Study after study shows that children benefit when their parents are married. Ah, say the sceptics, is that because they’re married, or it is because married couples usually have more money and better parenting skills? Share those same benefits with other family forms and all will be well..jpg)
Sweden provides a sort of controlled experiment for this point of view. Sweden has pushed the welfare state to its outer limits and has done more than any other society to eradicate poverty and its effects. But there still remains a big difference in Sweden between child outcomes for children raised by single parents and married parents as the tables below show. (They are taken from this article at the Institute for Family Studies.)
The article goes on:
Another study of the entire population of Swedish children found that Swedish children from single-parent families were about twice as likely to have psychological problems, attempt suicide, or struggle with substance abuse, compared to their peers from two-parent families, even after controlling for socioeconomic differences and parents’ history of psychological problems (see figure below). Finally, even in Sweden, marriage is the best ticket to the kind of stable, two-parent family that optimizes children’s odds of thriving. In fact, children born to married parents are 44 percent less likely to see their parents break up than are children born to cohabiting parents in this Scandinavian country.
The differences are startling and need little elaboration.
Suffice it to say that no amount of income redistribution (and some redistribution is absolutely necessary) can overcome the advantages that having a married mother and father typically confers on children.
The reluctance of many policy-makers and academics to acknowledge this, and their eagerness to explain away the marriage effect is extremely unhelpful, to put it mildly. And it is unhelpful to children above all else.
The fact remains the marriage is the most pro-child of all social institutions because it, better than anything else, commits fathers to their children and to the mothers of their children and the children benefit from this.
