Half of American's Now Born to Single Parents (From 5%)

In this hard-hitting discussion, we analyze the alarming rise of single parenthood over the past decades. We link this trend to increased rates of substance abuse, mental health issues, high school dropouts, and unemployment among affected children. While recognizing that many single parents strive admirably, we argue that the societal normalization and enablement of single parenthood has tragic consequences.

We also touch on how political polarization exacerbates partnership woes, with liberal women far outnumbering progressive men and vice versa among conservatives. Ultimately, we advocate for a cultural shift that promotes stable two-parent households as the ideal environment for raising well-adjusted, productive members of society.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] So here's where I like, just want to push back a little bit but like. These children may be exhibiting the antisocial tendencies of the fathers who left the relationship.

Malcolm Collins: Let's buy what you just said. Okay. Then I want you to then contextualize the severity of the quote I read earlier, which I will read again.

In the 1950s, fewer than 5 percent of babies born in this country were born to unmarried mothers. To date, nearly half of all babies in America are born to unmarried mothers. A lot of people, when we talk about sort of genetic shifts in the country's like sociological profiles, they think that these happen slowly.

They do not.

And so what we're going to see is across all ethnic groups in this country, the whatever genetic correlate there is to this behavioral pattern is going to begin to, Become dramatically more common in the population and the other traits that it is correlated [00:01:00] with, i. e. substance abuse, depression, anxiety, externalizing behavior disorders.

Those are also going to explode also things like dropping out of college, dropping out of high school, not having a job. Those are also going to explode. And it shouldn't be a surprise that these things cross correlate, I just typically don't point this out due to the offensive nature of admitting that humans have genes and that affects behavior patterns.

How dare you. To extreme lefties. But I mean it's true, humans have genes, I'm, I'm sorry

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am so excited to be talking to you because I am so excited to be married to you. Mm. So this episode is going to be done on the statistics of marriage, single parents, and the consequences to children, as well as realistic long-term solutions to the way that people pair, bond and stuff like that in, in, in the context of having kids.

So the first one I really wanted to [00:02:00] go over here, which is a study that I think really flies in the face of what a lot of people intuit about marriage. So it's important to sort of start with this because I think a lot of people, they go into this being like, well, marriage makes you less. Right. This is, this is just something you see, especially if you're in these like red pilly circles and stuff like that.

So last I'm quoting here last month, for example, the university of Chicago economist, Sam Paltzman published a study in which he found that marriage was the most important differentiator between happy and unhappy people. Married people are 30 points happier than unmarried. Income contributes to happiness too, but not as much.

So, just to clarify, if you were going to contrast your amount of happiness, that marriage gives the average person, when contrast you with a non-married person. That would be the equivalent to the boost in happiness. You would get from an additional income of 75 to a hundred thousand dollars a year. So in other words, If you were to give somebody $50,000 extra a [00:03:00] year in salary that would not correlate was an equivalent happiness boost as marriage does. You would need to offer them at 75,000 to a hundred thousand dollars.

Malcolm Collins: According to an analyst of recent survey data

by the University of Virginia, Professor Brad Wilcox, 75 percent of adults ages 18 to 40 said that making a good living was crucial to fulfillment in life, while only 32 percent thought that marriage was crucial to fulfill it in a Pew Research survey. 88 percent of parents said it was extremely or very important for their kids to be financially independent, while only 21 percent said it was extremely or very important for their kids to marry.

So the point here is that there is this misperception in society that you're most important. Goal. Like even if you're just caring about personal hedonism should be in personal happiness and personal contentment should be to be well off financially, that is just demonstrably untrue from the data.

You are much better off being less happy or less, less, [00:04:00] lower income. Typically within the income bracket, you would expect for yourself and married and in a good relationship than you are to be higher income and unmarried. but our

Simone Collins: society does not imply that. I mean, the data may, may indicate. As such, but if you were to go off mainstream societal norms, you'd, you'd think it was crazy to focus on marriage, which could become abusive or substandard or ending divorce, or you grow apart.

And also look at how marriages are depicted in media. They're not that fun. And I'm part of that. It's a plot device. I mean, boring, happy marriages are boring. They're not good fodder for a show or a movie or any sort of story plot. But my point is, like. This is not obvious to people.

Malcolm Collins: I think it's more than that.

I think that there is a concerted effort to some extent to paint marriage as not fun. I think, yeah. So I think that there's a few motivations here. I don't think it's like an intentional concerted effort, but I do [00:05:00] think it's a, an emergent property of the way. The types of people who end up being showrunners and writers in Hollywood divide from the mainstream population.

They're much more likely to be individuals who are deep into the urban monoculture and single themselves. It, it, it, they, they have not experienced marriage. They paint. Marriage both with a sour grapes mindset because of this and within a community and culture that is not good at rewarding stable marriages.

So there's, there's just a lot less of them. I mean, you're, you're obviously going to see much more stable marriages within conservative cultural communities, which are going to be much more rural and stuff like that. than the types of people who are writing these shows in LA. And as society drifts further apart from each other, you know, the left and the right and as the left begins to dehumanize the right more and more, they have a harder time interacting with or modeling people of the opposite political persuasion.

And as such [00:06:00] they cannot write, like, what these stable marriages look like without making digs that their culture needs to sort of insert into them, that if a marriage is, like, conservative ish in some way, that the woman must be being oppressed, for example, or must hate her life. So I think that that's, that's part of, of what you have going on in, in these depictions.

But you also have this with teachers and stuff like that. You know, a lot of these people are very unlikely to be married. They're much more likely to be in allegiance with the urban monoculture. When contrasted with their local communities and as such they, they teach kids this cultural value system of money matters more than anything.

And I remember this is something my mom really pushed against me as a kid, because I thought education mattered more than anything. And she made it pretty clear that within our family, it did not, t