Introduction
In the latter half of the twentieth century, divorce posed the biggest threat to marriage in the United States. Clinical, academic, and popular accounts addressing recent family change—from Judith Wallerstein’s landmark book, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, to Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur’s award-winning book, Growing Up with a Single Parent, to Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s attention-getting Atlantic article, “Dan Quayle Was Right”—focused largely on the impact that divorce had upon children, and rightly so. In the wake of the divorce revolution of the 1970s, divorce was the event most likely to undercut the quality and stability of children’s family lives in the second half of the twentieth century.
No more. In fact, as divorce rates have come down since peaking in the early 1980s, children who are now born to married couples are actually more likely to grow up with both of their parents than were children born at the height of the divorce revolution. In fact, the divorce rate for married couples with children has fallen almost to pre divorce revolution levels, with 23 percent of couples who married in the early 1960s divorcing before their first child turned ten, compared to slightly more than 23 percent for couples who married in the mid 1990s.
Today, the rise of cohabiting households with children is the largest unrecognized threat to the quality and stability of children’s family lives. In fact, because of the growing prevalence of cohabitation, which has risen fourteen-fold since 1970, today’s children are much more likely to spend time in a cohabiting household than they are to see their parents divorce.
Now, approximately 24 percent of the nation’s children are born to cohabiting couples, which means that more children are currently born to cohabiting couples than to single mothers. Another 20 percent or so of children spend time in a cohabiting household with an unrelated adult at some point later in their childhood, often after their parents’ marriage breaks down. This means that more than four in ten children are exposed to a cohabiting relationship. Thus, one reason that the institution of marriage has less of a hold over Americans than it has had for most of our history is that cohabitation has emerged as a powerful alternative to and competitor with marriage.
For this reason, the third edition of Why Marriage Matters focuses new attention on recent scholarship assessing the impact that contemporary cohabitation is having on marriage, family life, and the welfare of children. This edition also picks up on topics that surfaced in the first two editions of the report, summarizing a large body of research on the impact of divorce, stepfamilies, and single parenthood on children, adults, and the larger commonweal. The report seeks to summarize existing family-related research into a succinct form useful to policy makers, scholars, civic, business, and religious leaders, professionals, and others interested in understanding marriage in today’s society.
Five New Themes
- Children are less likely to thrive in cohabiting households, compared to intact, married families. On many social, educational, and psychological outcomes, children in cohabiting households do significantly worse than children in intact, married families, and about as poorly as children living in single-parent families. And when it comes to abuse, recent federal data indicate that children in cohabiting households are markedly more likely to be physically, sexually, and emotionally abused than children in both intact, married families and single-parent families. Only in the economic domain do children in cohabiting households fare consistently better than children in single-parent families.
- Family instability is generally bad for children. In recent years, family scholars have turned their attention to the impact that transitions into and out of marriage, cohabitation, and single parenthood have upon children. This report shows that such transitions, especially multiple transitions, are linked to higher reports of school failure, behavioral problems, drug use, and loneliness, among other outcomes. So, it is not just family structure and family process that matter for children; family stability matters as well. And the research indicates that children who are born to married parents are the least likely to be exposed to family instability, and to the risks instability poses to the emotional, social, and educational welfare of children.
- American family life is becoming increasingly unstable for children. Sociologist Andrew Cherlin has observed that Americans are stepping “on and off the carousel of intimate relationships” with increasing rapidity. This relational carousel spins particularly quickly for couples who are cohabiting, even cohabiting couples with children. For instance, cohabiting couples who have a child together are more than twice as likely to break up before their child turns twelve, compared to couples who are married to one another. Thus, one of the major reasons that children’s lives are increasingly turbulent is that more and more children are being born into or raised in cohabiting households that are much more fragile than married families.
- The growing instability of American family life also means that contemporary adults and children are more likely to live in what scholars call “complex households,” where children and adults are living with people who are half-siblings, step siblings, stepparents, stepchildren, or unrelated to them by birth or marriage. Research on these complex households is still embryonic, but the initial findings are not encouraging. For instance, one indicator of this growing complexity is multiple-partner fertility, where parents have children with more than one romantic partner. Children who come from these relationships are more likely to report poor relationships with their parents, to have behavioral and health problems, and to fail in school, even after controlling for factors such as education, income, and race. Thus, for both adults and children, life typically becomes not only more complex, but also more difficult, when parents fail to get or stay married.
- The nation’s retreat from marriage has hit poor and working class communities with particular force. Recent increases in cohabitation, non-marital childbearing, family instability, and family complexity have not been equally distributed in the United States; these trends, which first rose in poor communities in the 1970s and 1980s, are now moving rapidly into working-class and lower-middle class communities. But marriage appears to be strengthening in more educated and affluent communities. As a consequence, since the early 1980s, children from college-educated homes have seen their family lives stabilize, whereas children from less-educated homes have seen their family lives become increasingly unstable. More generally, the stratified character of family trends means that the United States is “devolving into a separate-and-unequal family regime, where the highly educated and the affluent enjoy strong and stable [families] and everyone else is consigned to increasingly unstable, unhappy, and unworkable ones.”
We acknowledge that social science is better equipped to document whether certain facts are true than to say why they are true. We can assert more definitively that marriage is associated with powerful social goods than that marriage is the sole or main cause of these goods.