[will_brown]

>And I find it at least questionable that parenting has gotten markedly less supportive in the past few decades.

Look at the trends of the past few decades: divorce; single parent; and dual income households. There is in fact remarkedly less two parent, supported by single income households, meaning it's a rareity for a child to simply have a parent at home when they return from school to fix them a healthy snack, ask how their day was, or help with homework. Certainly it's not a single cause, but stability in the home is indisputably tied to mental well being of the child.

[curveship]

US divorce rate is lower than it's been for 40 years.

[will_brown]

HN never fails to disappoint in fundamentally unfair readings.

Yes if you ignore overall trends and use a simple snapshot today divorce rates are slightly lower than the alltime high in 1980. To my larger point, in 1960 9% of kids lived in single parent homes, that number today is 36% and as high as 72% in a certain demographic.

[jdmichal]

You're discussing the derivative (rate of change) of the actual issue. The issue isn't how fast divorced households are growing; the issue is that they exist at all. Even if the divorce rate was zero, there would still be existent divorced households. And broken households don't do any favors for children, even if the parents do their best to make it seem amicable.

[dragonwriter]

> You're discussing the derivative (rate of change) of the actual issue.

The rate of change is the rate of new divorces minus the rate at which divorcee households are ending (if the concern is divorced parents with children, by death of the parent, child, or the child leaving the household.)

> Even if the divorce rate was zero, there would still be existent divorced households.

A declining, eventually to zero, number of them.

[jdmichal]

Of course I'm not taking a stance that the rate of change is not important. And of course it would need to drop in order to reduce and eventually eliminate occurrence...

I was instead pointing out that simply bring up a reduced rate is not really a counterpoint. Especially when, as you accurately point out, the divorce rate is not even the entire picture for the rate-of-change of divorced households. See also Arizhel's sibling comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150694

But hey, will_brown did a better job of making the same point and defending himself:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150843

[Arizhel]

The marriage rate has also fallen greatly. People aren't getting married as much, and more and more people are just staying single.

[irrational]

Well, yeah, that's because fewer people are getting married. If you don't get married you can't get divorced! But that doesn't mean more kids aren't living in "broken" homes.

[emodendroket]

I'd argue the cause and effect relationship you're positing is backwards.

[will_brown]

As in you think the declines in mental health of children leads to an increase in divorce, dual income households and single parent homes?

[emodendroket]

What? No. I think it seems like the post I'm replying to wants to imply that the "crisis of despair" that is the topic of this discussion is caused by broken families, rather than broken families being caused by people not having any way to support a traditional family due to economic factors.