There is some evidence that kids do better in aggregate in stable two parent homes. There is no evidence I'm aware of that kids do better in homes where their parents would have divorced but are compelled to stay together by social mores or legal compulsion and now hate each other.

This is the problem with all these "marriage is best for the children" pieces that get published. They don't (can't?) look at situations that show what would happen if their agenda, to force people to stay married, was actually carried out. They can only see that a stable household under existing conditions has good outcomes. That's hardly a surprise. The question is whether a child in an unstable household gets a better outcome with that specific household staying together 'for the children', and my guess there would be no.

I know some successful 'ruined' children who would probably take issue with your summation there too.

I’m guessing in places where single parents are financially supported, childcare is abundant and affordable, sick leave is guaranteed and covers your child, workplace discrimination against single parents is illegal, that any observed difference will disappear. That is I suspect the evidence is actually describing poverty, not parenthood.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Two parents are never going to have the exact same approach or emphasize the same thing, so I think it is likely beneficial to children to have two parents helping them along in different ways.

Unless the other parent is completely absent, you get that anyway. And even if they are (one of my parent was for a large part of my childhood) you usually get other family members, grandparents, ants and uncles, friends, teachers, etc.

While it is probably true that it is easier on the parent to have another person which is always there to help each other out, I doubt—all else being equal—this has any significant difference on the child.

I'm sure that's a big part of it, yes.

But also even if we allow that there is benefit in a stable, two-parent household in which the parents don't change around at all, if we can even isolate that variable away from other factors, it seems tautological.

To make an analogy that's close to my heart right now -

In a drinking water capture system, you can probably collect the most water in a pristine, well-designed system where all the pipe gauges are the same and the fixtures are all well fitting and designed for the duty they perform. But if you haven't got one of those, if the one you have is full of holes and leaking all over the place every time it rains, and the pipes are jammed onto each other with no consideration of size or gaps, then ramming bits of cork into the leaks and praying isn't going to make it perform as if it was. Sometimes you're going to get better results if you rip out the downpipes, dig up the junctions and fit major parts of the system again.

Sure, it still might not be quite as good as that well-designed, perfect system, and you're probably going to get PVA glue all over your hands and clothes while you do the work, but it'll be a darn sight better than watching your drinking water piss out all over the veranda every time it rains...

I'm not sure if this comment is about divorce any more. Right, I'm off to buy more pipe fittings, grrr mumble mumble.

Nice analogy. And good luck with your water capture system ;-)

So does an unhappy marriage.

The true answer is that a dysfunctional marriage negatively affects any children period. If the would-be parents can't reasonably guarantee a happy household going forward, having children is the epitome of irresponsiblity.

> If the would-be parents can't reasonably guarantee a happy household going forward, having children is the epitome of irresponsiblity.

Who can do this? Who can possibly guarantee anything about the future, especially when it involves other people?

It should be reasonably possible to ascertain whether you and your spouse will have a pleasant or unpleasant future. If the latter, why the fuck (pun intended) would you have children?

Protracted job loss? Major illness? Death of a child? War?

There are a lot of variables that go into the success of a marriage that can't be predicted, especially over a 20+ year timeframe. The idea that you can reliably predict if someone'll be happy in their marriage decades later is... unsupported.

A child of a single parent here (a bastard if you will). No it does not.

This is a nice anecdote, but it doesn’t mean anything.

In the US at least, being raise by a single parent is a massive statistical indicator for basically every negative social outcome. Poverty, criminality, future generational single parenthood, etc.

I wasn’t raised in the US.

Aside from that my anecdote is no less scientific than your conjecture. Correlation is not causation, it is far more likely that this statistical indicator comes from a third variable, say poverty.

USA has a abysmal social safety network. Single parents are left to fend for them selves, without protections in the workplace (meaning they can loose their jobs), without child sick leave, without financial support, with unavailable and unaffordable child care, etc. etc. Of course a kid raised under these conditions is gonna be statistically more likely to correlate with other negative outcome.

PS. I’m slightly insulted you unapologetically put future generational single parenthood in the category of negative social outcome. As if you’ve already concluded that it is bad.