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Comment by marcusverus | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, much of this comes down to blind empathy. Folks are more worried about hurting people’s feelings than about their life outcomes. They would rather “lean in” and embrace the huge rise in single parent households than push back, even with the knowledge that these social changes have resulted in millions of children living in poverty who otherwise would not have! It’s absolutely bananas.

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What the hell does pushing back on single-family homes look like? Christian fundamentalism? Think about this from a perspective of getting positive outcomes from the actual world that exists. Divorce happens. Unplanned pregnancy happens. Family planning is being actively dismantled by the same people who are pushing for increased privatization of schooling and decreases in social safety nets. I don't think that's a coincidence.

I think being overly sympathetic is infinitely preferable to merciless cynicism. Removing poverty is also much more preferable than, what?, making it harder to divorce? We could probably makes huge strides in education outcomes by adopting universal healthcare and free school lunches so single parents aren't so burdened.

Stop incentivizing single parenthood. This reestablishes social norms around staying together as they (the parents) need each other. Trying to approximate that via social engineering and creating clients of the state has failed for 50+ years.

No one has ever incentivized single parenthood. We offered protection for children born into difficult circumstances not of their making.

There’s 0 evidence of that. What has happened is the lower class family structure has been decimated as generation after generation of mother becomes a client of the state and dads aren’t around because they aren’t actually needed. The kids have not benefited from this (there’s no metric that shows this and in fact the achievement gap has widened and prison outcomes are increased for lower class kids) and in fact are probably worse off.

But, the state has created a massive bureaucracy to manage this and gobs of money to get distributed to both public and private managers of these clients. Yeah, it’s about the kids lol.

> dads aren’t around because they aren’t actually needed

They're incarcerated [1].

[1] https://nij.ojp.gov/media/image/19511

You're telling me there's zero evidence of my claim and yet you are going deeper down the hole of thoroughly disproven theories. Child poverty numbers in the US were the best ever recorded just prior to the pandemic and you can draw very direct lines from government anti-poverty programs as being a major contributing factor.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/09/record-drop-i...

All that chart shows is how they have successfully ganked more and more money from taxpayers. Where does it show outcomes have been improved or that the outcomes of kids from single mothers (those that have been "lifted out of poverty") are improving relative to traditional families? The outcomes I see VS 75 years ago is that incarceration rates are through the roof, premature death due to drug use is through the roof, and suicide is too.

The fact that being "lifted out of poverty" is somehow seen as a victory when the state has aggressively promoted and incentivized single motherhood for the last 50+ years is astounding. Because that's all a dad was good for. Things.

I'm not sure if it's men that allowed this to happen or if women just fell for it. But it's clearly indicative of the massive decline the West has seen.

75 years ago? For reference, Ruby Bridges is 68 years old as of today and active on Instagram. If you think too many single moms are the biggest cultural shift of the last 75 years, then you are just drawing absolutely arbitrary connections.

Drug use, drug convictions, drug deaths are a big shift from then for sure. Some of that is deliberately abusive policy-making by legislators who had been constitutionally barred from segregating so they pivoted to incarceration. Some of it just that we're way, way better at making narcotics than we used to be. None of that seems to be caused by single parents so I really don't know what point you're making here.

You still haven't come close to explaining who has been promoting single parent households. And now I'm forced to ask what decline has the west seen? Almost everything you're complaining about is specifically about America. And there are few if any practical measures by which are declining. This very much reads like a lament for white privilege.

Means tested welfare actively discourages marriage in poor people. As we’ve added more and more of these programs the divorce rate of poor people has skyrocketed. This has actively destroyed their communities and made them reliant on the state.

The welfare state should reward and incentivize marriage. The tax system does for middle and high earners and you see lower rates of single parenthood. The fact you can lose benefits if you’re lower income and married is the worst possible incentive.

Citation needed. Absence of a legal marriage does not preclude co-habitation and co-parenting. Especially for parents who may be doing something for the benefit of the children. Furthermore, if you created incentives to marry, you'd just be inundated with fake marriages done for financial benefit (a la citizenship marriages). Go google the phrase "medical divorce" as another data point. If you are worried the system is being gamed, adding more rules and loopholes is unlikely to solve anything. And you have to ask what outcome your are trying to incentive. This thread started talking about educational outcomes for kids. Marriage is not a particular useful end unto itself. I'd posit that just adopting universal healthcare would increase the marriage rate and do so by improving outcomes.

Just do the most basic Google search. Here, I'll start for you:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK230345/#:~:text=This%2....

However, a majority of the newer studies show that welfare has a significantly negative effect on marriage or a positive effect on fertility rather than none at all. Because of this shift in findings, the current consensus is that the welfare system probably has some effect on these demographic outcomes.

Based on this review, it is clear that a simple majority of the studies that have been conducted to date show a significant correlation between welfare benefits and marriage and fertility, suggesting the presence of such behavioral incentive effects.

But it's also just obvious.

And then the effects of kids from single-mother homes:

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/are-children-raised-with-....

This is all widely known and generally agreed on. That the outcomes of kids from single-mother homes are far worse than married coupled homes when you control for income, etc.

> What the hell does pushing back on single-family homes look like?

A previous poster spelled it out:

> by encouraging and aggrandizing stable two-parent families instead of getting schools and teachers to fill proxy parenting roles

You seem to be thinking of "pushing back" as some sort of attack upon single parents, when I believe that the original spirit of the comment was more along the lines of:

Let's strive to spread awareness of the myriad of benefits two parents can provide in a child's life.

