my own privileged hindsight - but I think it's evident we're in a poorer place because of it. But it's sort of besides the point anyways as we're here and now.
And it may appear easy to just say "Well, I'll stick with ye olde convention." But I don't think it's the case as everyone, myself included, wants their cake and to eat it too. Fantasy and reality are more miscible than ever before. Apparently normal people with reams and reams of their life's perfectly orchestrated highlights on shining beaches sunken in beautiful blue oceans with perfect partners - except they're buried in debt and have median income and fight incessantly, but they copy type well enough and edit even better so nobody knows they've got skeletons in the closet. And these are the kind of standards we're all sort of inadvertently supporting. And with that unreality we convey ourselves into deeper depths. But that's old hat, everyone knows it (or everyone I know does) and yet we're still marching off in that direction because — still — nobody knows what the fuck we're doing, and it won't be plain to see until some very hard times come, I reckon.
strongly supports that in Roman times, just as today, there was no single concept of family. While the “nuclear family” was central, divorce was common, as was remarriage, resulting in blended families. If a parent died, a child was sometimes fostered by extended family.
It appears that one of the greatest differences between classic Roman times and modern US customs might be the extent of extended family support, that difference perhaps also seperating modern US customs from many other modern countries.
Does it specify the latter, Christianized Roman Empire, or is it more of a generalized account?
And does it retell of the common Roman, or of the Roman elite? These tales may be radically different, from what I understand.
I expect the Christianized Romans would have had more laborious conventions such as we see with the Catholic Church in the middle ages. But I'm extrapolating.
The Roman Empire is commonly considered to be the four centuries of post-Republican state of ancient Rome (27 BC) until more or less the adoption of Christianity as the state church in 380 AD and the "fall" of the Western Roman Empire during the following 80 years or so.
Your "latter Christianized Roman Empire" was the dag end of a rotting corpse .. you might be thinking of the Byzantine Empire (aka Eastern Roman Empire)
Republican Rome and to a much much greater degree Empire Rome were not entirely homogenous, the Empire integrating many cultures (such as the Arabian divisions building Roman forts in Britain) .. much as modern USofA does with it's large latin and many other demographic populations.
The Roman Family picture would need to be broken down almost as much as the US Family picture - I suspect the single parent rates in the US might vary considerably by ethnicity .. although it's interesting the the article linked above (IIRC) suggests that Christian V. non Christian rates are more or less the same.
I wasn't really thinking of any particular era, I have some vague familiarity with the concept of pater familias and famiglia as a "body of slaves". This, I reckon, aligns with the Christian family modal that I'm most familiar with, perhaps with less extreme connotations of ownership depending on who you ask.
My presumption is that the later Roman empire, despite its collapse, did inform the later customs of Europe, particularly in religion if only due to incidental diffusion. And by that dint also affected the custom of marriage, divorce and perhaps more importantly the status and autonomy of women, though I've all but forgotten precisely how this all played out. And I may very well be mistaken.
I would also posit that it has less to do with religion and more to do with [perceived] female autonomy, value, mobility, economics, and the abatement of the stigma of divorce. The religious aspect having only been the foundational institution of the customs which have been carried (somewhat steadily) forward for nearly 1500 years let's say - a tradition which has suffered a colossal usurpation in society's working memory.
I think it's important to note that women with children are not necessarily unbounded as are women without, I think it would be difficult quantify pre- and post-divorce expectation shifts, but I believe it would be an incisive question. But if the expectations aren't grounded in reality the decision weighing process would lead to poorer outcomes.
> My presumption is that the later Roman empire, despite its collapse, did inform the later customs of Europe, particularly in religion if only due to incidental diffusion. And by that dint also affected the custom of marriage, divorce and perhaps more importantly the status and autonomy of women,
Why later?
Roman Law was the foundation of modern Western Law and it dates back to Republican Rome with a lot of fleshing out during peak classic Empire Rome.
Both Greek (pre Rome) and Roman attitudes toward women have persisted to this day; in Greek stories Telemachus tells Penelope to shut up, and Philomena has her tongue ripped out by Tereus so she cannot speak of her rape .. these are the templates for the active, loaded silencing of women today in public life.
On that theme you might enjoy Mary Beard's Women in Power lecture (part of a series).
