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Comment by sethg | Hacker News Reader

When both parts of the family are aggressively working towards acquiring more, the softness of a family gets lost. There is less emotional dependence, less of one person doing one thing, and more of two people who have a lot of potential to be at loggerheads with one another.

Statistics suggest otherwise:

¶ As more women have entered the workforce over the past few decades, the divorce rate, contrary to popular expectation, has gone down.

¶ US states where women have a higher labor force participation rate have lower divorce rates.

¶ Couples in which the wife an be considered a “career woman” have a 25 percent lower chance of divorce.

http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/fall10/couples/

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--- If you accept divorce rate as an indicator for a failed family.

For instance, what if families with two hard-working parents spend less time together but still find a level of contact that's need-filling. They grow neither happy nor unhappy enough to divorce. It's a stable but weak and unnurturing family and perhaps isn't the best place to bring up a young child.

Failure of a family is multifaceted and the op puts forth a theory too strong to be knocked down merely by decreased divorce rates.

(Edited: In light that the statistics the author quoted might be wrong, I'm should disclaim that I don't personally think that the polar-opposites parental style we're talking about here is best. I just want to advocate caution judging family-style health by divorce.)

It’s not a perfect indicator, but it is what the economists would call “a revealed preference”. I understand that people can have all sorts of reasons for remaining in an unhappy marriage, but I would expect that all other factors being equal, a large-scale social trend that makes the average marriage less happy would also lead to more people becoming unhappy enough to bail out.

The original argument was never about marriages being "less happy". It was about them being less healthy, less caring, less connected. It's quite likely that they're happy enough to not want to divorce without being a stable, healthy family producing a good environment to raise a child.

A lower chance of divorce does not entail a better family unit with a balance of gentleness and aggressiveness as suggested by the parent.

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