MARRIAGE : UNMARRIED PARENTS ARE FIVE TIMES MORE LIKELY TO BREAK UP THAN MARRIED PARENTS
[The London Times, 02/06/05]
Great Britain learns the hard way that cohabitation is not a healthy choice for children.
Three quarters of all family breakdowns affecting young children now involve unmarried parents, new research suggests.
The findings indicate that family breakdown is no longer driven by divorce, but by the collapse of unmarried partnerships.
An estimated 88,000 children aged under 5 were affected by the separation of their unmarried parents in 2003, compared with about 31,000 children under 5 whose married parents divorced, the research concludes. According to the 2001 census, 59 percent of households with children are married, 11 percent are co-habiting and 22 percent lone parent families.
The study is likely to provoke heated discussion among family policy specialists. While it argues for the Government to do more actively to promote marriage, critics say that encouraging parents who do not want to marry to do so simply does not work.
Harry Benson, author of the research and director of the Bristol Community Family Trust, an independent relationship education and research body, based his findings on Office for National Statistics data on divorce and jointly registered births, together with ONS research on the ratio between breakdown rates for married and unmarried families.
The findings show that it is no longer plausible to argue that all relationship types were equal, he said. "The evidence is irrefutable. Unmarried parents are five times more likely to break up than married parents. Divorce is not the major problem any more."
Mr. Benson's research is the first in a series of reports on unmarried parents expected to be published this year. One Plus One, the leading independent relationship organization, will shortly publish its key study into the increasing number of children affected by unmarried parents
splitting up.
Penny Mansfield, director of One Plus One, said that Britain appeared to have reached a watershed in the way families were forming. Whereas couples in previous generations did their courting, got married and had children in that order, nowadays growing numbers were having children first and only then deciding whether to remain in a couple relationship.
"The problem with this approach is that having children generally destabilizes a relationship. If you are trying to figure out whether to form a partnership in the early years after having a child, it's a bit like pedaling uphill," she said.
"What we have lost is the idea that at the heart of marriage there is a link between parents which is of value of itself. That link would then cradle the upbringing of children. Maybe we need to rediscover this link in this new world of equality," Ms. Mansfield said.
Kathleen Kiernan, Professor of Social Policy and Demography at York University, accepted that children of cohabiting parents could be disadvantaged. They were more likely to live in different de facto step-family arrangements because their parents were more likely to split up than married parents. "We know that the more transitions, or experiences like this, that children have, the more detrimental it is to their wellbeing," she said.
* The research coincides with the publication of new government figures showing a 4.7 percent increase in marriages in England and Wales in 2003 to reach 267,700.
