Literally the 1970s [1]. I'll add that there are family organizations beyond the typical nuclear set-up as well. Wouldn't a single parent with supportive parents, siblings, and/or peers be just as good as a married couple that didn't have any of those supports?

I don't have an Atlantic account, so I can't comment on the whole article [2], but when I read anything like:

> Two-parent households should be a policy goal.

I start to get a little don't-tread-on-me-ish. I don't think having The Man deciding family structures is what the government is for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_family#/media/File:Fam...

[2] If you're so eager to sell a policy idea why shoot yourself in the foot by putting it behind a login?

"Forcing unhappy people to stay together or get married doesn't help anyone."

I largely agree, but the idea of promoting two parent households isn't antithetical to your statement. You could have programs that are meant to ensure that couples get married for the right reasons, with the right skills, etc. It's likely a marriage prep/ed course would result in fewer divorces, just as drivers ed results in better drivers.

Ine example, if your primary discussion about what happens if the marriage doesn't work out happens after the fact, then you were ill prepared. Better to have that discussion while on good terms going into it - like a collaborative prenup consultation at least.

You want people to go to marriage school?!

Honestly what planet are you living on.

I'm not sure I agree with the parent or not, but there are a few things that I've found incredibly valuable to sustain a successful marriage long term. For example, we have the rule to never go to sleep while angry with each other. Maybe we'll be sitting in separate rooms tired and fuming at 1am, but once heads are cooled off we talk it out and then go to sleep at 2am after both are happy to share a good night kiss. I think this is huge because it prevents anger or frustration to build up and forces it to be resolved at a natural point.

The Catholic church requires marriage school (often the priest goes over a large standardized list of questions about how the marriage will be structured to verify you've thought it all through).

Catholics have significantly lower divorce rates: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/28161/catholics-cont...

From my priest friends, I've heard horror stories of couples they've managed to convince not to marry. We are talking couples who could not agree on kids, or who had major family issues or resentment, or couldn't agree on finances.

It's best for everyone if these just don't marry.

It's the science fiction world called, "The Planet of People Who Look Before They Leap."

There are awesome marriage schools, called couples counseling, and a lot of people do just that before getting married to help expose some of the gotchas that you don't realize before getting married (lots more farts basically). Should it be "policy?" Hell no, but it would probably help new families a lot for people to do it.

The policy shouldn't make it mandatory. It would be interesting to see what a free session would do.

Yeah that's an awesome idea.

what should be policy is that the educational parts of such counseling should be part of the general school curriculum. children need to learn to care for each other, to listen to each other and respect and love each other. there is a lot you can teach about friendships and relationships in school that doesn't need to be done in the intimate situation of couples counseling.

> You could have programs that are meant to ensure that couples get married

Is marriage required or just a two parent household ?

Just the two parent household. It seems that many of the one parent households are a product of divorce though. Reducing divorce could help address that subset.

Is there any evidence that reducing divorce increases children's welfare?

The current paradigm doesn’t work so maybe the “70s” had it right. Our kids are more depressed than ever, the parents have been run haggard due to wage declines with women joining the workforce, care of our kids is outsourced to daycares, archaic child support laws essentially end up putting men into defacto slavery for decades, no fault divorces are inherently unfair etc.

So, let's prioritize helping folks have happy/healthy relationships?

>"prioritize".

How?

education for one. children need to learn to care for each other, to listen to each other and respect and love each other for example. this can and should be done in school. (besides ideally the parents as good role models)

what young people see as love is often just desire. the desire to be loved. they think if they love someone the other will automatically love them back. they don't understand that loving someone requires wishing the best for that person, unconditionally.

i love you because you are a human being and i want that all your wishes and goals come true.

but for a healthy and happy relationship this is not enough. we need to align our wishes and goals and work together to achieve them.

providing an environment where young people can learn that, is our job as society.

Western society peaked in the 80s so maybe we should listen to some of the arguments from back then.

In the way that the peak of a cocaine binge feels really good in the moment, sure.

Things may look like they were working better in hindsight, but we just hadn't started choking to death on all of the unchecked externalities yet.

I'd say we're currently choking to death on the self actualization that came from living in a safe society where all our needs are met. That remains more pressing than any externalities, which tend to get addressed as they become dangerous.

Maybe thats the real evolutionary path going on, as we humans grow to have a more temporally aware mindset. That ability to see how past actions effected the future hopefully allows for more predictive capabilities.

"Western society peaked in the 80s"

By what metric?

By the metric of best new-wave hair, for sure.

Peaked for whom exactly?

based on what metric?

You need to go back a bit further than that. By the 1970s single motherhood was already being incentivized through policy. Once initially for rare hard luck cases, policy went from supporting single mothers to essentially encouraging it. Stigma around it became celebration of it even being considered liberation by many leftist groups. And this is why we have seen such a spread in this type of behavior being taken up by the underclasses across many demographics now. Where as the poor once had very strong families (because they needed each other) that role has been taken up by the state turning mothers into reliable clients and fathers into unaccountable wastes.

As it turns out, The Moynihan Report [1] was 100% accurate and its predictions on where things were going to head have come true.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For...

This is called out as concretely happening in the "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth" documentary.

> Welfare policies made things worse by denying benefits to families with adult males in residence. Fathers and husbands had to leave — or hide in the closet when social workers came to check. (quoted from a review [1])

[1] https://www.npr.org/2012/01/19/145343942/in-st-louis-an-urba...

The path to hell is paved with good intentions.

It does make a clear suggestion on how to improve marriage rates: Employ more men.

It also spells out the advantage of marriage, even unhappy marriage: kids get in less trouble, have fewer problems, and are happier with better outcomes.

Relationships are much more about your ability to handle conflict and invest time than who the other person is.