Disconnecting Children from Marriage
We have now reached the last installment in my blog series on the breaking apart of sex, marriage, and the procreation & rearing of children—namely, the separation of children from marriage. This has skyrocketed over the past sixty years or so, though with some levelling in recent years, but still at high rates of disconnecting children from marriage.
One would think that the widespread availability of legal contraception and abortion would have led to the opposite outcome. Advocates of both often “sold” them to the public at least in part by assuring folk that, all other things being equal, more contraception and abortion would mean more children raised by married parents. This has not been the case.
Divorce has declined from the (at least) 50% level achieved by some post-1960’s marriage cohorts, but it is still frightfully prevalent. Moreover, a major reason for the decline in divorce rates has been decreasing marriage rates, especially among the poor and working classes, including explosive increases in cohabitation. After all, people who do not marry cannot get divorced, even if they form live-in couples who have and raise children together. I provided details, including trend charts, for both cohabitation levels and marriage rates in my last blog post. Then, we also have the high percentages of babies born out of wedlock, which I also explored in my last blog post. Taking all these things together—while lower divorce rates are a good thing, less divorce has not meant that we have seen increases in the percentages of children raised in households headed by two married parents nearly as much as we might expect. In fact, the percentage of children under eighteen living with two married parents remained virtually flat comparing 2010 and 2020 (65.7% and 66.6% respectively), despite declining divorce.
And even these last two percentages are far too optimistic relative to reality.
First, many of these married couple households include a stepparent, just as many cohabiting households involve one partner who is not related by adoption or birth to the children in it. For example, in 2020 5.4% of children in the U.S. lived with a parent and stepparent. Only 61.1% of children under eighteen lived with two biological or adoptive married parents.
Moreover, this last figure includes all children, newborns through age seventeen. It describes their present, not their future. Many children living in married households today are heading toward the breakup of their parents’ unions at some point before they turn eighteen. In fact, according to Why Marriage Matters from the National Marriage Project (2011, page 7) as of 2002-07, 24% of children experienced their parents’ divorce by the time they were age 12. As divorce has declined a bit since then, this statistic may have gotten a little better. But not much.
Thus, we are not surprised at a 2021 analysis of Census data by Nicholas Zill for the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) showing that, as of 2019, only 50.6% of American high school seniors were living with two married, biological parents. Note the graph below, taken from this article. Even counting adoptive parents (a ridiculously small slice—only caring for 1.4% of all children in 2020), this probably means that most American children under eighteen were not living with two married biological or adoptive parents. Why? Because a study of high school seniors does not include those who have dropped out before their senior year, a group that would have much higher proportions of children who are not living in households headed by married biological or adoptive parents.
On the one hand, it is great that, as Zill shows, in 2019 the proportion of high school seniors living with two biological, married parents had risen from the terrible 46.2% of 2012. But look at how much lower it was in 2019 compared to 1996 (60.4%), when the official divorce rate was much higher. Again, decreasing divorce is obviously not translating to more children living with two biological or adoptive married parents, nearly as much as many people assume.
Then we have the increasing prevalence of children being raised by cohabiting parents.
About 40% of children today are either born to cohabiting parents or will live in a cohabiting household in the future. The percentage of cohabiting couples raising children is not much less than the percentage of married couples raising children. In the 2020 Census, 38% of married couple households included children under eighteen compared to 33% of cohabiting couple households. Many of these cases involve a biological mother living with a man unrelated by birth or adoption to her children. According to the Census, as of 2020, 7% of American children lived in cohabiting households. 3.2% lived with two cohabiting biological or adoptive parents, and the rest lived with a “stepparent” (.6%) or simply their mother or father’s live-in partner (3.2%). 2% are listed as living with Mom and a live-in lover, while 1.2% are with Dad and his lover.
Compared to children living with two married biological parents, those living with a parent and unrelated lover face the highest risk of all types of abuse than any other family structure. Moreover, children in all types of families other than those headed by two married biological parents fare worse. The below bar graph from data from the 2005-06 National Incidence of Child Abuse and Neglect study, as reported in Why Marriage Matters (page 8), shows what we have known about this before and since. On average, cohabitation is a risky environment for kids and, far and away, children are least likely to be abused when they are being raised by two married biological parents.
Moreover, cohabitation is notoriously unstable, even in situations where both partners are biological parents to the child. And stability is vitally important for children, as even the progressive Urban Institute emphasizes. In 2020, Richard Reeves and Christopher Pulliam noted in an article for the Brookings Institute that, compared to kids in married households, by age twelve those in cohabiting households would go through “almost triple the number of transitions.” In 2017, another Brookings Institute piece noted that “two-thirds of cohabiting parents split up before their child reaches age 12, compared with one quarter of married parents.” The below graph from still another Brookings Institute piece shows this with stunning clarity. (Remember, the Brookings Institute is politically center-left.)
