New research released this week highlights the differences between children who were born into married households versus those with cohabiting and single parents. The study from the Institute From Family Studies titled, “The Cohabitation Go-Round: Co-habitation And Family Instability Across the Globe” analyzes the worldwide decline in marriage rates and its effects on children.
“[C]ohabitation continues to confer a stability disadvantage on individual children even as cohabitation has become more normative,” the study reads. “We find no evidence supporting the idea that in societies where cohabiting births are more common, marriage and cohabitation come to resemble each other in terms of stability for children.” Aggregated data from 100 nations shows that families are much more unstable when children are born to unmarried parents or to single mothers. READ MORE
