OK, I’m gonna get really controversial here, but I’m really not looking for a debate. I’m not even sure I agree with my position.
But to play devil’s advocate a bit with my GF I took the position it would be better to never exist than to be born in a scenario where he/she is unwanted and will be unloved (by the biological parents at least). Just to pile it on, let’s say the father skips town and the mother is on welfare so there won’t even be adequate financial support.
So I was challenged on what I meant by suffering, which I’ll define as suicide or serious psychological disorders (major depression, severe anxiety disorders, etc.). But does the research support this?
Again, I’d rather steer clear of the abortion debate (at least until after I get my GQ answer please). I just want to know if such a scenario is statistically correlated with suicide or serious psych disorders, or even other examples of extreme suffering.
All kinds of things can be statistically correlated with other things; that doesn’t mean that one is actually caused by the other. Mental illnesses have all kinds of causes besides the actual quality of one’s life – family history, for example. There is a fairly strong correlation between the incidence of suicide and race and gender (it’s highest for white males). Suicide is very strongly correlated with mental illness – around 90% of those who kill themselves have a mental illness.
A child in a poor, one-parent household will not necessarily become mentally ill because of their situation. It would be far more likely for a child with a parent who had a mental illness to become mentally ill than for a child to become mentally ill because their mother was poor or their father absent.
How would you figure in the children whose parents stay together long enough for one to kill the other? IIRC, the spouse of a murdered person is far more likely to be the killer than anyone else. Not that this answers the OP, but presumably there would be more spousal murder, if more ill-suited couples stayed together.
Actually, in retrospect I certainly agree with this; mental illness was not a good way to define what I wanted to.
::sigh:: I may have posted this thread in haste as a reaction to the debate I was having at the moment, and not as a question that I had really thought through, but lessee if I can weasel my way through this and see where it takes me.
Intuitively it seems that a child born into a single-parent, unloving, poverty-stricken scenario would be more likely to face serious suffering in life. I admit I don’t know how to define this “suffering” (perhaps criminal behavior?) and, as regards my debate that prompted this thread, I don’t think I could ever define any variables that would enable me to judge whether it would have been better for someone to have never existed.
But what about the population in question? First, could anyone truly believe that it would have been better for them to never have been born, and if so, are there statistics that can show that those born under the circumstances I’ve described are more likely to believe this?
Better to have never been born? How would you measure that? Who do you know who’s that lucky?
I took a poll last month of over 1,000 people who had never been born, and over 80% said they would have preferred to have been born. Of that 80%, almost half said they would have preferred to have been born to parents who were filthy rich.
Look, sorry, the question of whether children from single-parent families have higher percentages of mental illness, do poorer on intelligence tests, or whatever, compared to two-parent family children: that’s a legit question. But comparison to “never been born” is, well, just silly.