"The latest social science tells us that children raised in single mother homes are about five times more likely to be poor than kids raised in stably married homes. That young men raised apart from a stably married home are according to recent research, more likely to land in jail or prison than to graduate from college. That the biggest driver of recent declines in happiness is the nation's retreat from marriage.
And that, at the community level, the strongest predictor of economic mobility for poor children is family structure: Poor kids hailing from communities with more two-parent families have a markedly better shot at moving up into the middle class than poor kids from neighborhoods dominated by single parents" ~ Brad Wilcox, The Atlantic
Why then, is it so hard to publicly advocate for the nuclear family? Toxic Compassion: the prioritisation of short term emotional comfort over truth, reality, actual long term outcomes, flourishing everything optimises for looking good, rather than doing good. This is seen in much of popular culture as the desirable, fair, empathetic thing to do. And it's everywhere.
People would rather claim that body fat has no bearing on health and mortality outcomes to avoid making overweight individuals feel upset. Even if this causes them to literally die sooner or have a worse quality of life over the long run.
People would rather say that children growing up in single parent households suffer no worse outcomes than those from two-parent homes. Even if this misleads parents, children and teachers about why kids behave the way they do.
Campaigners would sooner shout Defund The Police as a response to what they perceive as unfair treatment of criminals. Even if this results in more crimes being committed against people from minority backgrounds due to the abandonment of police officers from those areas.
The important tradeoff with all of these examples is between appearing good and actually doing good. Telling people what they want to hear, giving them immediate gratification and avoiding saying anything that could cause distress prioritise the former over the latter.
"That's exactly what the Oedipal situation is. It's the prioritisation of short term emotional comfort over long term thriving. It's going to hurt now, but the long consequences are positive. If you give up your children to the world, you will keep them." ~ Jordan Peterson
The opposite is Performative Empathy: Saying whatever is required to look good, even if you don't actually care. And on the internet, the gap between words and actions has never been bigger. You can be the least virtuous, meanest, most dishonest human on earth, but if you say the right things on social media, you look like a saint. Performative empathy is more rewarded than genuine empathy. Posting about mistreated groups is more incentivised than helping mistreated groups. [puts flag in bio, has never actually donated to charity]
This isn't me saying that you can't do good whilst talking about it. But that many (maybe even most) of the people who proselytise about how virtuous and caring they are, and how it's everyone else who is evil, uncaring and the enemy are allowing their morality to stand on the shoulders of limited scrutiny.
"It's like 'look at how good I am'. Well if the 'look at' comes before the 'how good I am', it really wreaks havoc on the claim" ~ Jordan Peterson
Beware the people who prioritise saying good things, they might not be doing good things.