Originally posted by dadudemon
Support your position with things like:1. Suicide rates.
2. Mental health or the lack thereof.
3. Life satisfaction.
4. Socioeconomic Mobility.
5. Educational Attainment.
6. Home ownership.
7. Standard of living.
You can decry the moral decay of society and the destruction of the family unit all you want but if all measures of quality point to improvements, across the board, you're just a dumbass old man whining about the young people.
But, if you can prove that the moral decay and destruction of the family unit has direct and tangible negative impacts, why...you've got yourself a damn good point.
Okay so a lot of the standards by which we also measure societal prosperity such as the ones just mentioned by you and the ones mentioned by Ellimist would be seriously positively impacted by economic growth, advancement of technology, and advancement of scientific knowledge, which are all things I don't dispute we've made advances in, and I wasn't disputing the overall advancement of society, merely it's advancement along the dimension of culture. Saying that society overall is better than it was last decade doesn't discredit the point I'm making since all of that is linked to areas nobody would dispute we've made progress in such as scientific knowledge, technology, and economic growth.
I'll touch upon the destruction of the family unit since you mentioned that one. The single motherhood rate has been rising in every community for a while now, and single motherhood is the largest predictor of inter-generational poverty, as well as being linked with a whole host of other things, such as violent crime, teenage pregnancy, homelessness, dropping out of school, etc. as well as having a higher likelihood of dealing with psychological problems.
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/07/single_motherhood_worse_for_children_.html
But Hetherington, who like Roiphe embraces changing family structures, also was honest enough to admit that divorce tends to double a child’s risk of a serious negative outcome. Specifically, she found that “twenty-five percent of youths from divorced families in comparison to 10 percent from non-divorced families did have serious social, emotional, or psychological problems.” Other research suggests that the children of never-married single parents tend to do somewhat worse than children of divorced single parents.
Take two contemporary social problems: teenage pregnancy and the incarceration of young males. Research by Sara McLanahan at Princeton University suggests that boys are significantly more likely to end up in jail or prison by the time they turn 30 if they are raised by a single mother. Specifically, McLanahan and a colleague found that boys raised in a single-parent household were more than twice as likely to be incarcerated, compared with boys raised in an intact, married home, even after controlling for differences in parental income, education, race, and ethnicity. Research on young men suggests they are less likely to engage in delinquent or illegal behavior when they have the affection, attention, and monitoring of their own mother and father.
I used this article specifically because as the opening sentence in the quote says the author and person who did the study are both in support of the shift in family structure, so what they are saying isn't exaggerated out of a bias against the changing family structure.
Here's another piece of information from the Brookings institute:
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/three-simple-rules-poor-teens-should-follow-to-join-the-middle-class/
Let politicians, schoolteachers and administrators, community leaders, ministers and parents drill into children the message that in a free society, they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities: at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year). There are surely influences other than these principles at play, but following them guides a young adult away from poverty and toward the middle class.
Consider an example. Today, more than 40 percent of American children, including more than 70 percent of black children and 50 percent of Hispanic children, are born outside marriage. This unprecedented rate of nonmarital births, combined with the nation’s high divorce rate, means that around half of children will spend part of their childhood—and for a considerable number of these all of their childhood — in a single-parent family. As hard as single parents try to give their children a healthy home environment, children in female-headed families are four or more times as likely as children from married-couple families to live in poverty. In turn, poverty is associated with a wide range of negative outcomes in children, including school dropout and out-of-wedlock births.
So it's not only harmful for the children born out of wedlock, but bears consequences for those in their adult lives as well.
Also a lot of the things I mentioned are pretty self-evidently bad, such as:
Propagandizing children with political ideology, often with taxpayer money, which I've pointed out happens both in public elementary schools, and on children's shows on Public networks... so... propagandizing children and using taxpayer money to to it.
Practices such as diversity quotas which are inherently discriminatory on the basis of identity and operate not only in the private sector but in the public sector as well (ie. public universities), as well as the ideology that argues in favor of this being pushed on elementary school students and being entrenched in the corporate training of places such as Google. Not only does this unfairly discriminate against specific individuals on the basis of their identity, but the contempt for meritocracy as a "white male" ideology suggests that it is not good to solely focus on selecting the best candidate for a position (which any reasonable person would do).
The expanding repression of people's right to free speech in the rest of the west to which I've mentioned numerous examples that aren't even hate speech, such as Count Dankula, the girl who posted rap lyrics with the n-word, Canadian senators openly and virtually unanimously arguing in favor of compelled speech, Jordan Peterson being smeared as having an unacceptable opinion when he says the government shouldn't be able to compel citizens' speech, people getting arrested for protesting a mosque that was calling for the death of jews.. although even criminalizing hate speech is a grave moral injustice. I'd say the repression of human rights and support for such things among the populace is a pretty tangible negative thing.
Likewise the push for "multiculturalism" and the contempt with which people argue against national or cultural identity and this cultural force's impact are pretty self-evident in Europe with the migrant crisis, with the sexual assault spree in Germany on one new years day, the child grooming gangs in the UK (which authorities are more hesitant to act on for fear of being labeled racist), the rise of violent crime and antisemitism in certain areas, and the fact that if you criticize taking in this many migrants from such a culture at once and them not assimilating, you get smeared as a racist, and if you criticize Islam you get smeared as a racist and get death threats from a certain portion of the population.