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Comment by ndriscoll | Hacker News Reader

Keeping your family intact is a necessary but not sufficient condition for good parenting.

It really truly isn't.

The fact that you believe this is what forces me to conclude the answer for my family is to move somewhere where people share our values (c.f. our other discussion). If we can't even have people agree that an intact family is critically important, then what's the point in trying to find solutions to other problems, many of which are downstream of broken families? It's a fool's errand.

(and then weirdly, when I leave, I'm "pulling the ladder up." Shouldn't it be good riddance to me? Since I'm wrong and simply bigoted, of course)

Let me try to explain at more length.

I think, believe, that having two parents is better than one parent for a child. In the same way that having some number of grand parents and aunts and uncles and other relatives is also probably better. More relatives, generally speaking, means access to more resources and more resources for children strongly correlates to being richer later in life.

I don't believe that having one "good" parent and one abusive parent is better than having just a single good parent.

Some kids don't get to have two loving parents. What is supposed to happen to them? It's certainly not their fault.

Like, I'm challenging your values here and your response is "well I'll just leave" and you act like this is what I want.

It's not what I want. I want people to care and more crucially do stuff for their community/society/culture/nation/whatever. I want people to work together to raise everyone's standard of living.

It's like building wheel chair ramps everywhere and then discovering that, hey, ramps are also really useful if you're trying to push a baby carriage or wheel some luggage around or even just move up a level with really bad knees.

Having one parent is probably better than two where one is abusive, yes. But personally I set my bar for "good parent" quite a bit higher than "doesn't abuse their child." Did the abusive parent get a brain tumor or suffer a stroke causing a sudden personality change? Or could anyone with an IQ over 70 see that they were a garbage person from a mile away from their neck tattoos, previous child, and advertised marijuana use (real example of a glaringly obvious situation I watched of an intentional pregnancy between an unwed couple that lasted for 2 months after the kid was born)? Like I said in the other thread, a lot of trashy people will very openly broadcast that fact, including proudly calling themselves trashy. It is a real culture. You do not want this to rub off on your kids.

I think I made it clear with my "we moved somewhere nice" that that's not what I'd like either. It's not a kid's fault that their family sucks. But it's not every other kid's fault either. Schools should do what they can to discipline these kids (generally, they don't). But they also need to still teach the kids who did have loving parents instead of spending all available resources on the kids who didn't, and likely this means separating groups of kids with different needs, which they are loath to do. But it absolutely is the parents' fault. Unless someone died or suffered an extreme random personality change, that includes single parents.

You’re arguing against a strawman. Most divorce isn’t because one partner is abusive. That happens. But that’s not most of what’s happening. My wife is from a part of the country with a lot of lower income white folks, and I’ve made a lot of observations about divorce. It seems to me like much of it is people with poor impulse control making bad decisions and the lack of social structure to help guide those people to make better ones.

So if my wife dies of an aneurysm I’m a bad father, got it.

I believe you already correctly identified we're talking about separation/divorce, though even in the case of death, it's still going to be extraordinarily difficult to be a good parent without a lot of support.

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