When we consider how often divorced people go on to cohabit (see for example here and here), and the fact that remarriages are less stable than first marriages, the impact on children of the combined realities of out-of-wedlock birth, cohabitation, divorce, and remarriage is incredibly bad. Top family sociologist Andrew Cherlin has famously called this gross instability the Marriage-Go-Round in a 2009 book of that name. This is where we increasingly “partner, unpartner, and repartner”—constantly creating a series of “stressful transitions” for children which have “long-lasting negative effects” on them. J. D. Vance, now a U.S. Senator from Ohio, chronicles his own experiences with this, and his struggles to overcome them, in his fascinating 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which was also captured accurately in the 2020 Ron Howard film of the same name.
So, are the children fine so long as the parents are happy, no matter what kind of relational choices and transitions Mom and Dad make? Some are, but many are decidedly not. In every indicator that matters, children raised by two married biological parents do much better than those living under any other type of household structure. We already saw this in the above graph from Why Marriage Matters.
Laying out all the indicators with adequate citations goes beyond what I should do in a single blog post. But in addition to the child abuse detailed in the above graph, here are some more deficits I document fully in my book Christian Marriage (2019), and regularly update for my college-level family course.
In no particular order and not exhaustive, for both adults and children compared to those in stable married households, there is: some higher risk of suicide, a lot more poverty (overall and intergenerational), higher risk of divorce in future marriages, decreased happiness, and greater incidences of a range of mental and physical health problems. Moreover, divorced, separated and cohabiting women are at much higher risk of crime, including violent crime and domestic abuse. And crime itself, particularly violent crime, is disproportionately committed by younger, single, fatherless males.
For children (remembering that what impacts adult care givers will also affect their kids) we can add: detachment from the non-custodial parent, less closeness even in relationships with custodial parents, lower academic attainment and success including higher dropout and truancy rates, higher risk of substance abuse, delinquency, behavioral problems at school and home, run-away, and sexual promiscuity. Moreover, children suffer from transitions and separations that break-up relationships with other kin, particularly grandparents.
In all these problem areas, those in homes headed by stable married couples are not immune. And many adults and children in divorced, separated, and cohabiting situations may not suffer from all or most of these difficulties, or to great extents in those that do affect them. But the greater likelihood of these problems for those outside homes headed by stable married biological parents are clear, stand up in rigorous, controlled studies, and many of these differences are huge (for example, poverty and abuse).
Clearly, society—collectively and individually—is better off when marriage is prioritized among adults, particularly those having and raising children. This needs to be addressed not only through public policy and politics, but culturally. However, at this point I do not see this happening to any large degree though minor improvements such as we have seen in the last decade or so may be possible. Each new poll on relevant matters shows people caring about marriage, even for those with children, less and less, especially among young adults.
There does seem to be hope among highly religious people who actively participate in their faith communities (and not just those who have the “right beliefs”), as I document for Catholics and Protestants in Christian Marriage. Though even here the degree of decline is shocking, they still do much better, something that will be even more true where the churches, synagogues, temples and so on, that they are part of, teach and do the right things to promote and strengthen marriage.
Overall, those who are more successful do continue to follow the same “success sequence” (finish high school, work full-time, and get married before having children) that used to be preached by most parents, school teachers, religious and cultural leaders. Perhaps the example of these affluent folk will inspire more to do so. Perhaps we are already seeing some of this. The problem is, as we continue to see in poll after poll, these same affluent people are unwilling to encourage this marital behavior among those in lower social strata, or publicly argue for its value, nor do they seem anxious to explicitly promote media and educational content, religious teaching, and public policy that does the same.
Meanwhile, these differences between the affluent who follow this success sequence, and lower and working classes who do not, are fracturing our society, creating dangerous and growing separations along class lines. These realities were eloquently and powerfully documented by Charles Murray in his excellent, sobering book Coming Apart (see also here). The basic warp and woof of the familial lives of the affluent versus lower and working classes is increasingly starkly different. There is less and less to unite us. To make matters worse, current declines in marriage among the middle classes threaten to exacerbate class divides even further, setting the wealthy apart from the rest of us even more, as the previously linked 2020 article by Reeves and Pulliam demonstrated.
I am not sure we can turn things around in the general culture. I hope we can but am not confident. But we Christians can get our own houses in order, if we have the wisdom, courage, and compassionate concern to strengthen our own marriages, homes, and churches. We can also ally ourselves with those in other faith communities who hold to similar values and aspirations, even as we continue to preach the Gospel to them. Only then will the larger culture listen to us about marriage issues anyway. Let us commit ourselves to do that, for the glory of God, the good of His people, and our care for all of our fellow citizens.