August 25,
2010
Column
#1,565
Cohabitation: Largest Threat to Children
By Mike
McManus
The Institute for
American Values issued a landmark report, “Why Marriage
Matters, Third Edition” which states: “The rise of
cohabitation is the largest unrecognized threat to the quality
and stability of children’s family lives.
“In fact, because of the growing prevalence of cohabitation,
which has risen fourteen-fold since 1970, today’s children are
much more likely to spend time in a cohabiting household than
they are to see their parents divorce.”
The report has some good news about divorce: “Children who
are now born to married couples are actually more likely to grow
up with both of their parents than were children born at the
height of the divorce revolution,” says the report written by W.
Bradford Wilcox who directs the National Marriage Project for
the University of Virginia.
While 27% of children experienced a parental divorce if
they were born in the late 1970s, only 23% of those born 20
years later live through a divorce. (However, that’s triple the
8% divorce rate of kids born in Britain or France, and shatters
1 million U.S. kids annually.)
What’s worse: 42% of American children will endure the
horror of living in a cohabiting family, almost double the
percentage hurt by divorce. Kids in cohabiting households “are
markedly more likely to be physically, sexually and emotionally
abused than children in both intact, married families and
single-parent families.” Some snapshots:
·
Teenagers from cohabiting families are 60% less
likely to graduate from high school than those with married
parents.
·
Children in cohabiting families are five times
more likely “to experience depression, difficulty sleeping,
feelings of worthlessness, nervousness and tension.”
·
Preschool children are 47.6 times more likely to
die in a cohabiting household compared to those with married
parents.
·
Daughters raised outside of intact marriages are
three times more likely to be young, unwed mothers.
As recently as the
1970s, the vast majority of adult Americans were living in an
intact
marriage and almost nine in ten children were born into married
families. “No longer. Now, less than half of adults are
married.”
“This retreat from marriage has hit poor, working-class and
minority communities with particular force,” while marriage
trends of college educated, affluent Americans have taken a turn
for the better. Nonmarital child-bearing soared more than six
fold from 5% in 1982 to 34% in 2006-8 among white high school
educated Americans. By contrast, unwed births of college
educated remained only 2% during these years, and divorce rates
fell.
The report found this growing marriage gap troubling.
“It leaves working-class and poor adults more distanced from an
institution that has historically lent purpose, meaning,
responsibility, mutual aid and a sense of solidarity to the
lives of countless men and women.” And it leaves poorer children
“doubly disadvantaged” with less family resources and fewer
married parents.
Sociologist Paul Amato states: “increasing marital
stability to the same level as in 1980 is associated with a
decline of nearly 500,000 children suspended from school, about
200,000 fewer children engaging in delinquency or violence,
250,000 fewer children receiving therapy… 80,000 fewer children
thinking about suicide and about 28,000 fewer children
attempting suicide.”
The report offers no answers, only questions: “How can
communities be mobilized to promote a marriage-friendly
culture?”
I have an answer. I’ve helped more than 10,000 pastors
join across denominational lines to make marriage a high
priority, by creating Community Marriage Policies in 229
cities. A study by the Institute for Research and Evaluation
reported that in the first 114 cities, divorce rates fell 17.5%
in seven years, cohabitation dropped by a third compared to
control cities. Now marriage rates are rising.
The Institute estimated that 31,000 to 50,000 marriages
were saved from divorce by 2001. With another decade in the
original cities, and 229 cities now, perhaps 100,000 divorces
were averted.
Nearly a tenth of the cities cut divorce rates in half,
such as Modesto, CA which signed the first Community Marriage
Policy in 1986. Its divorce rate has been nearly 50% lower for
a decade. Marriages have doubled from 1,300 a year to 2,600.
With more kids in stable homes, teen pregnancies fell 30% in ten
years and school dropouts, by 19%.
Community Marriage Policies can “promote a marriage
friendly culture.”
More is needed. Government inadvertently subsidizes
cohabitation. A woman with an unwed birth gets welfare,
Medicaid, food stamps, etc. as if she were bringing up the child
alone. But most are cohabiting, and have the benefit of his
income plus taxpayer income. If she marries him, she loses
subsidies.
My solution: If they marry, let them keep the subsidies for two
years, then taper off. More will marry, the best answer for
everyone, and government costs will drop in time |