Loyal workers are selectively and ironically targeted for exploitation [1]
People who read the GameFaq [2] already know this is how society works. Loyalty is punished, lazy cheating rewarded. Even children watching porn know the drill "She doesn't want it, but really she does. No means she wants it." That's the entire book. Extended version:
PS: 11) Believe nothing the entire time, 12) Reduce the opponent's value to nothing so the only redemption is intercourse, 13) You're interacting with a video game character of absolutely no value whatsoever except for the score, 14) All is Increment++, 15) Ditch in a way where there's no long term connections, 16) Be on the lookout for the next level (existence only reward the most useless. How else are you going to administratively golf, while stealing every professor in the University's money, while swearing about missing a shot on a completely flat grass lawn?)
Its only an MMO overrun with exploit users. It's just Game Theory. Backstabbing must win. Existence forces backstabbing to win. All it does is lie about being nice while being ** underneath. "Merica..."
Look at all venture capital, same strategy. "Innovate. Disrupt. Paradigm shift. We're pivoting to FinTech/AI/Social/VR/Quantum/Nano/Cyber/Cloud/Mindshare/Frameworks". Only ninja/wizard/blood ninjas need apply. "Round A/B/IPO/exit/Burn the world behind you." PS: Be rewarded with more IPOs for successfully burning money (I'm looking at you "New"man of WeWork).
Look at military innovation "Say whatever's necessary (blah, blah, warfighters, thoughts/prayers). Believe nothing. Close. Get money / rank advancement. Leave." [4]
And thus "why are there so many single children?" Because existence rewards humans for playing like Fight Club. Gotta travel around setting up franchises.
If i got married and she didnt work i would lose per month 800$+ in childcare costs, 550$ in cash assistance and our combined foodstamps would effectively drop by like 100-150$ over our household amount(hers and mine before marriage).
if i got married to a normal earning woman id lose 2500$ in benifits total a month. This includes 560$ towards rental assistance.
And when i start working ill lose 500$ a month and probably 250$ in food stamps.
But if i just dont work i can raise my son like a parent should. Which is first priority.
E, Maryland. A town with slightly lower than average rental costs,, but great livability statistics. We have a two floor, two bedroom apartment with listed price of 720$.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 428 ms ] threadI wonder if Canada would be the same without the indigenous cultural and French influence
Single parent USA: 23%
Single parent world: 7%
Extended family USA: 8%
Extended family world: 38%
EDIT: Also, to be clear, an extended family household means that mom and dad could still be around, so it says nothing of a household with only either mom or dad (most likely mom, according to the article).
Anecdotally, I know quite a few extended family situations, but only one single parent. Non-US context.
Apparently sometimes there are people other than your parent(s) who both want and can do a better job at actual parenting. (Say if one or both of the parents are still young and stupid/unstable or slightly insane/dead or can't be bothered.)
It might not even be detected on surveys. The parent would say they were a single parent if asked, which is true, but family pitches in a ton.
Its more of a “one adult in the house” study
Divorce has tremendous negative consequences on children. The childhood poverty rate for children of married couples is under 7%. For the children of single parents it’s over 37%. A Stanford study found that children of divorce die five years earlier than children of intact families.
See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4240051/ (“The best scientific literature to date suggests that, with the exception of parents faced with unresolvable marital violence, children fare better when parents work at maintaining the marriage.”).
While there are clear advantages to children having same-sex role models there is no requirement that the role model be a parent.
As for this specific comment: you're still only pointing to hypotheses rather than evidence. And there are enough really obvious counterarguments that there's no way to pretend you're trying to engage in serious conversation.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'll make my point without sarcasm then: Asking for proof that "men need fathers" is so common sense and obvious that denying it suggests to me that there is no evidence that you would accept. If you're serious and actually want me to find you studies, please describe, in detail, what evidence would change your mind. I want to have a clear understanding of the requirements and goal posts before I make effort towards that. If you don't want to do that, then unfortunately I can only conclude the question was in bad faith.
You think I'm denying your claim that "men need fathers". That's because you're spoiling for a fight instead of trying to have a reasonable conversation.
Before I can take you seriously, you need to start showing some awareness that there are potential alternative explanations for what you claim is too obvious to require evidence. The questions and criticisms your comments raise and the fallacies your comments perpetrate are obvious and plentiful enough that you should be able to anticipate at least some of them yourself, and preemptively respond to them as a way of strengthening your case and making your comments substantive. Instead, you're continuing to make low-effort comments and treating this forum like a playground for your trollish behavior.
You could be making a case, instead you're just demanding others carry your water for you.
