{"id":5607,"date":"2009-01-04T02:00:21","date_gmt":"2009-01-04T07:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=5607"},"modified":"2010-12-02T05:45:04","modified_gmt":"2010-12-02T10:45:04","slug":"children-do-better-with-parents-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2009\/01\/04\/children-do-better-with-parents-together\/","title":{"rendered":"Children do Better with Parents Together?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>(Image found here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Ballgame at Feminist Critics writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The assertion, \u201cchildren do better with parents together\u201d could mean a number of different things, so let\u2019s go through the possible ways the statement could be interpreted:<\/p>\n

The notion that \u201cChildren ALWAYS do better with parents together\u201d is almost certainly false. If one of the parents is abusive, it seems pretty non-controversial to assume that the kids would be better off with the non-abusive parent alone.<\/p>\n

The notion that \u201cChildren SOMETIMES do better with parents together\u201d is almost certainly true, but so banal and useless an observation that it\u2019s not worth the expense of a billboard or worth discussing at any length.<\/p>\n

That leaves \u201cChildren GENERALLY do better with parents together.\u201d This, itself, has two entirely different meanings which are easily confused. Take 100 couples with children. Of those couples, 75 are (at the moment) happily married, while 25 have marital difficulties \u2014 some severe \u2014 and are on the brink of divorce. Let\u2019s say 20 of the 25 couples actually go through with the divorce.<\/p>\n

The notion that \u201cChildren GENERALLY do better with parents together\u201d could be taken to mean that, out of the 100 families described above, children from the 80 non-divorcing families end up being mentally and emotionally healthier (as a group) than the children from the 20 divorcing families. That is very easy to believe. Indeed, there are any number of studies that show this, and these are the studies that are typically trotted out to misleadingly imply that divorce hurts children. In fact it\u2019s just another rather banal observation that children from happy families do better than children from emotionally fraught ones, and hardly worth the price of a billboard. It\u2019s almost like saying, \u201cPeople with money are less likely to have difficulties making ends meet.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the other meaning of \u201cChildren GENERALLY do better with parents together\u201d is quite different: namely, that the children in the 20 divorcing families would have been better off if those parents hadn\u2019t gotten divorced.<\/em> THAT notion is purely speculative<\/em> as far as I know.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Via Alas<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Image found here.) Ballgame at Feminist Critics writes: The assertion, \u201cchildren do better with parents together\u201d could mean a number of different things, so let\u2019s go through the possible ways the statement could be interpreted: The notion that \u201cChildren ALWAYS do better with parents together\u201d is almost certainly false. If one of the parents is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[223,272,274],"class_list":["post-5607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-childrenyouth","tag-marriagefamily","tag-methodsuse-of-data"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5607"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30251,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5607\/revisions\/30251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}