Leading children’s author Mem Fox has drawn criticism from working mothers but qualified support from family groups for likening childcare for very young babies to child abuse.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/childcare-for-babies-like-abuse/2008/08/31/1220121035944.html

A lot of people think marriage is something at which you fail or succeed. A refusal to admit failure can see people dogging it out when there’s no point. However if marriage is short term it means there’s no failure as such. It also means you don’t take each other for granted as the tender’ll be up soon enough.

Of course, it’s impossible to generalise. I know another friend who is heartily glad her parents divorced when she was young. Her father treated her mother very badly, whereas her stepfather has been very caring and faithful. So both my friend and her mother benefitted.

My friend and her partner are not married (somewhat shy of it, I think, after watching their parents) but have two children. Both parties to the relationship have said they would always try and work through any difficulties rather than put their kids through what they had to go through.

Whilst on average it’s a zero sum game (or close to it), there is of course a huge distribution of people where both lose, one loses and the other wins etc. You could certainly set up laws or social campaigns that would cause it to be a winner. We already do that — it’s why people frown on early marriage now. That’s why I wonder if we should be encouraging divorce more, rather than sponsering marriage counselling.

However, if you find ‘happiness research’ to be rather dodgy (I know I do), then it’s possible to fall back on more conventional economic arguments - finding a marriage partner is rather like finding a job, and we all know that a job market where nobody could quit or be fired wouldn’t work very well. People - lots of people - would finish up in jobs they hated or were crap at.

I’m not going to hazard a guess at what an ‘optimal’ divorce rate would look like, but I’m positive it isn’t zero.

Mel: an interesting but high-risk strategy, as quite a few blokes have discovered.

Yes, you read right. I think divorce has had some social effects that are so positive it’s simply impossible to ignore them.

I think you are conflating two separate issues, perhaps deliberately in order to better grab our attention but maybe not.

“Divorce” and the “Freedom to Divorce” are not the same thing. The crux of your argument does supports the notion that the latter might be a good thing. However that doesn’t mean the former is also a good thing. Just as illicit drug taking and drug prohibition might both be bad things, divorce and divorce prohibition may both be bad things also. Doing something is not the opposite of being prohibited from doing something.