Would you have the women stay with their abusers and their beaters so that the child can have “two parents”?
People don’t leave relationships because they’re good, safe and healthy.
Love is what helps a kid grow well and the comradery and care two adults can have for each other can be reflected into children no matter the gender of the adults who serve as examples.
The love between a man and a woman is unique and no other arrangement replicates it.
I'm more than confident you don't mean to imply that a child gains benefit specifically because a biological man has an outie and a biological woman has an innie and because innie and outie go together and that that's the "love" that only a man and a woman can have together in that particular "arrangement" and that, again, a child benefits from that.
So, since a child's life isn't impacted by the specific configuration that a penis and vagina can happen to join in, what do you mean?
Which philosophy of thought do you follow where gender would have an impact? Is this an argument about dominant / submissive? breadwinner / caretaker? Something else?
I said genitals is "a required component of the arrangement." It's just not the whole thing.
Why do genitals matter?
Quantitatively false:
https://newatlas.com/science/how-many-ants-total-earthIn terms of tonnage and sheer numbers there are many many more ants than humans - clearly their method of producing life "wins".
As a quick heads up, they don't have loving two parent families.
Evolution only operates on "ability to live long enough and put oneself in a circumstance that enables making a baby."
Requirement no. Advantage yes.
No.[0]
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2023/03/06/kids-rais...
Living with both a mother and father can certainly have its perks. The main one being easy accessibility to a role model of both sexes. There are plenty of other situations that would provide that same advantage though.
Families come in all kinds of configurations, especially when you get into multi-family/generational living situations, none of which is inherently better or worse for the child by sole virtue of the sex of the those involved.
Child A living with a mother and father isn't guaranteed to be better off than Child B living with two fathers. Just like Child B isn't guaranteed to be worse off than Child C who lives with a mother and a grandmother and a grandfather even through there are benefits to having more people in the home caring for and watching over the child. If you didn't grow up in a household with both your parents and grandparents you didn't have that advantage, but you weren't disadvantaged because of that either.
It's like saying that having two kids, one a boy and one a girl is "best". It absolutely has its advantages sure, but that doesn't make it best or mean that anything other than that is "worse".
It doesn't actually matter what is "best", what matters is what is possible. The world doesn't run on "best", ever. It runs on "good enough" or "better". When people push for the ideology that I read as you asking for us to agree on, the results tend to be harmful.
You say "two parents that birth their child and stay together are best". The words gets twisted "being a single parent hurts your child"; "having a step parent hurts your child"; "having same-sex guardians hurts the child". Then the policy gets made that harms even further, "same sex couples cannot adopt", "divorce is illegal"; or, the lesser form, harm is caused to the child through broken families who have been tricked into believing that "it's good for them to stay together for the sake of the child".
Stances and arguments and acquiescing to those perspectives has a tendency to walk down very harmful paths very quickly; and, if it's not your intent to push or argue for the policies listed above, it absolutely is what the people you're referencing will push or have pushed, or people who come after you will push.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/when-did-marriage-become-a-...
But I can't even imagine trying to gather statistics for that with surveys.
Children grow up perfectly fine making bonds with non-parents. (See also the father/mother figure trope.) They may do it even if the parent(s) exist but were not fit for the role.
In many countries extended families can help sort this out. It is only a bigger problem if you have a single parent + no extended family support. I imagine social services (is that what they're called) or teachers compensate for the extended family role in countries like US?
https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-determine-child-succ...
It sucks, but having only one parent is a huge disadvantage.
Teachers are part of large state institutions, paid workers. They're not going to finance someone's surgery, rent, or groceries. Offloading this kind of stuff onto the state doesn't work well because the situations aren't legible and the type of support required necessitates a great deal of intimacy on the part of the benefactor and a great deal of vulnerability on the part of recipient not to mention a legitimate impetus from both parties to make things right.
I'm restrained in my ability to extrapolate, but from my personal intimate, experiences extended families don't exist in the US. We've built ourselves out of that. And even a couple hours of driving becomes a huge barrier when seeking child care. Let alone half a dozen, and that's in the cases where parents/children aren't estranged which is an increasingly common phenomena. Between that and economy, and economics... Families may well span the whole continent and it's simply infeasible to support one another.
Children with both parents also very often do not grow up fine if they are in certain socioeconomic divisions. That needs to be eliminated from the equation before any such generalizations.
people unfit for parenting are most likely mentally ill or they are put in an impossible situation with unreasonable demands and no outside support.
western couples are less likely to do that which means that kids there will suffer more especially if their parents are openly fighting, and divorce helps them settle because happier parents makes for happier kids.
