Prioritize families, not marriage

Abstract

Does marriage improve well-being for parents and children? It can certainly appear that way. In the contemporary United States, children who grow up with married parents perform better in school, enjoy better physical and emotional health, more often begin and finish college, and enter stable employment at higher rates compared to peers who grow up in other family arrangements (Brown, 2010). Married parents appear to be better off, too: they report being happier, healthier, and more financially secure than parents who are single or in cohabiting unions (Waite, 1995).

The relationship between marriage and well-being is of policy interest for several reasons. First, a lot of childrearing in the U.S. happens outside of marriage. Forty percent of U.S. children are born to unpartnered or cohabiting parents (Guzzo, 2021; Osterman et al., 2024, Table 9), and roughly one quarter of children under age 18 live with a single parent, usually their mother (Census Bureau, 2022, Table C3). By age 12, more than half of U.S. children have spent some time outside of a married-parent family household (Brown et al., 2016).

Further, in the U.S., children in single-parent households, and particularly those headed by single mothers, are exceptionally likely to be poor, and child poverty is strongly associated with compromised development and achievement (Duncan et al., 1998). Among families with children in 2022, 37.2% of female-headed households and 18.3% of male-headed households were in poverty under the official poverty measure, compared to just 6.9% of married-couple families (Shrider & Creamer, 2023, Table A-2). Among 30 peer countries, the U.S. ranks first for single motherhood's average marginal effect on the probability of being in relative poverty (Brady et al., 2024).

And although most Americans say that they would like to marry (Gallup, 2020), married parenthood is largely stratified by race and social class. Sixty percent of Asian adults, 54% of White adults, and 63% of college-educated adults are in married couples today, compared to fewer than half of Black or Hispanic adults and adults with a high school education (31%, 45%, and 45%, respectively; Census Bureau, 2022, Table F2; Julian, 2023). Married adults also have higher earnings at marriage compared to their same-aged unpartnered or cohabiting counterparts (Ludwig & Brüderl, 2018; Oppenheimer, 2003).

Socially patterned disparities in marriage formation and stability in the United States are not new: indeed, Dianne M. Stewart (2020) has described the profound systemic barriers to stable marriage that Black adults have encountered over four centuries in America as “this country's most camouflaged civil rights issue” (p. 217). But at the end of the Baby Boom, marriage was nearly universal across sociodemographic groups (Allred, 2018) and nonmarital fertility was infrequent. Since then, sociodemographic disparities in the likelihood of childbearing outside of marriage grew in step with rising economic inequality (McLanahan, 2004) before slightly declining in the last decade. Today, 70% of births to Black women and half of births to women with a high school diploma occur outside of marriage, compared to one third of births to White women and 14% to women with a Bachelor's degree. Most of the growth in this disparity is attributable to the share of births occurring in cohabiting unions among non-college-educated parents (Guzzo, 2021).

Thus, marriage appears to be both a product and a driver of social inequality. Would more marriage improve population well-being? Based on the evidence, my answer is no. To improve well-being for parents and children, we should look beyond marital status.

To explain, let's look first at why marriage appears to be uniquely advantageous. Much of our insight comes from looking at what happens within and between families. In most married-parent families, both parents are working (Ruggles, 2015) and have more income and assets to share with household members compared to single-parent or even cohabiting-parent families. Married parents also have more time and emotional energy to invest in children (Kalil et al., 2014; Umberson et al., 2013), greater kin support (Harknett & Knab, 2007), and more opportunities for social connections (Song, 2012). Marriages last longer than cohabiting relationships or spells of single parenthood, and the resulting stability is good for children (Cavanagh & Fomby, 2019). These factors are each associated with children's better outcomes in married-parent families.

But focusing on what is happening inside of married-parent families after they have formed distorts our view of how and why marriage matters. First, composition matters. As marriage has become more selective on educational attainment, it has also become more homogamous. The advantages to pooled resources are maximized in households where two college-educated partners each have the capacity for relatively high earnings, job security, time flexibility, and social and cultural capital to achieve their desired ends. Put another way, the positive outcomes married parents and children experience are not primarily a product of marriage itself, but rather, of the multiple forms of capital that these families accumulate and effectively deploy (Brown, 2010; McLanahan, 1985). To the extent that highly-resourced parents are overrepresented among married-parent families, the relative gains to that family arrangement may be overstated.

Second, and relatedly, not everyone benefits equally from marriage. From a sociological perspective, unequal returns to marriage largely reflect systemic inequalities. For example, both Black and White children in married-parent families have higher family income, lower poverty rates, and better outcomes compared to their same-race peers in single-parent families. And Black married couples are even more positively selected on college completion than are White couples (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023). Still, Black married-parent families have lower income and wealth and greater job insecurity compared to White families, and the gains to parents’ marriage are smaller for Black children compared to White children with regard to educational attainment, financial support for college, and timing of sexual initiation and childbearing (Amorim & Deming, 2022; Cross, 2020; Fomby et al., 2010). These weaker gains reflect racial differences experienced by parents and children in school quality, employment opportunity and discrimination, intergenerational transfers, home ownership, and contact with the criminal justice system (Addo et al., 2024; Cross et al., 2022; Fomby, 2021; Pager & Shepherd, 2008). Increasing marriage rates in population subgroups that benefit less from marriage without redressing other causes of inequality is unlikely to close racial and social class gaps in family resources or child outcomes.

