Earlier this week [1] the Oireachtas Committee on Social Protection issued a report called ‘Financial Disincentives to 
Marriage and Cohabitation’.
On the plus side, the report admits that children raised by lone parents often face bigger problems than those raised by two parents. On the negative side, it refuses to recognise that marriage is generally better for kids than cohabitation.
Actually, for an Oireachtas committee to be willing to commission a document that admits what the evidence in fact shows in respect of lone parent families is a big step in the right direction and we shouldn’t take this for granted.
It represents quite a departure from family diversity dogma which insists on burying the evidence that family structure/formation matters, and condemns as ‘judgemental’ or ‘bigoted’ those foolhardy enough to highlight the evidence.
But the report won’t face up to the evidence concerning the differences between marriage and cohabitation. Seemingly this is still a step too far.
It does deal with the arguments in favour of marriage versus cohabitation but it does so in a very slippery, sophistic manner.
For example, it informs us that “the positive impacts on children [of marriage] only hold when the two parents are the ‘biological’ or ‘intact’ parents as opposed to remarried parents.”
Well, quite. But the vast majority of marriages in Ireland are first-time marriages and therefore the vast majority of children who are raised by married parents are being raised by their biological parents.
In effect, the report is tacitly admitting that it’s best for kids to be raised by their married biological parents but it won’t follow this to its natural conclusion, which is to favour marriage over cohabitation.
In addition, marriage is much more likely than cohabitation to provide children with their own mother and father over the long-term.
Why doesn’t the report point this out? Clearly it can see the benefits to a child of being raised by their own biological parents. But since marriage is so much more likely to give a child their two biological parents right through their childhood it would eminent sense to give special support to marriage.
(The British Millennium Cohort Study shows that the children of married parents are twice as likely to live with both parents throughout their childhood compared with the children of cohabiting parents).
To further its argument that marriage is no better than cohabitation the report then tells us that marriages are only more like to help children if they are ‘healthy’ ones.
But the same could be said of any family. Obviously a functional cohabiting relationship is better for children than a dysfunctional marriage. But marriages are less likely to be dysfunctional than cohabiting relationships.
Apart from that, however, what the research shows is that ‘healthy’ (that is, low conflict) marriages are better for children on average, than any other kind of family formation, healthy or not. And most marriages are low conflict.
Finally, we are told that the reason marriage is more stable than cohabitation is because of the financial stability that precedes marriages and leads to it. There is some truth is this, but marriage also promotes financial stability because married men, for example, tend to work harder than unmarried men, even allowing for self-selection.
On this point, the report quotes Isabel Sawhill and Adam Thomas. But Sawhill actually favours pro-marriage policies. She knows all the complications in the research and all the ‘ifs, buts and maybes’ we need to include, but she still believes that is a good argument in favour of promoting marriage.
What a pity the report of this Committee is still sufficiently in the grip of family diversity dogma that it can’t go where Sawhill has gone. Maybe in another ten years.