It certainly is the case that cohabiting couples who have children tend to be less educated, poorer, and less committed to their relationship than couples who have children in marriage.
So one reason that children are less likely to thrive in cohabiting families than in intact, married families is that their parents, or the adults in their lives, have fewer of the resources that they need to be good parents.
But the best research on cohabitation and child well-being controls for factors like income, education, and race/ethnicity. And even after you control for these factors, you still find that children in cohabiting families are significantly more likely to suffer from depression, delinquency, drug use, and the like.
For instance, one study from the University of Texas at Austin found that teens living in a cohabiting stepfamily were more than twice as likely to use drugs, compared to teens living in an intact married family–even after controlling for differences in income, education, race, and family instability.
In fact, children in cohabiting stepfamilies did worse on this outcome than children in stable single-parent families.
Research like this suggests to me that cohabitation has an independent negative impact on children, above and beyond the factors that make some Americans more likely to cohabit with children in the first place.
So the answer, I think, is for the nation to improve our children’s home environments in a variety of ways–from improving our nation’s educational system to improving job opportunities to discouraging parents from cohabiting.
Cohabitation vs. single mothers
Q. How does cohabitation compare with children brought up by single mothers?
A. The Why Marriage Matters report focused in its first two editions on divorce and single parenthood.
But as I was reviewing the literature on families for this third edition with my colleagues, I was struck by this fact:
On many outcomes, children in bio- and step-cohabiting families look a lot like children in single-parent families, even after controlling for socioeconomic differences.
So even though kids in cohabiting families have access to two adults they don’t generally do better than kids in single-parent families except on economic outcomes.
I think this is probably because cohabiting relationships tend to be characterized by less commitment, less sexual fidelity, more domestic violence, more instability, and more insecurity, compared to married relationships. Needless to say, these kinds of relationship factors don’t foster an ideal home environment for children.
And it’s also very clear from the research that kids living in a stable, single-parent home are less likely to be abused than kids living in a cohabiting household with an unrelated adult male.
WINTERY KNIGHT 