You've repeatedly been uncivil in this thread. We ban accounts that engage in flamewars, so please don't do that again, regardless of how poorly understood you may be.
More unmarried couples => more single parent families
That's the link that people were questioning. Marriage is not a necessary condition for having a two-parent family, even if the US law is lagging behind in recognizing it. Why would you think that any of those bad things would happen if two parents, who were already planning on living together and raising their children, had to postpone the wedding for a few years?
I'm not like you. I won't pretend to be something I'm not by hiding behind passive aggressive phrases like "I'll make this easy for you".
You screwed up. You conflated correlation and causation. You fumbled dictionary definitions, suggesting that having unmarried parents was the same as having only one parent.
Numerous people called you out on this. You doubled-down and then, when you saw the way it was going, tried to change the conversation and tried to suggest that you were talking about general trends; unmarried parents correlates more strongly with single parents than married parents does.
These are ways you screwed up. You can learn from this, and become a better person, more able in the future to have meaningful discussions, or you can ignore it and spit out some more passive aggressive phrases in which you pretend everyone just misunderstands you, posturing for complete strangers who don't even know you. Either way, we're done here.
For all I know the difficulty and bitterness of divorce could make it harder for separated couples to co-parent, leading to more single parenting in families that start as married.
I'm not sure about that, I'm open to persuasion. But I'm not persuade by people saying {it's obvious}.
Actually, I should retract my previous statement. I don't really know what I wrote that, maybe something I'm personally reactive to.
As far as I'm aware what the family relationship counsellors are saying these days (the ones I've spoken to anyway) is that it is conflict that harms children.
It matters less whether the parents are together. What's important is that children aren't exposed conflict.
Is it a fact that everything else being equal, a lack of a legal marriage document causes more single-parent families? How did someone prove that?
Because if it's just a correlation, then you're might just be measuring the obvious third-cause: that deadbeat parents are not willing to marry. And that wouldn't be affected by preventing their marriage, since they wouldn't marry anyway.
