“Legally, his wife controls their marriage, and if she decides to end it, she gets what he has, and he is obligated to support her and any children they produced, even if he is not left enough to survive.”
To me this seems to be the biggest reason for the end of marriage/families; the young people today are often from the broken homes of yesterday, and the males see nothing enviable about the positions the men in their life were in twenty or thirty years ago.
“If he chooses the bath of bachelorhood, he will be bitterly attacked, but he will retain his autonomy and wealth, will be able to live in comfort instead of poverty, and he will be free of the demands put on a married man.”
He will see benefits from that lifestyle, and the bloodline ends while he subsidizes many other people’s children. Marriage/children aren’t for everyone, but it has to be for SOMEONE.
I think in a way many men are just saying, if society won’t respect me, I refuse to support this failing system by propping it up...
I quite agree, but there are some considerations.
1) Children raised by single parents are brought up in a “survival” instead of a “success” mode, so they are 60% more likely to become criminal offenders.
2) When a country reaches an economic plateau unique to them, the number of children per family drops to just 2.1 to 2.3. While government or culture cannot increase this birthrate, by increasing the degree of difficulty and expectations on parents, they can substantially lower it even further.
3) Student loans have become a demographic disaster in America, by upsetting the reproductive timetable of college graduates. While their parents would have graduated poor, from that point, their earnings, less taxes, would be theirs, so they were comfortable in getting married, having children, and mortgaging a home in their prime years for doing so. Graduating deeply in debt can delay this process outside of its effective window, making it much harder.
4) Redemption may exist in organizations like Quiverfull, that communally encourage large families. While currently limited to just a single Evangelical Protestant line, other religious sects should be encouraged to follow suit, for both religious and patriotic reasons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiverfull