jjorsett: Who says it doesn't?

good point. I'm right leaning, and I'm pretty pro gay marriage and adoption.

Mr. Right: All moral posturing aside, it is a pretty well-documented fact that children who are born into a committed marital relationship have a much greater chance of not being in poverty, a much better chance of success educationally and socially, a much lower incidence of drug use, teen pregnancy, and ending up in prison. That does not mean that children born into a single parent family will fail. But the chances are much greater.

It has more to do with having their shiat pulled together.

Did they finish high school?
Did they go to college?
Did they finish college?
Did they invest a period of time in advancing their career?
Did they succeed in acquiring a job with reasonable pay and benefits?
Can they execute birth control properly?
Did they refrain from getting knocked up by a complete loser?
Do they value things like education, socialization, health, etc?
Did they focus on their education and career rather than getting married in their late teens/early 20s?
Did they get roped into a relationship they otherwise would have walked away from because of an unplanned pregnancy?
Do they refrain from antisocial and criminal behaviors?
Is their personality so disagreeable that no other adult would voluntarily share their life with them?
Is their financial situation so poor that it interferes with their ability to attract a spouse?

Once you control for those factors the marriage advantage goes away. Marriage is more of an expression of having your shiat together than the cause of better outcomes.

fickenchucker: Given the high rate of divorce, these days usually instigated by a woman who thinks the grass is greener somewhere else, I applaud this development. At least the guy won't have to pay alimony.

/Work with a guy who specifically won't get married, but has two kids with the same chick.
//Marriage was supposed to be a protection for the wife, but if broads don't want it anymore, then "meh".

Alimony? That duck is dead and decomposing. Almost no one gets granted alimony anymore unless one spouse has not worked for a significant number of years.

Child support will happen no matter what their legal status as a couple.

LiberalEastCoastElitist: Mr. Right: All moral posturing aside, it is a pretty well-documented fact that children who are born into a committed marital relationship have a much greater chance of not being in poverty, a much better chance of success educationally and socially, a much lower incidence of drug use, teen pregnancy, and ending up in prison. That does not mean that children born into a single parent family will fail. But the chances are much greater.

It has more to do with having their shiat pulled together.

Did they finish high school?
Did they go to college?
Did they finish college?
Did they invest a period of time in advancing their career?
Did they succeed in acquiring a job with reasonable pay and benefits?
Can they execute birth control properly?
Did they refrain from getting knocked up by a complete loser?
Do they value things like education, socialization, health, etc?
Did they focus on their education and career rather than getting married in their late teens/early 20s?
Did they get roped into a relationship they otherwise would have walked away from because of an unplanned pregnancy?
Do they refrain from antisocial and criminal behaviors?
Is their personality so disagreeable that no other adult would voluntarily share their life with them?
Is their financial situation so poor that it interferes with their ability to attract a spouse?

Once you control for those factors the marriage advantage goes away. Marriage is more of an expression of having your shiat together than the cause of better outcomes.

No, it doesn't. It decreases a little, but it doesn't go away. Two people simply equal more parenting available to the child. The denial of this by some on the Left makes global warming denial almost, almost seem rational.

We should give tax breaks for NOT having children, not having them.

There, I said it.

Theaetetus: You're comparing apples and oranges. The article is about unmarried biological-parent couples, but you're comparing married biological-parent couples to single parents and step-parents.

My point is that unmarried biological parents have not made a legal commitment. If the actual, legal marriage is not important, why are gays so hot to do it? Because the legality of it all does matter. Have one of the parents killed in an accident while not married and you will immediately see the benefit a "mere piece of paper" as marriage was frequently referred to in the 70s.

Ever been divorced? What you notice is that, when you got married, nobody questioned your fitness to be a parent. While you stayed married, the court could only interfere in the parent-child relationship if a parent was abusive or neglectful. The instant you file for a divorce, in nearly every state, your children are not your own. They become wards of the court. Who they live with, to a large extent where they live, who they are allowed to visit with and the schedule for such visitation, who is responsible for every aspect of their lives is suddenly a matter for the court. Additionally, the entire financial picture of both parents now becomes a matter of court scrutiny. (When one has been through a divorce, which remains the only legal means of dissolving a marriage while both partners remain alive, one wonders why in the hell gays would want to enter into that whole world) While it seems insulting to the parents to put them through this - especially if they're in agreement over this stuff prior to the divorce, it remains the position of the legal system that when parents are no longer legally married, the court needs to step in to assure the welfare of the children.

If a couple is not married and decides to separate, who looks out for the welfare of the children and who enforces things like custody and support agreements? There cannot be a divorce where there has been no marriage and one adds whole layers of legal complexity when looking out for the welfare of children from an unmarried relationship.

This is not to argue that married parents can't become post-divorce deadbeats or skip out on their families altogether or other reprehensible things that damage children. But again, the odds are better.

LiberalEastCoastElitist: Once you control for those factors the marriage advantage goes away. Marriage is more of an expression of having your shiat together than the cause of better outcomes.

I won't argue a single point you've made. But being in a committed marriage is part of getting one's shiat together where the welfare of children is concerned.

