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Yes, I understood that point. I just happen to disagree with it. I could just as easily say âthat if increasing differences between men and women lead to more people deciding to have children on their own, then those children will by definition be in single parent families, with the joys and advantages that may bring for some.â Or âthat if increasing differences between men and women lead to more people deciding to turn to same-sex couples, then those children will by definition be in glbt families, with the pleasures and benefits that may bring for some.â
My statements could be as true as yours despite @ChangeTheGameâs concerns, which I share. It really depends on whether those concerns are inherent to single parenting or glbt parenting or caused by other factors.
Of course, I didnât list all the disadvantages of traditional 2 parent heterosexual families and the problems they face because those lists would be sweeping generalizations.
Iâve known young men who wanted a pretty girlfriend/partner and got along with their chosen mate until things went sour: the problems always came when they made it clear they expected the girlfriend/partner to take care of them.
Yes they defined themselves as conservative.
In some cases, to top it off, they honestly believed women mostly want children and only work as a stopgap measure and could only conceive âallowingâ their wife to work if the job didnât impact the âtaking care of meâ part of their ideal partnership. One also confidently asserted women shouldnât have business responsibilities due to children responsibilities and couldnât imagine having to obey a female boss (had an internship and was very dismissive of his female supervisor).
I talked to them after multiple break ups that left them bitter, angry, and flabbergasted. (âWhy is it insulting to ask her to do my laundry?â)
The solution was for them to⊠grow up.
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Well, those guys sound like miserable people to begin with. My first thought was, I wonder if all this helicopter parenting of the last 20 years or so has created a generation of needy people? And while I realize there are scads of independent young men and women in their 20s, there is a reason the term âhelicopterâ or âsnowplowâ parents came into existence - and what is the fallout of that parenting style?
My other thought - is the mindset of these young men, that women are in the workplace as a stopgap, an overgeneralization of the reality that many young women do eventually drop out of the workforce because of the demands of motherhood.
At our former private school, we had a lot of working mothers - lawyers, bankers, executives - and with those families, sometimes the dad was the stay-at-home parent, or there were nannies or grandparents who took over the day-to-day. There is a lot of pressure for moms to do it all. In my seven years of being a room parent, I saw many a frazzled mother rush from work to a 2 pm Valentineâs Day party. I rarely, if ever, saw a dad do the same.
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Men who self-identify as âconservativeâ are more likely to subscribe to traditional gender roles so it isnât surprising to hear that the men you mentioned think of women as accessories/live in maids as opposed to life partners. But, in all fairness, that isnât all conservative men. And, both sexes are capable of bad behavior when it comes to relationships - Iâve known women that are shallow and pick their romantic partners solely because they are handsome or because they have a lot of $$.
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Simple economics mean that it is more efficient for two adults to share a home rather than live separately. That will allow those two adults to build more wealth compared to single people. On average, more wealth leads to better outcomes for children. Of course some people succeed as single parents, but on average the outcomes are worse.
âWe investigate the wealth of single-parent households in six high-income countries that span a variety of institutional contexts and welfare regimes. Using household survey data, we show that single-parent households in all these countries are disadvantaged in the wealth they hold, compared to dual-parent householdsâŠ
Single-parent households face a complex set of challenges and barriers to economic advancement and social mobility. Parental wealth is one of the key influences on the well-being of children and their prospects for the futureâ
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00027162221123448
Same sex couples donât suffer from that economic disadvantage (though some may incur extra costs to actually have children, such as for surrogates). But do you really believe that a significant proportion of the population will resort to that option to have children rather than remaining childless or becoming a single parent?
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I think this whole issues goes far beyond politics and political differences. In general, young people arenât getting married as often and many are opting out of having kids by choice. Neither of my sisterâs two kids has or is planning on kids (they are late 20s/early 30s) and I know many more people whose children feel the same.
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Income inequality is much more of a factor, imho
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Who are all these financially secure women choosing to have children on their own? While I can think of a few women who did adopt as a single person, it is a tiny number compared to the hundreds, if not thousands, of poor single mothers who filter through our paternity docket every month. Many of these mothers have multiple children from multiple fathers. It is a grim situation, and those families tend to stay in the court system for years.