Let's try to move the conversation an inch or two away from 'my happiness above all else' and slightly more towards 'sometimes being part of a family requires sacrifice.'

Hell, let's create a national holiday dedicated to households with two parents raising children together as a team.

Let's remind people that they aren't freaks for not getting divorced as soon as the initial spark died down. That it's okay to continue trying to make things work for the benefit of their children.

So often today I encounter the sentiment that "there are so many fish in the sea, and it's so easy to find them, why bother putting effort into it if it isn't perfect from the get go?"

In my opinion, the prevalence of this school of thought is harmful to the propagation and stability of two parent families. American society at some point became so obsessed with "self care" that, you guessed it - they forgot about the children.

Your post is content-free, and it says much about the value of your thoughts. This is not a problem of emotions, except in that it's a useful tool for others to manipulate your emotions. The only effective solution would be to subsidize these relationships via taxes, ideally to the point where one partner can devote themselves to childcare. In this society, you want something, you pay for it. You should probably contemplate why this isn't being proposed by the people who are supposedly concerned about this problem, but I suspect you'll find an answer that lets you keep thinking that you're thinking, rather than being played like a fiddle.

>his is not a problem of emotions, except in that it's a useful tool for others to manipulate your emotions.

we do it with every other form of advertisement, why not use it to encourage good lifestyles too?

> You should probably contemplate why this isn't being proposed by the people who are supposedly concerned about this problem

simple:

- they aren't concerned about the problem to begin with. Be it apathy, ignorance, or malice. There are different solutions depending on the cause.

- they are, as mentioned above, more afraid of upsetting single families by imposing what can arguably be a healthier family dynamic

- the school board feels that issues with family are outside their purview so they do not even consider it, despite the fact that parents are the biggest strain on any given school teacher.

Maybe take your own advice? They at least gave propositions, while you are simply engaging in rhetorical attacks without contributing anything worth a conversation. What does "you want something, you pay for it" mean in a conversation about government funded education? We're all already paying for it.

Yes, I'm sure you have wonderful reasons for wanting to legislate your morality. No, that person offered zero in the way of concrete suggestions, and it staggers belief to see how you would even think that. The immediate subject at hand is not government funded education but family structures, and I was pretty explicit about the solution; since you seem not to have the correct context I suggest re-reading this discussion more carefully.

> Your post is content-free, and it says much about the value of your thoughts.

It's hard for me to get behind the logic of someone who opens their response with a direct personal attack. I stopped reading as soon as you started making abusive comments (the very first sentence). I didn't deserve to be told that my thoughts are without merit, and when you resorted to saying so it really did tell more about you than it ever could me.

it all comes down to Mother's decision to sustain pregnancy in unstable relationship.

Currently America incentivizes single mother childhood because all social handouts are increased if 1) mother is poor/low income 2) has dependents 3) more dependents => more handouts

Things like Section 8, Medicaid, SNAP, EBT - were supposed to have social safety net - the lowest standard that any mother can rely on.

It ended up that many mothers cannot rely on anything else.

once you are in the hood and on government's program - there is no incentive to leave them. People can't even get a fulltime job, because that would mean disqualification from Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, EBT, etc

The vicious cycle of black poverty continues... This is what keeps black people locked in the hood:

1. Black women get locked by social welfare and kids out of wedlock

2. Black males get locked by adolescent crime (culture of "background checks" with lifetime record of crime), keep themselves in the jail system forever / outside legal employment system

This reads like rational debate, but is really just pure conservative fantasy and at least a little racist. Every time you mention black people in the hood, I assume it means you have never been within 100 miles of an urban environment and have no idea what you're talking about. You act like poverty and broken families only exist with black people.

Welfare Queens don't exist. Absolutely no human being in existence since the New Deal has considered having a baby to be a profit-making venture. I can submit that maybe some, but vanishingly few consider a life on government assistance to be sustainable. The reason something like Medicaid can be a trap is because private healthcare in this country is capitalist hellscape. ACA made the miniscule effort to raise the Medicaid eligibility window and half the country rejected it. Programs like Medicaid, CHIP, SNAP are intended to prevent descent in penury and/or to protect the completely innocent children. Less so the parents.

Your opinion is really just the lowest form of victim blaming. These problems are almost entirely unique to America in the developed world. We have undeniable objective proof that being more generous with benefits improves everyone's lives and does not breed dependence.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3487602 https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/welfare... https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/business/the-myth-of-welf... https://epod.cid.harvard.edu/article/dispelling-myth-welfare...

And for good measure here's someone who thinks dependence is genetic and all the people who think he's a terrible scientist: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/09/adam-perkins...

You are exaggerating my point, but on the way you exaggerate yourself and make false arguments.

If welfare queens dont exist - then how do you call beneficiaries of these programs like meeicaid?

Poverty exists in white and asian families, but interesting fact - only in black hoods it leads to high crime, high fatality, high incarceration rates.

How do you explain the fact that poor asian neighborhoods dont have crime and have much better achievements among kids?

And I am not sure that more handouts will help, because these handouts come from taxpayers and US a lot of Us taxpayers will be against it

> If welfare queens dont exist - then how do you call beneficiaries of these programs like meeicaid?

Uh, "beneficiaries"?

I literally gave you a wall of citations that they do help. A lot of taxpayers being against it is a political argument. Of course they will. They've been fed lies by politicians who have given them fallacious rationalizations for why they don't have have any responsibility to promoting an equitable society. It's called the "I got mine" theory of civics. If you just don't _want_ to do anything, then go ahead and say it. Just stop pretending that greedy self-interest is anything but that.

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