What evidence do you have that “Asian” parents (whomever that refers to) show more devotion to their children? Or that “western” couples show less care?
Extended family situations, kids living with grandparents or aunts and uncles, seems more common in poorer places (mentioned in the article), so it’s likely lots of kids grow up with relatives but not with married parents.
the difference is noticeable.
chinese will sacrifice everything for their children. until recently they had to because there was no pension system, and the only way to get by when you are to old to work was to have your children care for you.
I live in SE Asia now. I see lots of devoted parents making sacrifices, just like most parents everywhere.
I’ve seen selfish and negligent parents in the US, and in SE Asia. Those parents occur everywhere.
Some Asian cultures emphasize the extended family, and children taking care of their parents later in life, perhaps more than Americans or westerners emphasize that.
America doesn’t have much of a pension system either, and lots of adult children care for their aging parents.
I come from South Asia. It’s my observation that Americans are far less willing to sacrifice their personal happiness and well being for their kids.
You know what you don’t see in America? Children working in factories. Baby girls left at orphanages or sold. You do see parents going into debt to pay for school, sports and other activities, deferring retirement, buying phones and cars for their kids.
Generalizations that include vast numbers of people from different places and cultures don’t make any sense to begin with. Cambodia and Japan, both Asian, have very different outcomes for children. America likewise doesn’t describe a single culture or set of traditions. Some countries and cultures make divorce difficult or impossible, the USA does not.
Anecdotally, as an American parent, I have seen far more parents centering their lives around children and making sacrifices than I have seen selfish and neglectful parents — even after divorce. In rural Thailand you see many children raised by grandparents or other relatives because the parents dropped them off to do their own thing. And you see devoted parents caring for their children too.
I can’t generalize anything about Thai parents from those observations. I suspect that opinions about how much parents care for children, anecdotal and generalized, derive mainly from misinterpreting cultural differences.
most likely caused by extreme poverty.
children in factories happens in the US too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35137873
also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_selling#United_States
selling babies is a form of adoption that was common in the US too before adoption became acceptable. people in the US still give up children for adoption.
treatment of girls is a specific asian problem, driven by their culture and the dependency to have a son to care for them in old age, but it is changing.
In rural Thailand you see many children raised by grandparents
that is simply asian culture. it happens in china too. the motivation here is that the parents are not just off to do their own thing, but are off to work their ass off so their kids can have a future. that's not selfish or neglectful but in their eyes, the ultimate sacrifice.
Are children being taught how to parent? Are girls playing with baby dolls and cook sets and dollhouses? Are they babysitting as teenagers? Are boys taught the roles and responsibilities of husbands and fathers? Do they have younger siblings to supervise for a while, when the parents aren't around? Do they know what it's like to change a diaper, feed an infant, do household chores?
I mean, we expend a lot of energy shoving kids into STEM and soccer and ballet dancing, and they deserve space to play and be children, but what are they going to be when they grow up? Not everyone makes a conscious choice to become a parent.
The problem is "bad relationship" is a broad and fuzzy concept, often conveniently left undefined or defined selectively to bolster a particular position.
There are definitely situations where divorce is probably good for the kids (e.g. the more extreme ones, like physical abuse). However there are other perhaps more common situations where divorce is on the whole harmful to the kids (e.g. mom and dad just don't have "that spark" for each other anymore).
If it's large then maybe divorce should be mentioned. If it's small then maybe there's little reason to mention divorce.
Here's an editorial by the Brookings Institution from 2012 about the controversy.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/twenty-years-later-it-tur...
Of course, ideally, people just shouldn't be having kids if they're not absolutely sure that they want to be raising children. The best salve we have for the overall problem is access to birth control.
I think this is missing the point of the controversy. The argument at the time was that it was fine for women to chose to have a child without being married. It was not about "couples should stay together for the sake of the children".
The whole point of the TV show was "Murphy Brown was divorced, and then she decided it was fine to have a child." That is, if a single women wanted to have a child, she should. There was no need for her to first establish a working marriage first.
Here's how the Wikipedia plot synopsis describes it: "In the show's 1991–92 season, Murphy became pregnant. When her baby's father (ex-husband and current underground radical Jake Lowenstein) expressed his unwillingness to give up his own lifestyle to be a parent, Murphy chose to have the child and raise it alone." If you were to see a real-life woman in the same circumstance, what would you advise that she do instead? And why are we blaming the mother for the problem of deadbeat fathers?
