Benefits of marriage: When mom and dad are married, the “odds of instability” are lower

November 10, 2003
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ANN ARBOR—Children whose parents live together but aren’t married are twice as likely to face their parents’ break-up as children born to married couples, a new study finds.

The study, based on a national sample of more than 6,000 children, appears in the current issue of Population Research Policy and Review.

By age one, 15 percent of children born to cohabiting parents saw their parents part company, and by the age of 5, half their parents had separated. Children born to married parents experienced a much greater level of domestic stability; by age one, only 4 percent saw their parents break up, and by age 5, about 15 percent had parents who had separated.

“Our findings appear to strengthen the case for marriage,” said sociologist Pamela Smock, co-author of the article and associate director of the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR). “Quite clearly, children born into first marriages, rather than to cohabiting parents, enjoy much higher chances of growing up in two-parent families.”

But the findings also challenge the case for marriage, at least for children of color, Smock said. “For never-married cohabiting Hispanic and Black mothers, marriage after the birth of a child does not provide an advantage in terms of stability,” she said. “Black and Hispanic children born to cohabiting parents who later marry face statistically similar odds of instability as children born to parents who continue to cohabit but don’t marry.”

In general, children born to cohabiting parents had 148 percent higher odds of experiencing parental separation than children born to married parents, according to the article’s lead author, Bowling Green University sociologist Wendy Manning. Slightly less than13 percent of the children were born to unmarried parents who lived together, while about 87 percent were born to married couples.

In light of recent policy discussions about welfare, the findings suggest that efforts to encourage marriage among low-income parents, many of whom are already living together, may not be an effective strategy for assuring child well-being, the researchers concluded.

In addition to Manning and Smock, the article was co-authored by Southwest Texas State University sociologist Debarun Majumdar.

Established in 1948, the Institute for Social Research (ISR) is among the world’s oldest survey research organizations and a world leader in the development and application of social science methodology. ISR conducts some of the most widely cited studies in the nation, including the Survey of Consumer Attitudes, the National Election Studies, the Monitoring the Future Study, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Study, the Columbia County Longitudinal Study and the National Survey of Black Americans. ISR researchers also collaborate with social scientists in more than 60 nations on the World Values Surveys and other projects, and the Institute has established formal ties with universities in Poland, China, and South Africa. Visit the ISR Web site at www.isr.umich.edu for more information. ISR is also home to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world’s largest computerized social science data archive.

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