Marriage Matters

Thirteen of the top scholars on family life have issued a joint report on the importance of marriage. The report is based on decades of research and the findings are striking. For the first time leading family scholars have issued a definitive joint report on the financial, emotional, and health consequences of marriage for men, women, children, and society.

Why Marriage Matters: 21 Conclusions from the Social Sciences

was produced by a politically diverse and interdisciplinary group of leading family scholars, including psychologist John Gottman, best selling author of books about marriage and relationships; Linda Waite, coauthor of The Case for Marriage; Norval Glenn and Steven Nock, two of the top family social scientists in the country; William Galston, a Clinton Administration domestic policy advisor; and Judith Wallerstein, author of the national bestseller The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce.

The report is sponsored by the Institute for American Values, a nonpartisan think tank, Center of the American Experiment, and the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education. The report was released on February 14th, Valentine's Day, on the same day as the broadcast of a national PBS documentary on the weakening of marriage, "Marriage - Is It Just a Piece of Paper?" narrated by ABC's Cokie Roberts.

This is the first time leading family scholars have issued a definitive joint report based on a steadily accumulating and by now very large body of social science evidence about the consequences of marriage and its absence.

Since 1960, the proportion of children who do not live with their own two parents has risen sharply– from 19.4% to 42.3% in the Nineties. This change has been caused, first, by large increases in divorce, and more recently, by a big jump in single mothers and cohabiting couples who have children but don't marry. For several decades the impact of this dramatic change in family structure has been the subject of vigorous debate among scholars. No longer. These 21 troubling findings are now widely agreed upon.

Even E. Mavis Hetherington's book, Divorce Reconsidered: For Better or Worse, which argues that the consequences of divorce are not so troubling as other recent books on the subject have suggested, does not dispute the basic facts. The dispute is about the interpretation of the facts. For instance, Hetherington agrees that between 20% to 25% of the children of divorce suffer from serious, long–term emotional problems. But she says that's not so bad– that means 80% to 75% don't suffer serious, long-term emotional problems.

The 20-25% figure is not in dispute; what is in dispute is whether such a figure constitutes a serious social problem.

Among the research findings summarized by the report Why Marriage Matters are the following:

About ChildrenParental divorce reduces the likelihood that children will graduate from college, and achieve high-status jobs.

 

Children who live with their own two married parents enjoy better physical health, on average, than children in other family forms. The health advantages of married homes remain even after taking into account socioeconomic status.

Parental divorce approximately doubles the odds that adult children will end up divorced.

About MenMarried men earn between 10 and 40 percent more than single men with similar education and job histories.

Married men, have longer life expectancies than otherwise similar singles.

Marriage increases the likelihood fathers will have good relationships with children. Sixty-five percent of young adults whose parents divorced had poor relationships with their fathers (compared to 29% from non-divorced families).

About WomenDivorce and unmarried childbearing significantly increases poverty rates of both mothers and children. Between one-fifth and one-third of divorcing women end up in poverty as a result of divorce.

Married mothers have lower rates of depression than single or cohabiting mothers.

Married women appear to have a lower risk of domestic violence than cohabiting or dating women. Even after controlling for race, age, and education, people who live together are still three times more likely to report violent arguments than married people.

About SocietyAdults who live together but do not marry– cohabitors–are more similar to singles than to married couples in terms of physical health and disability, emotional well-being and mental health, as well as assets and earnings. Their children more closely resemble the children of single people than the children of married people.

Marriage appears to reduce the risk that children and adults will be either perpetrators or victims of crime. Single and divorced women are four to five times more likely to be victims of violent crime in any given year than married women.

Boys raised in single-parent homes are about twice as likely (and boys raised in stepfamilies three times as likely) to have committed a crime that leads to incarceration by the time they reach their early thirties, even after controlling for factors such as race, mother's education, neighborhood quality and cognitive ability.

Marriage matters, it really does.