And the implication that "love" isn't desirable in a marriage because it's a modern idea is laughable. Child mortality rates less than 80% are a relatively new innovation; shall we get rid of those too? Loving marriages are a good thing. But by all means, if you want to spend the rest of your life co-habitating with someone you loathe, by my guest.
Do you believe majority of bad marriages are abusive?
Statistics show that neither do divorces and single parents.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4240051/ (“The best scientific literature to date suggests that, with the exception of parents faced with unresolvable marital violence, children fare better when parents work at maintaining the marriage.”).
> Children exposed to abusive marriages are predisposed to considering abusive marriages normal, therefore perpetuating the cycle.
Abuse used to be a ground for divorce prior to modern no-fault divorce.
> And the implication that "love" isn't desirable in a marriage because it's a modern idea is laughable.
Obviously it’s desirable. But if you take a shot at your love marriage, and then you “fall out of love,” should you be able to inflict the financial and emotional damage of divorce on your kids?
You stated that birth control is more available now than ever. Aggregate statistics might be more illuminating than not even an anecdote. I’d like to see a source that shows more birth control access in America than there was several years ago.
So is the implication that the US has much higher rates of those marriages? If so, why? Look for the root cause.
The strict implication is that the US has higher rates of people leaving relationships that result in children.
Perhaps:
* Marriage rates are lower, with more children out of wedlock, AND|OR
* US citizens are more prone to leave a bad relationship, whereas other places see more people staying despite a bad relationship, AND|OR
* US early relationships have a higher rate of one spouse being incarcerated than other countries, AND|OR
* { etc. ponder longer and add more reasons }
Things are rarely as simple as the first thought that occurs.
And what I mean by this is that we've, for example, still got houses built for whole families, yet the families have so often been split. The density doesn't work and there isn't enough of the intermediary to go around, and it seems like that has been a multi-decadal problem at this point, which has been growing enormously. Houses are neither fit for a return to the nest, and they aren't suited for bifurcation so neither can we expect people to live in multigenerational households nor can we expect the constituents of a family to remain in close proximity (nor should we, in many cases). That then further complicates things, once trivial obstacles require resorting whole days, perhaps weeks. And if a coparent is unreliable - by God will that drastically complicate one's life, sometimes it's easier just to cut away, whole cloth.
Whether that was a good and noble thing I can't dispute. But it was done with little foresight, and I can hardly say if my own perspective - that lack of foresight, of prescience, is just characteristic of my own privileged hindsight - but I think it's evident we're in a poorer place because of it. But it's sort of besides the point anyways as we're here and now.
And it may appear easy to just say "Well, I'll stick with ye olde convention." But I don't think it's the case as everyone, myself included, wants their cake and to eat it too. Fantasy and reality are more miscible than ever before. Apparently normal people with reams and reams of their life's perfectly orchestrated highlights on shining beaches sunken in beautiful blue oceans with perfect partners - except they're buried in debt and have median income and fight incessantly, but they copy type well enough and edit even better so nobody knows they've got skeletons in the closet. And these are the kind of standards we're all sort of inadvertently supporting. And with that unreality we convey ourselves into deeper depths. But that's old hat, everyone knows it (or everyone I know does) and yet we're still marching off in that direction because — still — nobody knows what the fuck we're doing, and it won't be plain to see until some very hard times come, I reckon.
Reading well regarded works such as The Roman Family (1992)
https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Roman_Family.htm...
strongly supports that in Roman times, just as today, there was no single concept of family. While the “nuclear family” was central, divorce was common, as was remarriage, resulting in blended families. If a parent died, a child was sometimes fostered by extended family.
It appears that one of the greatest differences between classic Roman times and modern US customs might be the extent of extended family support, that difference perhaps also seperating modern US customs from many other modern countries.
And does it retell of the common Roman, or of the Roman elite? These tales may be radically different, from what I understand.
I expect the Christianized Romans would have had more laborious conventions such as we see with the Catholic Church in the middle ages. But I'm extrapolating.
Your "latter Christianized Roman Empire" was the dag end of a rotting corpse .. you might be thinking of the Byzantine Empire (aka Eastern Roman Empire)
Republican Rome and to a much much greater degree Empire Rome were not entirely homogenous, the Empire integrating many cultures (such as the Arabian divisions building Roman forts in Britain) .. much as modern USofA does with it's large latin and many other demographic populations.
