[z9e]

I find it unfortunate we don't focus more on this problem. Children raised in single parent households are more likely to be on a criminal path and end up in prison. There's also significant mental health issues that arise from it [0]. It seems these days being concerned about the breakdown of the American family resulting in crime and mental health issues and the general lack of traditional family values puts you in the conservative category and then you get knee-jerk hostility.

Unfortunately I feel our society and current pop culture somehow feeds this problem, but I can't pinpoint how. Some say the welfare system doesn't help either [1]. But I'm not certain that's the full answer, and can also feed into yet more political hysteria.

[0] https://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/report/the-real-r...

[1] https://ifstudies.org/blog/family-breakdown-and-americas-wel...

[Veen]

I think you have to be careful not to conflate correlation and causation here. Criminals are also more likely to come from homes with high poverty, lower educational attainment, etc. It's entirely likely that those factors contribute to family breakdown so "broken homes" and criminality have the same causes, rather than one causing the other.

[tk75x]

A home with two incomes is less likely to have financial struggles

[toomuchtodo]

A home shouldn’t need two incomes to not struggle.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/t...

[bencollier49]

IMO the US is the epicentre of the cult of the individual which stresses personal pleasure and freedom over value creation in society. That's what causes it.

[swiley]

I read somewhere that the freedom is supposed to come with responsibility, without the responsibility there isn't really a point to the freedom.

[lordnacho]

Cynical hot take is that that's what we say so that we can get more freedom.

[username90]

I wonder if that correlates with overweight populations. If so the entire world is going in that direction, although USA is a bit ahead.

[CryptoGhost]

That doesn't jive on a historical basis when and where enlightenment era thinking and classical liberalism were much higher then they are today. Unless I am misreading your comment and you are simply talking about hedonism.

[jbob2000]

It's hedonism + individualism. We tell our children things like "you are unique, there is nobody else like you" and "just be yourself" and we ask them things like "who do you want to be when you grow up?". We raise our children to be identity driven.

Then they grow up, find a lover, and realize they need to give up parts of their individuality in order for the relationship to work.

Whaaaatt?? Give up my individuality? But I was raised to enshrine this above all else! Heck no, I'd rather divorce!

[Mordisquitos]

As a non-American watching U.S. culture from the outside, I generally agree that those two factors are important contributors to many problems. I would also add to hedonism and individualism the encouragement of a "just-world" myth, which comes as a corollary to the American Dream: you can achieve anything if you work hard for it—therefore, if you didn't achieve it, you didn't work hard enough.

This results in low self-worth of many people in bad circumstances, lack of compassion towards them from those who are better off, and sometimes active disdain from those who were lucky enough to climb out of poverty, as an overcompensation for their own past hardship.

[ArkanExplorer]

This is mostly a problem within the African-American community, and to a smaller extent the Latino community:

https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-majority-of-us-children-still...

Mom-only households are 43.9% for Blacks, 12.0% for Whites.

"In the words of Harvard’s Paul Peterson, “some programs actively discouraged marriage,” because “welfare assistance went to mothers so long as no male was boarding in the household… Marriage to an employed male, even one earning the minimum wage, placed at risk a mother’s economic well-being.” Infamous “man in the house” rules meant that welfare workers would randomly appear in homes to check and see if the mother was accurately reporting her family-status.

The benefits available were extremely generous. According to Peterson, it was “estimated that in 1975 a household head would have to earn $20,000 a year to have more resources than what could be obtained from Great Society programs.” In today’s dollars, that’s over $90,000 per year in earnings.

That may be a reason why, in 1964, only 7% of American children were born out of wedlock, compared to 40% today. As Jason Riley has noted, “the government paid mothers to keep fathers out of the home—and paid them well.”

https://ifstudies.org/blog/family-breakdown-and-americas-wel...

If we want this to improve, the simplest solution is to unlink being a single parent from getting extra welfare or preferential access to social housing. If we want to go even further, we could unlink welfare from having children at all, and just offer child tax credits instead and universal access to family planning.

[cj]

I can't help but think the shutdowns and lockdowns are disproportionately hurting young single adults: the prime group of people who need a way to meet each other to in order to not be single.

It's saddening to think that online dating has been the only way to meet new people for millions of young single people over the past 12 months.

> Unfortunately I feel our society and current pop culture somehow feeds this problem, but I can't pinpoint how

Until the world opens back up and people are able to interact again, I don't see pop culture as the real problem.

[throwaway3699]

And online dating is so horribly broken anyway. Anecdata, but I'm in that age group and just completely checked out of dating (and even general socialisation) because it's just impossible. Many of my friends have done the same.

[kasperni]

Both of these links [1][2] are wellknown organizations that promote very traditionally one man/one women/lifetime of marital bliss values.

[1] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Institute_for_Family_S...

[2] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Heritage_Foundation

[adaisadais]

Regardless of what they advocate for is the data they state true / accurate?

[api]

There is more of this kind of right wing politics in the US, yet we lead the world in broken families. It’s almost like it doesn’t work.

[edbob]

I spent ten years in prison, talking to people and trying to understand, and can confirm that the vast majority of people there come from broken homes. A huge reason is that it makes children very susceptible to bad influences. Two parents can struggle to give children the attention they need. With just one parent, who is likely busy working or too high to really parent, kids find the attention they need from gangs and drug dealers.

[sqqqqrly]

"Unfortunately I feel our society and current pop culture somehow feeds this problem, but I can't pinpoint how."

Maybe the problem is that government began focusing on this with the War on Poverty? Maybe this focus is how our society is "feeding this problem"? Maybe by subsidizing single parent homes, we inadvertently create more single parent homes? Maybe we consider data: - How many black homes in the 1940s single parent vs 1970s? - What were the black unemployment rates in the 1920s vs 1990s? Or 2010 vs 2019? - See https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...

Instead of renaming schools why don't we free students. For example, rather than throwing money at unions, help the students in Baltimore schools go to schools of their parent's choice such as religious or charter schools. Thirteen of 39 high schools in Baltimore have ZERO students proficient in math.

We doom these children at $15k/head/yr.

Read some of Dr. Thomas Sowell's work. The data is there. It is data that changed him from a marxist as a young man to a believer in freedom and markets.

[sqqqqrly]

“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” Milton Friedman

[londons_explore]

It's time we did more research on the economic effects of the ways children are raised...

For example, what impact does boarding school have on both the children and the families they come from? (boarding school allows both parents to work all week, allows children more time to socialize with their peers, allows parents to own smaller houses, etc.)

What impact do after school clubs have (so parents can both have a full time job). How about residential summer camps?

How about the impact of larger remote schools? In a school of 100 children, the range of activities that can be offered is limited. Yet if there were 100,000 children, then children could specialize on really rare topics, and still have enough people interested to fill a class.

It just seems there are so many potential ways to make family life & schooling work better for everyone, but without data it's a matter of every parent stumbling in the dark, because for most people child-raising isn't something they have done hundreds of times before.