Here's the dirty little secret. Men and women are different from each other. As parents, women tend to be more nurturing, men tend to be tougher and more disciplinary. I'm sure you can point to a thousand examples where that's not true, so can I. But those are the tendencies. The more nurturing parent will always bring the baby the food. The disciplinarian will know when it's time to kick him out of the nest to get his own food. Children need that balance. Sometimes they need somebody to kiss the booboo, sometimes they need somebody to tell them to walk it off and get back out there.

My point is that there are no absolutes in marriage or parenting. Different folks do things differently. Some succeed without the marriage, others fail with it. But the norm is that two parent families produce, on average, the best kids.

On a larger scale, there are societal tipping points. Boys, for example, need strong male role models so that they know how to interact with other guys, how to treat and how to respect women, how to develop the toughness required to get up and do what needs doing every day, and how to take responsibility for oneself. There are women who can do that for their sons but a good man (emphasis on good) will normally do a better job. If, in a bunch of boys, most of them have that strong role model, they can help the minority that doesn't have such a role model. When I was young, divorce was unheard of in our little Midwestern town and only kid in my class didn't have a Dad, he had died of Hodgkin's Disease. Other fathers in the neighborhood invited him along with their own sons to go to ball games and the like. Different fathers in the neighborhood took turns helping him with the lawn, shoveling the snow, fixing the mower, and all the other things that fathers normally taught their sons back then. So we had someone who did not fit the norm but the neighborhood covered, as best it could, the deficit.

When the percentage of boys in a classroom without any male role model in the home vastly exceeds those with such a model, that deficit cannot be covered. And that is how gang violence escalates, how criminal activity becomes the usual, etc. It's about tipping points. If society wants to do what's really best for children, it will encourage strong marriages. It's not a religious right kind of thing, it's a benefit to society kind of thing.

shortymac: Legal marriage is still important because it gives your partner automatic rights, to do it without marriage is a long difficult process, and that's why "the gays" are fighting for it. We have to shed a lot of the cultural bullshiat around it and look at it as a contract again.

You're right - marriage does give your partner automatic rights. What most people want to ignore, however, is that it also places automatic responsibilities. IMO, we've developed a kind of societal narcissism that marriage is all about me, my fullfillment, my happiness. In reality, it's all about fulfilling responsibilities, which in turn guarantees your rights and makes your partner much more eager to make you happy.

We have developed huge amounts of cultural BS around marriages and those huge steaming piles stand in the way of successful marriages at epidemic levels.

Smeggy Smurf: Co-habitating people popping out crotchfruit? White people problems

It most certainly is a white people problem, since generally our tax dollars are going to be funneled into welfare for all these people who can't pay their bills and yet continue to have kids.

FLMountainMan: No, it doesn't. It decreases a little, but it doesn't go away. Two people simply equal more parenting available to the child. The denial of this by some on the Left makes global warming denial almost, almost seem rational.

Data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care were analyzed to explore effects of marital separation on children in the first 3 years of life. The sample included 73 never-married mothers and 97 separated mothers; a comparison group of 170 was conditionally randomly selected from the 2-parent families. Children in 2-parent families performed better than children in 1-parent families on assessments of cognitive and social abilities, problem behavior, attachment security, and behavior with mother. However, controlling for mothers' education and family income reduced these differences, and associations with separated-intact marital status were nonsignificant (the effect size was .01). Thus, children's psychological development was not affected by parental separation per se; it was related to mothers' income, education, ethnicity, childrearing beliefs, depressive symptoms, and behavior.

Oh noes, looks like you're dead wrong!

Link

Hint: When you look at data, find the url where its coming from and if the home page mentions the bible or family values, it's crap.

shortymac: Hell, do you even know your neighbor's name?

Regardless of upbringing, men and women tend to be different. Note the word tend. It is intentional. I know a few women with bigger balls than most men I know. I know men who are quite wimpy but otherwise normal. But the tendencies, parenting-wise, are as I stated.

You're right that all children need role models. Boys need a strong male role model but they also need a female role model so they know how to treat girls and women as they get older. And if their Dad doesn't know how to cook, do laundry and at least sew on a button, their Mom ought to teach them! Girls need a female role model but also need a male role model to know how to interact with boys and men and how they should expect to be treated by them.

Of course, if you have really lousy parents, you may be better off without! My mother was a basket case but my grandmothers and aunts made up for it. The advantages of close knit extended families! I actually grew up poor but didn't know it. The family by whom I was surrounded gave me one of the most blessed childhoods you could imagine. Looking back, if our family could have been much wealthier but not had the great extended family nearby, I would have had a much poorer childhood.

But I do actually know my neighbors. Because I live near an even smaller town and I've retired to my little farm. One of my daughters lives in Chicago. She knows her neighbors because she's made the effort. She's pretty unusual.

jjorsett: which you'd think would upset Conservatives more than gay adoption

Who says it doesn't?

We can can hate both. Plenty of rage to go around.

shortymac: Mr. Right: Theaetetus: You're comparing apples and oranges. The article is about unmarried biological-parent couples, but you're comparing married biological-parent couples to single parents and step-parents.

