by Harry Benson, Marriage Foundation
One of the skills I’ve picked up during my painfully long PhD is how to read – really read – loads of great research papers that I might previously have skimmed through. Arguably the best recent paper on the family comes from the Deaton poverty review series published in 2022. Buried away on page 656 (left column) is this gem of information that I’ve summarised in the chart above.
If you only look at the Office for National Statistics data on Families and Households, you’d be forgiven for thinking family breakdown is bad but not disastrous. One quarter of children are living in lone parent households. But this massively understates the scale of family breakdown. What we really need to know is the proportion of teens not living with both natural parents. I did a study of this two years ago using my PhD dataset. The answer is 46%. The Deaton review did a similar analysis and came up with 43%.
But they did something I’ve not seen anywhere else. They looked at the scale of the problem for earlier cohorts of families. It turns out that among people my age who were teens in the mid-1970s, just 9% (of which my brother and I were part) were not living with both natural parents. That means for the first time we can quantify that the scale of family breakdown has increased five times over in the last fifty years.
The odd thing in this otherwise outstanding paper is that they somehow conclude the most important driver of breakdown is lack of education. Just read their conclusion on p672. This is true at population level but simply doesn’t explain the scale of the rise over time. Has education got five times worse since we sat our O-levels as teenagers? Of course not. The biggest social change, and only factor that really explains this massive rise in breakdown, is the trend away from marriage. Their own analysis on p656 (right column) pretty much admits this, but then ignores it. My 2023 analysis shows that of the 46% of teens not living with both natural parents, less than one third was due to the divorce of married parents. The rest never married. Among the 54% of teens still living with both parents, 84% of the parents were married.