The Long-Term Benefits of Marriage: Evidence from the UK
by Harry Benson, Institute for Family Studies:
One of the most common critiques of the supposed advantages of marriage is that married adults and their children only do better because of their education and money. The argument goes something like this: “It’s not marriage that conveys the advantages of life. It’s just that those who are better educated are more likely to get married. They then go on to make a success of their family and avoid many of the pitfalls. It’s a ‘mistake’ to attribute this to marriage, when really it’s all about education and money.”
Alas, this ‘selection’ argument will be trotted out well beyond our lifetimes, since it is unlikely that anyone will ever persuade one group of people to marry and one group to stay unmarried and see who does best.
But the story to date is such that even when you account for education and money, and all sorts of other things that tend to characterize married rather than unmarried families, it’s rarely enough to explain why married families tend to do better. Compare rich families or poor families and the outcome tends to be the same. Married families still tend—on average, remember—to do better. We’ve shown this to be the case in a whole range of studies.
And, of course, there’s an excellent explanation for why married couples tend to stay together and unmarried couples don’t through the ‘sliding/deciding/inertia’ theory of commitment. (Read this pdf paper that explains the idea really neatly)
Anyway, one of my research colleagues—Professor Spencer James at Brigham Young University—and I decided we wanted to look at whether having married parents, rather than unmarried parents, has any long-term effect on life as an adult. We’ve already established that married couples are more likely to stay together. We’ve already established that the children of married adults are more likely to avoid things like mental health problems. In both cases, this is true regardless of parent’s age, education, and ethnicity.
But how long do these effects last?
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