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Originally Posted by opendoor
Any article that uses the 1950s as some sort of baseline for two parent family rates (or much of anything) is flawed. The postwar '50s era was the outlier, not the baseline.
In Canada at least, in the '20s and '30s about 12% of families were lone-parent families and 3% of all children lived in a household where neither of their parents were present. In the 2011 census, 16.3% of all families were headed by a single parent and only 0.5% of children lived without either of their parents in the household. So not a massive difference from today if you're looking at what portion of children grow up in two parent households.
And like I mentioned above, for all the harmony of the first decade or two after the second world war, the children who were brought up in that era ended up being the most criminal generation of the last century. The murder rate in the United States for instance is less than half of what it was at its peak in the '70s.
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Setting any moral considerations aside, the 50s to the 80s saw the era of greatest economic egalitarianism in North America. Returning to the stark inequities of the Gilded Age, with rigid classes built on yawning disparities in education and family origins, is something to be avoided, I would think. Marriage is a bulwark against poverty, for the simple reason that we live in a society that requires two incomes to provide a family with most of the basic trappings of a secure present and a hopeful future.