My point is that unmarried biological parents have not made a legal commitment. If the actual, legal marriage is not important, why are gays so hot to do it? Because the legality of it all does matter. Have one of the parents killed in an accident while not married and you will immediately see the benefit a "mere piece of paper" as marriage was frequently referred to in the 70s.

Ever been divorced? What you notice is that, when you got married, nobody questioned your fitness to be a parent. While you stayed married, the court could only interfere in the parent-child relationship if a parent was abusive or neglectful. The instant you file for a divorce, in nearly every state, your children are not your own. They become wards of the court. Who they live with, to a large extent where they live, who they are allowed to visit with and the schedule for such visitation, who is responsible for every aspect of their lives is suddenly a matter for the court. Additionally, the entire financial picture of both parents now becomes a matter of court scrutiny. (When one has been through a divorce, which remains the only legal means of dissolving a marriage while both partners remain alive, one wonders why in the hell gays would want to enter into that whole world) While it seems insulting to the parents to put them through this - especially if they're in agreement over this stuff prior to the divorce, it remains the position of the legal system that when parents are no longer legally married, the court needs to step in to assure the welfare of the children.

If a couple is not married and decides to separate, who looks out for the welfare of the children and who enforces things like custody and support agreements? There cannot be a divorce where there has been n ...

It DOES give automatic rights. Some are just convenience, and could legally be established other ways. For example, they used to make a fuss that a person's gay partner had no legal status in a medical emergency or after death. Which was bullshiat as paperwork could be drawn up to fix that.

However, more significantly, there are economic issues. For example, Social Security's survivor benefits. To qualify for SS, you have to have worked and paid into it for a certain # of years. But, what about a housewife, who never held a job? Being legally married to a worker counts. The govt says being a house-spouse counts as your job, if it's a legal marriage. I find this extremely odd.

Most critical nowadays is health coverage. People get married JUST FOR THAT. It's no joke- with certain conditions, you just can't get insurance, not at anything remotely affordable. And you can literally die because of it. But if you marry someone with coverage through work, it's fairly automatic.

In fact, I wonder how many marriages these days are motivated by this. The Obamacare thing does seem to be set to fix this problem, and I wonder if it'll change the marriage rate now that you don't need to get married to get health care.

shortymac: Okay the scary thing about this article:

"The report also reveals more details about contraception. In 2008, for example, 19% of births were unintended; 36% of women who had an unintended birth said they didn't use contraception because they thought they couldn't get pregnant. But 23% of those women said they "didn't really mind if I got pregnant.""

Always use contraception!!!!

The problem isn't so much non-married couples having kids, it's people having children too young and deadbeat parents (not just men). (Better article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/us/two-classes-in-america-divided-by -i-do.html?_r=2&hp&pagewanted=all)

The unmarried woman in the article did get screwed over by dating a deadbeat, BUT she's burdened with 3 kids now while the deadbeat gets off scott-free. They could have been married and the same thing would have happened.

Marriage is just a legal contract saying "Dear Government, we're more than just roommates. KTHXBI".

Having a kid with the wrong person is so much worse than marrying/living with them, without kids breaking up sucks and it's expensive, but after it's over you can move on with your life. With kids, you're stuck for life.

The crux of the problem is that abusive partners use kids as a reason to keep the other partner subdued and we need to make note of that in our sex ed classes (which shouldn't be abstinence-only and should include healthy relationships). It's a problem that will never go away but we can do our best to minimize it.

Also BC isn't just the girl's problem, man up and use a condom. 2 forms of protection is better than 1.

This.
All of it.

People need to stoo having kids they cant afford

If a couple can question their sexuality, they can question the Biblical passages against it. They question the people preaching it. Preachers lose control of their congregations. Churches lose money.



/Shutup, its a perfectly valid theory
//This is not to say all churches or Christians or conservatives, just the loud obnoxious ones

ha-ha-guy: FirstNationalBastard: People having children had out of wedlock was pushed way down the list thanks to interracial marriages, and then gay marriages.

As someone in an interracial marriage, come at me Tea Party.

/who am I kidding, no one gets outraged over white guy, Asian woman
//well except Asian guys

Meh, I've been w/ my fiance for 5 years, and she's a brown tall Mexican, and I'm a WASP. My fundy parents don't care. Then again, my younger brother has been dating a Guyanese (Muslim raised) girl for 7 years now.

ronaprhys: RabidRythmDivas: Biblically speaking, I believe cohabitating couples ARE married. "Become one flesh"? That's Bible for "hooking up".

But when you do it with multiple partners, it becomes adultery very cool if it's 1 guy with multiple women.

Actually, Jesus was pretty clear about all this. And nowhere did he say "You can't have sex before your wedding ceremony!"

FTFY

jaytkay: Don't worry, we're talking about people who are enraged by the Girl Scouts, "Happy Holidays and the White House vegetable garden.

Conservatives have an endless supply of hatred to supply every manufactured "scandal".

Meh - liberals are no different. They manufacture "scandals" all the time, just on the opposite end of the spectrum.

How about some examples?