Forty years ago, 90 percent of children were reared to maturity by their married, natural parents. Today, that figure is 68 percent. More than one in four children are living in a sole-parent family or step/blended family from which one natural parent is absent, nearly always the natural father. The proportion of children born to unmarried mothers has increased six-fold since the 1960s. Rates of child abuse are eight to 10 times higher in step/blended and sole-parent families than in natural, two-parent families. Divorce has increased four-fold since 1960. About 46 percent of marriages will end in divorce, and about 50,000 children are affected by divorce each year. Cohabitation has increased rapidly, but cohabiting relationships are even more unstable than marriage. Cohabitation does not lead to stronger marriages. Six percent of children live with cohabiting parents. Forty years ago, 10 young male adults out of every 100,000 of the population killed themselves. Today, it is 40 out of every 100,000…
The sons of single parents are more prone to commit suicide as adults than others, and daughters are more likely to have abortions and more children. The risk of suicide doubled if sons were raised by single parents. When compared with people who grew up in a traditional family with both parents, children of single parents are hospitalized more often due to injuries and poisonings. The sons of single parents also commit more crimes. Licentiate in Medicine Anu Sauvola studied some 11,000 young people, two thousand of whom came from families with one parent or guardian. The lives of the children are followed from before birth to 32 years of age. The study revealed that the family background of childhood is connected to problems in adulthood, such as physical illnesses, premature death and crime. Helsinki Sanomat: “Children raised by single parents more prone to difficulties in adulthood” April 20, 2001, http://www.divorcereform.org/all.html
> Forty years ago, 10 young male adults out of every 100,000 of the population
> killed themselves. Today, it is 40 out of every 100,000…
I can’t offhand find a chart of the suicide rate over time for young adult males in the United States, but I can find an overall chart of the suicide rate from 1960 to 2007:
So it’s changed very little since at least 1960. I don’t ever recall seeing a chart or a table for any age and/or sex group within the U.S. showing that it’s changed a huge amount. Mostly it stays the same with occasional ups and downs. Can you show us any evidence that the suicide rate has changed that much?
Children grow into adults, and because of the sexual revolution those “children” won’t have to get married at 19 and stay in an unhappy marriage all their lives. I’d say they won too.
As you can see, the suicide rate dropped from 1990 to 2004 for both males 15-19 and for males 20-24. Suicide rates have never gone up or down by a factor of 4 over a period of forty years. Things just don’t change that fast. So, seriously, New Deal Democrat, the source you’re using is no good. When I click on the link you give, it leads me to a website called “Children of divorce: All Kinds of Problems”. This makes me a little suspicious anyway, since it’s a grab bag of claims and statistics claiming to show that divorce is bad for children. The statistic you give about the suicide rate going up by a factor of 4 for young adult males comes from the middle of that page, the paragraph titled “The damage done by the decline of marriage”. It says that that statistic comes from the Smart Marriages Listserv, which took it from an Australian newspaper. The link to the Smart Marriage Listserv is dead.
So I decided to look for a table of suicide rates in Australia. Here’s one:
About two-thirds of the way down is a chart of suicide rates for people 15-19 years old for 1989-2009. The rate for males 15-19 has gone down in those twenty years. So the statistic you quote isn’t true for Australia either.
Do you want to be taken seriously on the SDMB? Then do more careful research. When you quote statistics, look for the most authoritative source, which isn’t a website pushing a particular view. Furthermore, tell us what the source of every single statistic is, and tell us exactly what population it applies to. The issues you’re addressing are important, but if you want to convince people you need to learn to do better research.
If one goes to an internet search engine and types in “children + divorce + illegitimacy” one will find that divorce and illegitimacy are associated with a host of social pathologies for children. While it is true that most of the websites reporting these pathologies are socially conservative, that is because the facts substantiate what social conservatives and Christian conservatives want to believe.
If there are advantages from a child’s standpoint in being raised in single parent households, or by at least one adult the child is not descended from, or even by biological parents who are not married that I am missing, I would like for someone to document those advantages.
No, it just means they’re loud. And they don’t consider things like beating children or treating women as slaves or brutalizing homosexuals “social pathologies”. They are monsters; hardly some guide to good behavior.
