The statistics for all this are extensive and easily obtained on the Internet, as you say they are similar, at least across developed, Western nations.
For the purposes of mental (and actually physical as well) health: getting married and maintaining a healthy marriage tends to have a strong positive impact on everyone involved (partners plus their kids). Whereas getting divorced tends to have a strong negative impact.
This means that on a population level, all other things being equal, you tend to want to have a lot of healthy, supportive marriages, and kids growing up in those marriages.
1) From graph #2, the marriage rate is the lowest it's ever been in recorded history. Children are increasingly born into single parent households which tend to be less stable and lower income; the effect of having only one supportive parent will persist throughout their lives. Adults are less likely than ever to be partnered up with someone who will be there for them in hard times and "until death do they part."
2) From graph #3, the divorce-to-marriage ratio has been at or near record highs since the late 1960s. The number of divorces per 1,000 population has been highly elevated - over 3.0 - since 1969. What this adds up to is that for the past two generations divorce has been a much more common occurrence, and it is typically a traumatic event. Divorces further reduce the number of close family connections for everyone involved.
A valid point made in one of the responses to my comment is that not all marriages are healthy. It's certainly possible to have a marriage which is a net negative for one or both parties, maybe many of them. But I have rarely seen a rigorous attempt by people who make this point to quantify the net negatives generated by these marriages historically and compare them to the well understood negatives which accompany the current zeitgeist, which would be the intellectually honest thing to do.
To me the statistics couldn't be more clear, fewer people have close families, we are not creating as many new ones, and existing families are ending in divorce. All these things have been going on for two generations and have a greater deleterious impact on mental health than Facebook ever will. They increase isolation, loneliness, depression etc. Social tech is a shitty cope which is very popular in part because these social issues exist, but it doesn't cause them.
For the purposes of mental (and actually physical as well) health: getting married and maintaining a healthy marriage tends to have a strong positive impact on everyone involved (partners plus their kids). Whereas getting divorced tends to have a strong negative impact.
This means that on a population level, all other things being equal, you tend to want to have a lot of healthy, supportive marriages, and kids growing up in those marriages.
So, here are the marriage and divorce rates per 1,000 people in the USA since about 1865: https://robslink.com/SAS/democd80/us_divorce_and_marriage.ht...
Two facts to highlight:
1) From graph #2, the marriage rate is the lowest it's ever been in recorded history. Children are increasingly born into single parent households which tend to be less stable and lower income; the effect of having only one supportive parent will persist throughout their lives. Adults are less likely than ever to be partnered up with someone who will be there for them in hard times and "until death do they part."
2) From graph #3, the divorce-to-marriage ratio has been at or near record highs since the late 1960s. The number of divorces per 1,000 population has been highly elevated - over 3.0 - since 1969. What this adds up to is that for the past two generations divorce has been a much more common occurrence, and it is typically a traumatic event. Divorces further reduce the number of close family connections for everyone involved.
A valid point made in one of the responses to my comment is that not all marriages are healthy. It's certainly possible to have a marriage which is a net negative for one or both parties, maybe many of them. But I have rarely seen a rigorous attempt by people who make this point to quantify the net negatives generated by these marriages historically and compare them to the well understood negatives which accompany the current zeitgeist, which would be the intellectually honest thing to do.
To me the statistics couldn't be more clear, fewer people have close families, we are not creating as many new ones, and existing families are ending in divorce. All these things have been going on for two generations and have a greater deleterious impact on mental health than Facebook ever will. They increase isolation, loneliness, depression etc. Social tech is a shitty cope which is very popular in part because these social issues exist, but it doesn't cause them.