A new study out this week has been well covered in many media outlets because it purports to overturn the findings of many other studies which show that marriage confers various health and welfare benefits on married people compared with cohabitees or single people.

The study  is published in the current issue of the prestigious Journal of Marriage and Family and we await the response of other sociologists to it.

However, we don’t have to wait for their response in order to observe that the study in question has nothing to say about the benefits of marriage to children. The study is all about the benefits of marriage to adults. And this makes it slightly beside the point.

The study claims that while marriage does appear to provide a health dividend compared with say, cohabitation, it is not very big and it fades over time.

The authors therefore suggest that spending government money on promoting marriage could be better spent in other ways that will produce a bigger return.

But the main reason marriage is given special support (such as it is) has nothing much to do with adults and much more to do with children.

Study after study shows that in general kids fare best when raised by their married biological parents. And this stands to reason because it would be exceedingly strange if it was not beneficial in general to be raised by your own parents.

But why should your parents be married? Well, the reason is that marriage is far more stable than cohabitation. Table one of this latest study actually confirms this. Whereas 60pc of the cohabiting couples it tracked had broken up after six years, only 19pc of those who went straight from singlehood to marriage had broken up.

So to repeat, even if this study bears up under scrutiny, it doesn’t address the real reason why marriage should be promoted, namely children.