We should be hearing more about the ‘marriage gap’
Have the benefits of marriage become a middle-class secret?
Why should only the middle and upper classes enjoy the advantages of marriage as opposed to cohabitation? This is among questions posed by a recent Centre of Social Justice UK report called “Family Structure Still Matters.” With married parents twice as likely to stay together than cohabiting ones, their kids can benefit from numerous advantages of this stability – such as avoiding mental health issues and criminal conviction.
The report’s introduction sums it up well, saying: “The consequences of family instability are alarming; while the benefits conferred by marriage are inspiring. It is therefore surprising that government consistently fails to distinguish between marriage and cohabitation. In its language around family structure, including, crucially in its data collection, government persists in blurring the two categories of ‘married’ and ‘cohabiting’. Official silence on this issue has sent out the message that marriage and cohabitation are interchangeable. Yet we have seen how the two structures lead to widely different outcomes.”
What are these outcomes? The CSJ study points out that for cohabiting parents, their children experienced higher rates of cognitive delay; a greater presence of aggression and anti-social behaviours; more likelihood of involvement with crime or domestic abuse; and more under-performance in the educational arena.
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