[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> I think beasteurope is correct about religion encouraging families to stay together rather than breaking up.

Which really means: Encouraging families that don't work to stay together, no matter how much it hurts the people involved.

Helping people to resolve conflicts so they want to stay together is a completely different thing than just encouraging people to stay together.

[blotter_paper]

I'm really drawn on this. It's not like I want people to stay in abusive relationships, but the statistics around single parent homes in the US aren't great. I'm sure there's all sorts of chicken-and-egg problems in the data, and I'm not claiming that I know the best way of sorting those out without the sort of study that would never pass an ethics board ("group A was assigned to divorce, while group B was forced to continue marriage despite child abuse and other family issues"). I suspect that there is some amount of misery in a relationship which, if the parents endure rather than throwing in the towel, results in a happier/healthier childhood for the children. I don't know exactly where that threshold is, and where the "oh shit this nightmare has gone too far and it's leaving psychological trauma on the children" zone begins. Trying to get the parents to want to stay together is a worthy effort, but when you've decided to make children I socially expect you to put their needs first; I don't think it's unreasonable to encourage people to stay in an unhappy marriage rather than leaving their kids with a broken home, assuming the current home wouldn't be worse for the kids than the broken one. I doubt that marriages of the past struck a good balance there, and I doubt that modern marriages do either.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> It's not like I want people to stay in abusive relationships, but the statistics around single parent homes in the US aren't great.

Apart from the chicken-and-egg problems, probably the bigger problem with that is that naturally the populations you are comparing are extremely biased. So, even if it is not an artifact of social policies that children in two-parent households do better than children of single parents, there is no reason to think that the number of parents is actually the determining factor.

It might just as well be that people who are bad at maintaining relationships are also bad at raising children, so forcing two of them to raise a child together will not give you any of the benefits that you get from people who are good at maintaining relationships raising a child, and you will instead just draw down the average outcomes of two-parent households.

> I'm sure there's all sorts of chicken-and-egg problems in the data

Pretty much that.

If society disadvantages people who build support structures that do not fit a very strict set of requirements, then you can't really draw any useful conclusions about whether those support structures are good based on observing that society, because it is very likely that negative effects you see are simply effects of the discriminatory policies, and thus are useless for justifying the discrimination.

> Trying to get the parents to want to stay together is a worthy effort, but when you've decided to make children I socially expect you to put their needs first

But trying to get people to stay together who don't want to is very unlikely to be putting the child's needs first. If you can make people want to stay together (and not due to outside pressure/threats), that might well be worth it, but if you can't, you probably will be hurting the child if you try to force them, in particular if they get to resent the child because it's what is keeping them in a relationship they don't want to be in.

You can not force people to like other people, and forcing people to be with people they dislike is a recipe for disaster. It's really as simple as that.

> I don't think it's unreasonable to encourage people to stay in an unhappy marriage rather than leaving their kids with a broken home, assuming the current home wouldn't be worse for the kids than the broken one.

How is an unhappy marriage not a broken home? Either the parents will be displaying their dislike for each other, or they have to constantly live a lie, constantly be dishonest to their child about their emotional state ... neither sounds like a nurturing environment for a child.

[endgame]

I think that's a black-and-white interpretation of the point. Seems like there's a set of marriages that would hold regardless of social pressure, and a set of marriages that would be miserable if forced together, and a grey zone in between with marriages that would work well if encouraged to stay together but would also dissipate if not encouraged by society.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

But the point is that you shouldn't encourage staying together, you should encourage working out differences, because they should not stay together if they can't work out their differences, but they will generally stay together anyway if they do manage to work out their differences.

[mickelsen]

Once the children are born, the happiness of them takes over your differences with your spouse. Thus the pressure to make the family work as it is. I think it makes sense as long as there are not unworkable differences or violence, therefore IMO societal pressure has worked.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

I can't figure out whether you are agreeing or disagreeing with me.

I said people should not stay together if they can't work out their differences, you say they should not stay together if they have unworkable differences ... which seems to be the same idea?

But then, the overall impression is not like you are intending to agree with me.

I am confused.