[umvi]

I think the argument is yes it's the parents' fault. But that's not something we can directly fix. We can directly fix school budgets and stuff so that's what gets the blame. How do you fix broken families from a government perspective?

[lurquer]

Abolish divorce, criminalize adultery, castrate men who knock up women out of wedlock...

Something less drastic?

How about this..

Look at this thread. You’ll read all kinds of excuses for and blame of the mother.

Yet nobody mentioned the father.

A father — under our system — faces no penalty for neglecting a child. None. In a custody order where the mother has primary, the father has NO OBLIgATION to see the kid.

This is so engrained in our culture that, like I said, the thread doesn’t even mention a father...

[rayiner]

Harsh but true. The social damage caused by normalizing the notion that fathers don’t need to raise their kids is truly monumental.

[nate_meurer]

Some would say it's the single biggest problem. A big chicken and egg problem-- fathers abandon boys who then expect to abandon their own kids, and girls who expect to be abandoned by the fathers of their own children. Can't really have a healthy human culture with that going on.

[nate_meurer]

That is interesting.

In this case, it's quite possible the father is in prison.

[umvi]

Yeah, it's messed up, I agree. Not sure how you can force the father to help, especially if the father is also a teen. Maybe flip a coin at the child's birth, heads the mother is 100% responsible, tails the father is 100% responsible. Maybe then we would have an equal number of single fathers raising kids as single mothers.

[lurquer]

You don't need to 'force the father to help' if the law deters illgitmate children in the first place.

In my line of work, I know of men who have upwards of a dozen children from just as many women. There is nothing in the law that deters this activity. Nothing. There used to be. And, when there was, it didn't happen.

Penises and Vaginas, orgasms and lust, haven't changed one iota in the past 10,000 years. I have little patience for those who wring their hands, fretting about how to stop this insanity. We know exactly how to stop it. You can open any legal code older than 100 years and see exactly how it is stopped.

The fact is, this society has made the deliberate and intentional decision to eradicate any responsibility on the part of men, leaving women absolutely fucked (and the daughters of these women even more screwed.) Ironcially, it was all done in the name of feminism.

[vasco]

Plenty of other countries are able to put kids through school without adultery laws.

[lurquer]

The United States, depending on year, is #1 or #2 worldwide when it comes to single parent homes.

https://www.educationnext.org/international-look-single-pare...

In any case, nobody ever linked ‘adultery laws’ with school.

There are many ways to incentivize nuclear families and discourage illegitimacy.

And, many ways to do the opposite.

In US, for whatever bizarre reason, society had been trained to recoil at the idea of a nuclear family. Indeed, some readers will reflexively gag at my use of the term ‘illegitimate.’

It’s strange.

Occasionally you get these stories where people are ‘shocked’ that a kid in Baltimore didn’t go to school! Yet, the fact that he has no father is just ho-hum. Missing the forest for the trees.

[roninhacker]

Er...what was there in the law?

[woofie11]

Well:

* The law treated illegitimate children as illegitimate. It was harsh to be born out of wedlock. (https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/inheritance-rights-for-leg...). No child support. No inheritance. Etc.

* Until recently, there was no no-fault divorce. You couldn't up-and-leave a marriage without good cause. If your husband was beating you or your wife committed adultery, that was a valid reason. If you got bored, existential ennui, or married for child support in the first place, you were SOL unless the other party agreed. People were expected to make it work.

* All sorts of fraud laws around sex and sexual behavior. If we had sex because I promised to marry you, I was expected to marry you. Marriage was viewed as a legal agreement.

... and so on.

Most of it had problems, but there were some good ideas in there too. Adapting those to a 21st century framework of equal rights would be challenge, both intellectually and politically. There was a history of perverse, unintended consequences, intertwined changes, etc. and a discussion like this would be a political hot potato.

Divorce is also a massive industry and political lobby. It intertwines itself with social justice and feminism, so it's hard to tease out, but a lot of work is actively done to break up families, since lawyers, guardians ad litem, etc. profit. A lot of that hits low-income families, despite low-income divorce happening without bringing this industry in.

[SamPatt]

Maybe we shouldn't be expecting the government to solve every problem in society, and the fact that we have this expectation might actually be making the problems worse by not allowing other non-governmental forces to play out?

[mlyle]

Yah. Because these broken families are going to produce more broken students next generation. The only option is to fix the system somehow.