The bottom of the article says that they are also getting married less.

Basically, back when the Baby Boomers were young it was a major source of shame to have sex outside of marriage for a lot of people, so they got married early and then discovered that it wasn't a good match. Lucky for them the divorce option was available at least.

These days kids are much more free to experiment before they tie the knot and aren't forced into bad marriages as much. General availability of contraception also helps I suspect.

The downside is that when they do have kids outside of marriage it's a worse situation as the families are less stable without the institution holding them together.

So the ideal situation seems to be for kids to have lots of sexual partners using effective contraception before they settle down and get married to the partner they are most compatible with and then have kids. A policy that seems sensible from one angle, but sinful as hell from another.

Wasn’t it just the sensible thing to do back when the definition of what people today think of as a “sin” was invented? Imagine if safe, reliable, widely-available contraception was around when they were first formulating it, I bet the rules would have been way different.

I guess we could extend the metaphor perpetually - if there was no biological clock or aging at all, the rules might be completely different again.

The Romans sure as heck didn't think it was sinful - they'd throw a pig's bladder on and go to town. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexuality_in_ancient_Rome

That sort of behavior tends to get selected out over time.

Generally when women feel like they have the option to do so, they tend to delay marriage and have fewer children.

This is good for personal comfort, but less good for societal survival. The Roman situation the sibling commenter mentioned is relevant, as is a comparative analysis of birthrates worldwide.

> The downside is that when they do have kids outside of marriage it's a worse situation as the families are less stable without the institution holding them together.

Do you have any data backing up this assertion?

I don't, but it is at the bottom of the article so maybe the author can back it up?

I think what I was responding to was the implied causal connection between the lack of an "institution" of marriage causing instability in cohabitating adults.

The article and linked research don't make that assertion.

Marriage as an institution: - There is stigma attached to divorce. Not as much as their used to be but it's definitely more "jaw dropping" than breaking up with someone you're simply "dating" - Aside from common law marriage there are more financial impacts to divorce - Divorce requires social and/or legal rituals in order to dissolve the union. Regular dating just requires "I'm breaking up with you" and moving out if living together. It's much less formal.

These are just off the top of my head. Marriage as an institution definitely does raise the bar relative to dating in how stressful mentally and financially dissolution of a relationship is.

I found a few articles that back up that assertion.

There are a few interesting points in this one:

https://www.brookings.edu/research/cohabiting-parents-differ...

Cohabitating adults are less likely to stay together in every country where it's measured.

In the US, college educated non-married parents are 2.5x more likely to split before their first-born turns 12.

> The downside is that when they do have kids outside of marriage it's a worse situation as the families are less stable without the institution holding them together.

There's an unstated major premise here - that any "two parents cohabitating" family, even an unhappy one, is better than a single-parent or separated-parents family.

Is that true?

Why not just Google for it? According to this study, an unhappy 2-parent family has about the same negative effect as being in a single parent family.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2930824/

Of course, other studies may differ so this shouldn't be taken as conclusive.

More generally, I don't like to take any observational studies based on cohort data like this to be useful for attributing any sort of causes.

Whenever you've got people self-selecting into treatment populations, you need to be extremely careful about causality. For example, let's say that you've got a positive association between delinquent behavior and divorce, and that it seems to be stronger when the custodial parent stays single than it is when the custodial parent remarries. One story is that an unstable family situation causes delinquent behavior. Another equally plausible one is that difficult-to-rear kids stress their parents out, which causes them to divorce, and makes it harder for them to remarry.

It is possible to at least poke at these kinds of tangles, but you've got to be extremely diligent and careful about it. More careful than I think is possible in the "giant scattershot regression model" genre of observational study.

When I asked, "Is that true?", I meant it as a rhetorical question. I doubt anyone actually knows the answer. There's an idea, which I got from Green & Gerber's textbook on field experimentation, that some questions are just fundamentally unanswerable.

I don't actually have an answer, but I wonder if it's something in the middle...

No, two unhappy parents cohabitation (married or not) is not ideal. No, a single parent is not ideal. But, a single parent who bounces in and out of relationships every few years is worse than either of the above.

That instability is worse for the child than the other options.

Just a thought, nothing to back it up one way or the other.

I somehow recall that was already proven as not worse in studies of children from divorced households (might have been largely equitable custody) vs nondiviorced that the answer is no even without extremes like domestic violence being involved. There are extra expenses and difficulties involved in separate situations technically but the alternative may be worse. Two separate remarried families wouldn't even suffer from the resource loss and lack of support structure assuming both have healthier relationships.

The rhetoric seems to be spread more from a mix of traditionalism and insecurity about being dumped or stuck in an unhappy marriage than solid facts.

But think of those poor divorce lawyers! How will they get their millions if millenials won't divorce?

I'm less worried about the divorce lawyers than I am music. The Mountain Goats won't be as relatable to people if no one remembers what divorce is.

I'd expect millennials to have more mutual, non-contested divorces based on the advertising trends I'm seeing and anecdotal evidence. So lawyers are still getting paid but not nearly as much!