Happily married couples are going to be happily married sexual revolution or no - maybe more so, because talking about sex, even in marriage, is a lot easier today than it probably used to be.
You have to compare a kid growing up in a divorced household versus a kid growing up in a household that was always full of tension and anger.
> If one goes to an internet search engine and types in “children + divorce +
> illegitimacy” one will find that divorce and illegitimacy are associated with a host
> of social pathologies for children.
If you want to convince us of the correctness of your claims, you’re going to have to give us reliable sources for those claims. The source you gave for the claim that suicide among young adult males has risen by a factor of 4 over the past 40 years wasn’t a reliable source. As I showed you, both in the U.S. and in Australia the suicide rate among young adult males is actually lower today that it was a couple of decades ago. I could tell that the claim that the suicide rate had risen by a factor of 4 was wrong because I knew that suicide rates just don’t change that much. I haven’t tried to check the other statistics you gave us.
I’m willing to listen to your arguments. To convince me, you’re going to have to go back through all your statistics and give us reliable sources for them. You haven’t been doing that. You need to learn how to do research. Finding a source that agrees with you that gives a bunch of random unsourced claims is not doing research.
•living with their married biological parents places kids at the lowest risk for child abuse and neglect, while living with a single parent and a live-in partner increased the risk of abuse and neglect to more than eight times that of other children
many scholars and front-line caseworkers interviewed by The Associated Press see the abusive-boyfriend syndrome as part of a broader trend that deeply worries them. They note an ever-increasing share of America’s children grow up in homes without both biological parents, and say the risk of child abuse is markedly higher in the nontraditional family structures.
“This is the dark underbelly of cohabitation,” said Brad Wilcox, a University of Virginia sociologist. “Cohabitation has become quite common, and most people think, ‘What’s the harm?’ The harm is we’re increasing a pattern of relationships that’s not good for children.”
Child sexual abuse can occur when the child resides with either mother or father after the dissolution of marriage. Nevertheless, it is firmly established that living without either parent drastically increases the risk of child sexual abuse. The bare facts state that one to three million children in general are sexually abused each year and of those 67% came from families that were broken up. http://www.mesacc.edu/dept/d46/psy/dev/Spring01/Divorce/abuse.html
Studies have found that not biologically related parents (like stepparents) are up to a hundred times more likely to kill a child than biological parents. An evolutionary psychology explanation for this is that using resources in order to take care of another person’s biological child is likely not an good strategy for increasing reproductive success.[46] See also Infanticide (zoology). More generally, stepchildren have a much higher risk of being abused which is sometimes referred to as the Cinderella effect.
I am not cherry picking my sources. The evidence is overwhelming that children raised to adulthood by both biological parents living together in matrimony tend to do better in life than children raised in alternative situations.
I wasn’t accusing you of cherry picking your sources. By definition, cherry picking your sources means that you quote the few statistics that support your conclusion and ignore the ones that don’t support it, but the statistics that you quote are still correct. What I was saying was that one of the statistics you quoted is blatantly wrong. The rate of suicide among young adult males has not risen by a factor of 4, neither in the U.S. nor in Australia. I don’t know whether the rest of your statistics are correct or not. It’s your job to check each of those statistics carefully, not ours. What you have in your posts are a jumbled mass of statistics from all over the place, and I have no idea whether any of them are correct.
> I could have quoted many more studies, but I like to keep my comments to
> what can be read on one computer screen.
The problem is that this issue (and I’m limiting myself here to just the question of how well children who aren’t raised by a married hetrosexual couple do, not the even larger issue of what the sexual revolution was and how it affected society) is far too complicated to be explained in a single computer screen. This is, unfortunately, true of many of the issues that are debated in Great Debates. This is an enormously complicated issue, and it can’t be handled in a single thread, let alone a single computer screen. Most of the comments here, not just New Deal Democrat’s, have trivialized the issue.
The increase in pre and extramarital sex has made marriage fragile, and increased the percentage of children that are not raised by both biological parents living together in matrimony. These children tend to do less well in life than children raised in traditional nuclear families. They are more likely to be abused. They are more likely to be sexually abused. They are more likely to get felony convictions.
There is nothing trivial about that truth at all. The only reason anyone disagrees with me is that I am stepping on toes.