Family instability continues to grow in the U.S. despite falling
divorce rates for families with children.
Researchers say an increase in
cohabitation is part of the problem, adding that society’s “retreat
from marriage” harms children and has particularly hurt poor and
working-class communities.
“In a striking turn of events, the
divorce rate for married couples with children has returned almost to
the levels we saw before the divorce revolution kicked in during the
1970s,” said Prof. W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia.
“Nevertheless,
family instability is on the rise for American children as a whole.
This seems in part to be because more couples are having children in
cohabiting unions, which are very unstable,” he said.
Wilcox is
the lead author of “Why Marriage Matters: Thirty Conclusions from the
Social Sciences,” a report from the New York-based Institute for
American Values’ Center for Marriage and Families.
More than 40
percent of U.S. children now spend time in a cohabiting household. They
are much more likely to experience a parental breakup than children of
married couples.
In the U.S., the breakup rate is 170 percent higher for children born to cohabiting couples up until age 12.
Wilcox
said children of cohabiting parents are more likely than those from
intact married families to suffer from “a range of emotional and social
problems” such as drug use, depression, and dropping out of high school.
The
report surveys more than 250 peer-reviewed journal articles on marriage
and family life in the U.S. and around the world. It also has original
analysis of data from the General Social Survey and the Survey of Income
and Program Participation.
“(W)hether we succeed or fail in
building a healthy marriage culture is clearly a matter of legitimate
public concern and an issue of paramount importance if we wish to
reverse the marginalization of the most vulnerable members of our
society: the working class, the poor, minorities, and children,” the
report’s executive summary said.
The report found that children in
cohabiting households are at least three times more likely to be
physically, sexually or emotionally abused, compared to children from
intact marriages between their biological parents.
Researchers
have also discovered that family stability is part of a class divide.
Children from college-educated homes have seen their family lives
stabilize, while children from less-educated homes have seen their lives
become increasingly unstable. The highly affluent enjoy “strong and
stable” families while others face “increasingly unstable, unhappy and
unworkable ones.”
Divorces involving children have largely
returned to levels before marriage laws were changed for easier divorce.
About 23 percent of children whose parents married in the early 1960s
saw their parents divorced by the time they turned 10.
The numbers for
children whose parents married in 1997 were nearly similar.
The
report authors concluded that an intact marriage between biological
parents remains the “gold standard” for family life in the U.S.
“Children
are most likely to thrive, economically, socially, and psychologically,
in this family form,” the Institute for American Values said in an Aug.
16 statement.
Marriage is “an important public good” with a range of
economic, health, educational and safety benefits that help all levels
of government serve the common good.
The benefits of marriage also
extend to poor, working class and minority communities, despite the
weakening of marriage in these demographics in the last four decades.
“(T)he
rise of cohabiting households with children is the largest unrecognized
threat to the quality and stability of children’s lives in today’s
families,” the institute said.