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Both gender and sexuality are more fluid in Gen Z. I donât see it as âresortingâ to single sex coupling because of lack of heterosexual options, but a conscious choice of fluidity. This is not uncommon from what Iâve observed of my kids and their peers. I also think the elephant in the room (this thread) is climate change and many will choose to not have children for that reason.
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Right. People are going to be more pragmatic in choosing a life partner and will consider their debt levels and earnings potential.
Individuals will couple up with those who may offer a pecuniary benefit that is mutually beneficial.
Those with tons of debt or dim career prospects may not have as many choices.
We already see this. Marriage rates are much higher among the wealthy and educated. People with just a high school diploma are much less likely to marry.
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This issue came up on an earlier thread about whether posters would be sad if their children didnât have kids of their own. Personally, I hope to have grandchildren, but I couldnât care less if my children marry or donât. However, neither of those decisions are up to me, and I hope that they donât decide about marriage or children based on my preferences or for that matter based on average outcomes for marriage (almost 50% ending in divorce, more if you include second and third marriages) or the average outcomes for child-rearing (in single parent or married households). I believe my kids are unique individuals, and I hope they forge their own paths with clear eyes and an understanding of their needs, desires, and how they might best thrive as adults.
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We have to remember that College Confidential is a pretty skewed demographic, in that the majority of posters here are intelligent and successful women.
The mistake, IMO, is that posters are projecting that level of talent, drive, income, and support network onto the population as a whole. But by definition, society as a whole wonât be above average. And on average, children of single-parent families do worse than dual-parent families.
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Doesnât it depend on gender? Seems to me that an unabashed liberal male would be especially likely to be successful in finding a spouse in this situation, and an unabashed conservative male especially unlikely.
And when it comes to children, it wonât much matter either way due to sperm banks.
Yes I did say some women.
But it seems implausible that sperm banks are the best substitute for traditional families in more than a very small number of cases (who may be over represented on CC).
Who knows. Maybe in 100 years, weâll just end up with a scenario like the New Zealand show, Creamerie (Hulu). Iâm truly not worried about ideological divides driving family structure and relations.
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Theyâre not only in the court system for years - theyâre on social welfare benefits forever.
In my professional life, I had a unique position to see the intimate details of family structure across the board - poor, rich, all ethnic groups, and knowledge of their financial dealings, too.
What I saw was that lower class/underclass girls/women viewed having children as the ticket to social welfare benefits. The biggest prize was the Sec 8 voucher and getting as many of the children onto SSI as possible, for cash benefits. Medicaid, SNAP, and WIC were easier to get. Even cell phones and service, internet, and utilities could be gotten for free. Sometimes I saw deliberate decisions for women to have children as a single mom for just this reason, but more often, it was the happy result of an accidental teen pregnancy. While cash benefits are now limited to 5 years in total, I think, SSI goes on forever, and pays more. Three kids on SSI means nearly 3K/month in cash payments, and if all your living expenses are covered by Sec 8, Medicaid, SNAP/WIC, free phone and internet, and free utilities, youâve got a LOT of disposable income every month. The problem is that children raised in this environment do not tend to become taxpayers.
Married middle/upper middle class families really limited their family size, mostly because of the exorbitant cost of daycare. That was the real killer. If there had been heavily subsidized or free quality daycare available, I think that they might have chosen to have second, and maybe even third children. Most of the working families that I saw having three kids, had stay at home moms.
Seems to me that heavily subsidized high quality daycare is the solution to increasing the birth rate among the middle and upper middle class.
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That is true for a subset of very left leaning population but is not for the rest. All friends of my DD in their mid 20th, including herself, want marriage and kids in the next few years. They all are successful professionals and plan to work after having children. In fact with many companies giving men paternity time off this generation sees parenting as two equal partners job. Some of her friends who are in time demanding field like in medical school freeze their eggs to make sure they donât miss on motherhood.
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