A leading British think-tank has claimed that marriage does not improve outcomes for children compared with .jpg)
cohabitation.
A study [1] conducted by the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that whether a child is raised in a married family or by cohabiting parents makes little difference to how children turn out once certain factors such as socio-economic status are taken into account.
Drawing on the British Millennium Cohort Study (BMCS), the researchers accepted that children of married parents appeared to do better on a number of outcome measures. It found that children born to cohabiting parents, “on average, exhibit a small deficit in cognitive development at ages 3, 5 and 7 compared with children born to married parents”.
Similarly, it found that children at the same ages children born to cohabiting parents, “on average, exhibit a deficit in socio-emotional development”.
However, it said that the difference in cognitive development could be accounted for “by the fact that cohabiting parents tend to have lower educational qualifications than married parents, and is not a consequence of parental marital status itself”.
And it added that the differential in socio-emotional development by the lower levels of education and income displayed by cohabiting parents.
The study’s authors concluded that the differences in cognitive and socio-emotional development between children born to married and cohabiting parents “mainly or entirely reflect the selection of different types of people into marriage, rather than effects of marriage itself”.
“That is to say, after controlling for differences between couples that were observed in the parent’s own childhood and early adulthood, before they entered the relationship into which their child was born, we find no statistically significant difference between the cognitive and socio-emotional development of children born to parents who choose to marry compared to those who cohabit,” .
However, despite the fact that the study used data from the BMCS, it failed to point to figures from the BMCS showing that cohabitation was far more unstable than marriage.
According to the BMCS, only 35 per cent of British children born into a cohabiting union will live with both parents throughout their childhood, compared with 70 per cent born to married couples.
In addition, the average length in Britain of a marriage that ends in divorce is 11.5 years compared with just two years for a live-in relationship. Irish data also shows that only 25 per cent of cohabiting couples are still cohabiting after seven years. The result have either broken up or married.
The paper also failed to compare the outcomes for children raised by married parents compared with those raised by single parents or with those raised by divorced parents.