The Roman Family picture would need to be broken down almost as much as the US Family picture - I suspect the single parent rates in the US might vary considerably by ethnicity .. although it's interesting the the article linked above (IIRC) suggests that Christian V. non Christian rates are more or less the same.
My presumption is that the later Roman empire, despite its collapse, did inform the later customs of Europe, particularly in religion if only due to incidental diffusion. And by that dint also affected the custom of marriage, divorce and perhaps more importantly the status and autonomy of women, though I've all but forgotten precisely how this all played out. And I may very well be mistaken.
I would also posit that it has less to do with religion and more to do with [perceived] female autonomy, value, mobility, economics, and the abatement of the stigma of divorce. The religious aspect having only been the foundational institution of the customs which have been carried (somewhat steadily) forward for nearly 1500 years let's say - a tradition which has suffered a colossal usurpation in society's working memory.
I think it's important to note that women with children are not necessarily unbounded as are women without, I think it would be difficult quantify pre- and post-divorce expectation shifts, but I believe it would be an incisive question. But if the expectations aren't grounded in reality the decision weighing process would lead to poorer outcomes.
Why later?
Roman Law was the foundation of modern Western Law and it dates back to Republican Rome with a lot of fleshing out during peak classic Empire Rome.
Both Greek (pre Rome) and Roman attitudes toward women have persisted to this day; in Greek stories Telemachus tells Penelope to shut up, and Philomena has her tongue ripped out by Tereus so she cannot speak of her rape .. these are the templates for the active, loaded silencing of women today in public life.
On that theme you might enjoy Mary Beard's Women in Power lecture (part of a series).
[ Dame Winifred Mary Beard, DBE, FSA, FBA, FRSL, English scholar of Ancient Rome ] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Beard_(classicist)
[ text ] https://archive.md/mAoSZ
[ video ] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGDJIlUCjA0
Loyal workers are selectively and ironically targeted for exploitation [1]
People who read the GameFaq [2] already know this is how society works. Loyalty is punished, lazy cheating rewarded. Even children watching porn know the drill "She doesn't want it, but really she does. No means she wants it." That's the entire book. Extended version:
1) Select a Target, 2) Approach and Open, 3) Demonstrate Value, 4) Disarm Obstacles, 5) Isolate Target, 6) Create Emotional Connection, 7) Seduction Location Extract, 8) Pump Buying Temperature, 9) Make Physical Connection, 10) Blast Last-Minute Resistance
PS: 11) Believe nothing the entire time, 12) Reduce the opponent's value to nothing so the only redemption is intercourse, 13) You're interacting with a video game character of absolutely no value whatsoever except for the score, 14) All is Increment++, 15) Ditch in a way where there's no long term connections, 16) Be on the lookout for the next level (existence only reward the most useless. How else are you going to administratively golf, while stealing every professor in the University's money, while swearing about missing a shot on a completely flat grass lawn?)
Its only an MMO overrun with exploit users. It's just Game Theory. Backstabbing must win. Existence forces backstabbing to win. All it does is lie about being nice while being ** underneath. "Merica..."
Look at all venture capital, same strategy. "Innovate. Disrupt. Paradigm shift. We're pivoting to FinTech/AI/Social/VR/Quantum/Nano/Cyber/Cloud/Mindshare/Frameworks". Only ninja/wizard/blood ninjas need apply. "Round A/B/IPO/exit/Burn the world behind you." PS: Be rewarded with more IPOs for successfully burning money (I'm looking at you "New"man of WeWork).
Look at military innovation "Say whatever's necessary (blah, blah, warfighters, thoughts/prayers). Believe nothing. Close. Get money / rank advancement. Leave." [4]
And thus "why are there so many single children?" Because existence rewards humans for playing like Fight Club. Gotta travel around setting up franchises.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game:_Penetrating_the_Secr...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory
[4] https://www.military.com/daily-news/opinions/2023/09/19/inno...
if i got married to a normal earning woman id lose 2500$ in benifits total a month. This includes 560$ towards rental assistance.
And when i start working ill lose 500$ a month and probably 250$ in food stamps.
But if i just dont work i can raise my son like a parent should. Which is first priority.
E, Maryland. A town with slightly lower than average rental costs,, but great livability statistics. We have a two floor, two bedroom apartment with listed price of 720$.