Marriage and learned behaviors

I am a little dubious of the rigor of the data but the thrust of the argument has a directional appeal.  From The Rise of “Marriage Deserts” and What We Can Do About Them by Brad Wilcox | Chris Bullivant.

Relationships are role-modeled. If you have the privilege of growing up in a stable, good-enough married family, you get front-row seats for 18 years showing you how marriage works. But if you grow up with cohabiting or divorced partners, or parents who regularly were at war with one another, your perceptions are different and imagining a good marriage requires a lot more effort. This was the experience of so many Gen Xers who came of age during the divorce revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.

For anyone who grows up in a single-parent relationship, marriage is even harder to imagine. And if you grow up in a neighborhood where single-parent relationships are the norm for blocks on end, marriage is a fiction.

In 1968, only 13% of U.S. children lived with an unmarried parent, whether cohabiting or a single parent. By 2023, almost one-third of children were living in a home headed by single or cohabiting parents.

I have always been puzzled that children of cohabiting couples show social outcomes much closer to those of children of a single parent than to those of children of married couples.  The logic suggests that two committed parents, married or not, would parent in the same way with the same results.  But that is not what the data says.

And perhaps an element of the explanation is that there is a difference marital behaviors between the two models.  

The whole argument is suggestive.  Marriage is always an exercise in intimate cooperation.  The researchers suggest that without exposure to that, children are less able to prepare for a healthy marriage themselves.  

But there is another implication.  If you are not familiar with all the attributes of intimate cooperation, do you lose those attributes in settings outside a marriage?  Are you simply not able to practice cooperation with others (or to a measurably lesser extent?)

Finally, the point about the generational cohort effect is interesting, i.e. "Gen Xers who came of age during the divorce revolution of the 1970s and 1980s."  

Is some of what we identify as polarization today, related to a loss of copperation skills among that cohort because they were not exposed to them in functioning parental marriages?

I don't know.  I am reasonably skeptical about the reality of polarization at a social level.  Within the Mandarin Class and in the political arena?  Sure.  Among most people?  I am much more dubious.

It would be interesting to do some sort of sentiment analysis of the writings, postings, videos and speeches of the most vitriolic talking heads, pundits, academics, politicians, advocates, NGOs, etc.  Is there speech in fact more anti-social than the average of all people.  And then second, is the parental marital background of all those talking heads et al, materially different from the parental marital background of most people?  

Is the vitriol a function of poor cooperation and compromise skills learned from watching a healthy and functioning marriage as modeled by one's parents?