Third, not everyone can find a marriageable partner. Evidence from marriage markets demonstrates that people seek partners who will be reliable providers. What that means varies across time and place, but when the pool of potential partners falls short on characteristics like employability, job stability, earnings growth, and good health, people are less likely to marry (Autor et al., 2019; Wilson, 1987) and more likely to favor self-reliance (Pedulla & Thébaud, 2015). Perhaps counterintuitively, the decision to eschew marriage speaks to its value. In their study of poor young single mothers in Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey, Edin and Kefalas (2005) documented that women were holding out for all the best that marriage had to offer: security, stability, trust, and permanence. Silva (2013) similarly described working-class young adults seeking partners who would support their personal ambitions. For both groups, there was little value in entering a marriage that might fail.

Fourth, getting married is different from staying married. The divorce rate has recently declined for college-educated adults but increased for adults with less than a college education. Among adults married in 2005 to 2009, 14.2% of college-educated adults had ended their marriage through separation or divorce 10 years later. Among adults with less education, the share of marriages ending in divorce was 2 to 3 times higher (McErlean, 2021).

As this point illustrates, children experience a lot of family change. Brown and colleagues (2016) described the family structure pathways experienced from birth to age 12 among adolescents in 2006 to 2010. Only 3% of children always lived with a single parent. Even among those born to a single parent, only 17% stayed in that arrangement. Nearly all other such children saw their parent eventually marry or cohabit, either with the child's second parent or a new partner. And only a minority of adolescents—about 44%—lived continuously with their married parents to age 12.

Consequently, 84% of youth spent part of childhood in a married parent household and more than half spent time outside of marriage. That is, most children already experience marriage and something other than marriage. From this perspective, there is little to gain by encouraging more marriage. Nor is there strong evidence that we should encourage faltering marriages to endure for children's well-being; in fact, children whose parents remain in high-conflict marriages have significantly poorer outcomes compared to peers whose parents divorce (Amato et al., 1995).

Finally, studies focused on household characteristics overlook how the status of marriage benefits parents and children. Families are embedded in a network of institutions that favor married parents in employment, housing, education, and health and health care (Cherlin, 2009; Cott, 2000). More broadly, the federal government recognizes over 1100 statutory provisions under which benefits, rights, and privileges depend at least partially on marital status (Government Accountability Office, 2004). These include taxation, qualification as a caregiver under the Family and Medical Leave Act, and access to entitlement programs. There are no provisions for cohabiting partners or unpartnered adults under these federal statutes, many of which are premised on an outdated male breadwinner model of family organization (Letiecq, 2024; Smeeding, 1999). Yet the gains to the cultural, economic, and legal status of the married-parent family are largely invisible in research models that emphasize household-level characteristics.

To summarize, marriage is associated with multiple domains of parents’ and children's well-being. But marriage is a selectively accessed, variable, unstable, and exclusionary institution. To support parent and child well-being, we should look beyond marriage. A combination of the following strategies could be productive.

The prevalence and demographic composition of single parenthood in the U.S. are on par with those of most other rich democracies (Heuveline & Weinshenker, 2008), but, as noted above, U.S. children living with single parents are exceptionally likely to be relatively poor even after accounting for public transfers. As a result, the penalties to single motherhood, rather than its prevalence, distinguish the high relative child poverty rate in the United States (Brady et al., 2024).

Countries with comprehensive family policy programs that include child credits, paid parental leave, subsidized child care, and/or early childhood education have lower poverty rates and smaller learning achievement gaps among children living with single mothers compared to married parents (Heuveline et al., 2010; Zagel & Van Lancker, 2022). And in the United States, experiments like Baby's First Years and evidence from the expanded Child Tax Credit under the American Rescue Plan in 2021 have demonstrated that added income of a few hundred dollars a month reduces hardship, increases investments in children, and improves child nutrition (Halpern-Meekin et al., 2024; Pilkauskas et al., 2022). Evaluations of state paid parental leave programs and high-quality early child care programs have also demonstrated gains in parent and child health and child development (Morrissey, 2020; Rothwell, 2024). Expanded public financing to support similar family-friendly policies could complement existing programs to improve well-being in unmarried families.

Men's unemployment and wage stagnation are predictive of divorce in marriages formed since the mid-1970s (Killewald, 2016). The economic uncertainty that arises from job loss and wage decline drives family stress and increases the potential for conflict. Further, men report experiencing a sense of displacement and loss of purpose when they no longer meet the “breadwinner” role that organized much of family life in the past century (Reeves, 2022). Structural change to broaden job stability and wage growth and ongoing cultural change around gendered family roles can help to stabilize family relationships through increased economic security and reduced psychological and family stress.

Children benefit from the time and resources both parents provide even when parents live apart. When formerly partnered parents are able to coordinate care, support each other in parenting roles, and make decisions jointly, children benefit in terms of their social competency, peer relationships, and positive behavior (Choi & Becher, 2019).

Many children living with a single parent benefit from the support of other second caregivers (Mollborn et al., 2011), including grandparents, aunts and uncles, and other adults who occupy kin-like roles in family systems. Much of the evidence is drawn from scholarship engaged with minoritized families, particularly Black families that draw on robust family support outside of two-parent marriage in response to evolving structural barriers to marital stability. Assigning greater social and economic value to the role that extended kin and other caregivers play can make these meaningful relationships more visible, durable, and effective in supporting child and parent well-being.