We’re all familiar with the fact that people are waiting longer and longer to get married, and that cohabitation is more and more common among young people. However, this doesn’t mean most young people no longer want to get married, even though a growing number don’t.

According to a new paper by the Institute of Marriage and Family in Canada called ‘The trouble with Gen-X and Gen-Y families’, today’s twenty-and-thirty somethings still want to get married, “they just don’t know how to get there”, and also the cost of living and of raising children is making it harder for them to do so.  

It says that, for many young people, the “life script”, including marriage, has been lost. Instead of growing up, leaving school, getting married and finding work, young people are not hitting these markers.

They quote author Kay Hymowitz who makes the point that “traditional marriage gives young people a map of life that takes them step by step from childhood to adolescence to college or other work training… to workplace, to marriage and only then to childbearing.”

Its analysis uses Canadian figures, but many of the phenomena it describes are similar elsewhere. In Canada, young people are being priced out of the housing market by rising house prices; here, in many cases they are being kept out of that market because they don’t have employment. During the Celtic Tiger, of course, house prices climbed to completely unaffordable levels and many young couples are in negative equity.  

In Canada, the last 40 years has seen a rise in the average age of marriage of five years. Here, we’ve seen the average age at which people get married rise by seven years in just 25 years. In Ireland in 1986, 55pc of people were married by the time they were in the 25-29 age group. By 2006, that number was down to 18.5pc.

According to Statistics Canada, 2006 was the first time that there were more adults who were unmarried than married. Last year, Irish census figures showed that there were only 49pc of Irish people over 18 who were married. The figures also show a comparable rise in the number of single parent families.

Such a significant change in culture can’t be addressed overnight, of course, but the paper does propose some concrete steps:  

They propose the creation of family taxation, also known as income splitting. This would allow spouses to shift their income between them, in order to reduce a family’s tax burden.  

Families with young children would be better supported by lowering taxes than by childcare benefits

The paper also proposes that communities, families and schools should work to restore the ‘life script’ which puts love, marriage and children in the right order for life-long family stability

Schools, secondary and post-secondary, they suggest, could begin this process by teaching the social science research showing there is a difference in outcomes between marriage and cohabitation.

“Based on the social science research of outcomes of marriage versus cohabitation, families, churches and broader communities should encourage children to see lifelong marriage as realistic and attainable,” it suggests.

How much progress could be made towards the goal of rebuilding the marriage culture through these steps is open to question. What’s important is that we start by acknowledging we need to take some steps towards this important goal.