How Systems Work

There’s an interesting piece by Joe Pinsker at The Atlantic on divorce:

Lange seems to have avoided repeating his parents’ relationship history. But divorce, as a thorough body of research has demonstrated, often perpetuates itself across generations—“children of divorce,” as they’re called, are more likely to get divorced themselves than are people from “intact families.” A parental split, it turns out, can shape the next generation from childhood on.

Researchers have been aware of the connection between a parent’s divorce and a child’s divorce for nearly a century, says Nicholas Wolfinger, a sociologist at the University of Utah. Further, as Wolfinger found after he started studying the subject in the 1990s, people with divorced parents are disproportionately likely to marry other people with divorced parents—and couples in which both partners are children of divorce are more likely to get divorced than couples in which just one person is.

Wolfinger says that researchers have some ideas about why divorce would be heritable. One theory is that many children of divorce don’t learn important lessons about commitment. “All couples fight,” Wolfinger explains. “If your parents stay together, they fight and then you realize these things aren’t fatal to a marriage. If you’re from a divorced family, you don’t learn that message, and [after fights] it seems like things are untenable. And so you bounce.”

One other (albeit minor) factor is genetics. By way of explanation, Wolfinger talked through a hypothetical generation-spanning chain of assholery: “Some people are jerks, and there is some component of being a jerk that appears to be purely genetic. So: You’re a jerk, you get married, you have a kid, you don’t stay married—because you’re a dick—your kid inherits some of the genetic propensity to be a jerk. And so they get divorced.”

I was tremendously fortunate that my parents’ joint response to their awful childhoods was to create the most stable, loving idyllic childhood for me and my siblings that they possibly could.

There’s a considerable body of scholarship suggesting that children do best when reared by their biological parents as well.

Commitment, marriage, stable parental relationships, happy, secure children, secure old ages. These things are all interrelated. That’s how systems work. Traditional values are a system.

If we are to reject traditional values as inadequate to modern needs, we might consider coming up with alternatives that achieve the same or better outcomes. Something to the left of “whoopee”, as Murray in the play A Thousand Clowns put it, is probably inadequate.