This is American, and it is taken from Dalrock’s place. And it is a warning for women.
Let us say you have been married five years and you now have two kids in nappies and you are frazzled, worn out, and the last thing you want is romance. Your husband is working every hour of overtime you can, and the budget is so tight it squeaks.
You want out. You want a Romcom. Well… don’t. Because there is a very high chance you will not remarry. Because this will blow up in your children’s faces.
It is not as if this is not known. This abstract is from 1985 — and what it advocates — swingeing alimony laws with nonadherence being a felony — came to pass.
Based on a ten year study of the no-fault divorce law, first instituted in California and used in some form nationwide in the 1970s, this book disproves the law's theory that equal treatment of husband and wife leads to amicable and equitable economic settlements. Instead, the new gender-equal laws have created a new poor -- mothers with minor children and older homemakers lacking job skills. Under the old law, wives were usually awarded the family home and granted alimony and child support, but now they are expected to be self supporting, no matter what their background. These young mothers and older women experience a 73% decline in their standard of living (many have to sell their homes) while their husbands average a 42% increase in theirs. 60% children will experience disruption in their parents' marriage and face financial hardship before reaching 18 because 90% of all custodial parents are women, yet 60-80% of all fathers defy court orders to pay child support. The divorce revolution has three components: 1) the widespread adoption of no-fault divorce laws, 2) the highest divorce rate in US history, and 3) the social acceptability of divorce and nonmarital cohabitation. These have transformed the institution of marriage and the perception and reality of divorce, with unforeseen, far-reaching, and often tragic socioeconomic consequences for women and children. Proposed remedies include support awards based on income sharing; equalizing the standards of living in both households; more effective enforcement measures for these awards, including jail sentences; and grandmother clauses guaranteeing older women an equal share of the fruits of the marriage.
Such policies destroyed many men of my generation, and many children as well. Let’s look at some more recent work: one of the models in this paper explicitly included the maternal risk of divorce as a factor for children’s educational attaingment, while the other did not.
From either model, we would conclude that the experience of marital breakdown during childhood is associated with lower levels of education and that the effect weakens with the child’s age at disruption. However, if the negative random-effect correlation is ignored, the effects of divorce and separation are substantially overstated. The negative effects of divorce estimated from Model 1 are partly explained by a selection into lower levels of education of children whose mothers have a high risk of divorce. Similar to findings from the United States, the effects of divorce seem strongest for transitions during or just beyond the high school level—the first two transitions in our sequential probit model (Biblarz and Gottainer 2000; Mare 1995). The effects of marital breakdown are nonsignificant for the transition from undergraduate to postgraduate education. The only significant interaction between gender and divorce is for the transition from secondary school to university; the negative effect of parental divorce is substantially stronger for girls than for boys, similar to findings reported in Reneflot (2007). That said, the main gender effect is larger; thus, although divorce reduces the probability of going to college for females more than it does for males, the predicted probability of going to college for a female is higher, regardless of her family background, than that for an otherwise similar male
So, to quote Grerp, who speaks here with authority, being a little younger than me: hers was the generation when the flood of divorces started. I know anecdotes are not research, but go read her post. For the stories she has seen are similar to the ones I have witnessed. We are humans, and we follow patterns, for good and for ill.
Since I was a child myself I've heard adults rationalizing that if they're not happy in their marriages, the kids suffer, so it's just better to make a clean break and create a new happier environment for them to thrive in. This sounds really great; the problem is, it's just sheer crap. I think by now we all know it because the people who are of childbearing age now have seen so much of the insecurity, sadness, loneliness, anger, violence and abuse that are the results of broken families. It's hard to even type that phrase, "broken families," because I've had so much negative reinforcement and reeducation of the "every family type is unique and valuable" kind. "No family is broken, we're all just making different choices, etc., etc."
The irony is that this was predicted: in Humanas Vitae. For we used to have Popes who were catholic, and who could think, and could see the consequences of actions. We also used to have Presbyterians who were reformed, and took both the old creeds and gospels seriously. But both have moved on: correction both have fallen.
The building block of civilized society is not the individual but the family. The great evil of our time is that our progressive overlords actively undermine the family at every turn. My tradcon friends vacillate between believing game is either a placebo or a set of irresistible Jedi mind tricks cads use to deflower innocent virgins. The media wonders why young men refuse to grow up, man up, and marry those sluts. I say the men of today are responding rationally to the incentives of a world gone mad. Be honest gentlemen: if Marriage 1.0 were still the rule instead of the exception, how many of you would happily marry? The contraceptive regime radically disrupted the natural formation of families. Sex became an end in itself. From that conviction came the scourge of pornography. The logical conclusion is the development of sex bots. And an elderly, celibate Italian bishop saw it all coming more clearly than all of the experts.
Woman, ignore this time. Consider your children. Stay married.
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