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Why Is Marriage So Important?
Family
1. Marriage increases the likelihood that fathers and mothers have good relationships with their children.
2. Cohabitation is not the functional equivalent of marriage.
a. Couples who live together, on average, report relationships of lower quality than do married couples - with cohabitors reporting more conflict, more violence, and lower levels of satisfaction and commitment.
3. Growing up outside an intact marriage increases the likelihood that children will themselves divorce or become unwed parents.
4. Marriage is a virtually universal human institution.
5. Marriage, and a normative commitment to marriage, foster high-quality relationships between adults, as well as between parents and children.
a. By offering legal and normative support and direction to a relationship, by providing an expectation of sexual fidelity and lifelong commitment, and by furnishing adults a unique social status as spouses, marriage typically fosters better romantic and parental relationships than do alternatives to marriage.
6. Marriage has important biosocial consequences for adults and children.
a. Research strongly suggests that an intact, married household protects girls from premature sexual development and, consequently, teen pregnancy.
Economics
7. Divorce and unmarried childbearing increase poverty for both children and mothers.
8. Married couples seem to build more wealth on average than singles or cohabiting couples.
9. Marriage reduces poverty and material hardship for disadvantaged women and their children.
10. Minorities benefit economically from marriage.
a. Research suggests that black child poverty rates would be almost 20 percent lower than they currently are had the proportion of black children living in married families not fallen below 1970 levels.
11. Married men earn more money than do single men with similar education and job histories.
12. Parental divorce (or failure to marry) appears to increase children's risk of school failure.
13. Parental divorce reduces the likelihood that children will graduate from college and achieve high-status jobs.
Physical Health and Longevity
14. Children who live with their own two married parents enjoy better physical health, on average, than do children in other family forms.
15. Parental marriage is associated with a sharply lower risk of infant mortality.
16. Marriage is associated with reduced rates of alcohol and substance abuse for both adults and teens.
17. Married people, especially married men, have longer life expectancies than do otherwise similar singles.
18. Marriage is associated with better health and lower rates of injury, illness, and disability for both men and women.
19. Marriage seems to be associated with better health among minorities and the poor.
Mental Health and Emotional Well-Being
20. Children whose parents divorce have higher rates of psychological distress and mental illness.
a. When marital conflict is low, children suffer psychologically from divorce.
b. Currently, about two-thirds of U.S. divorces appear to be taking place among low-conflict spouses.
21. Divorce appears to increase significantly the risk of suicide.
a. Divorced men and women are more than twice as likely as their married counterparts to attempt suicide.
22. Married mothers have lower rates of depression than do single or cohabiting mothers.
Crime and Domestic Violence
23. Boys raised in single-parent families are more likely to engage in delinquent and criminal behavior.
24. Marriage appears to reduce the risk that adults will be either perpetrators or victims of crime.
a. Single and divorced women are almost ten times more likely than are wives to be raped, and about three times more likely to be victims of aggravated assault.
25. Married women appear to have a lower risk of experiencing domestic violence than do cohabiting or dating women.
a. One analysis of the National Survey of Families and Households found that cohabitors were over three times more likely than spouses to say that arguments became physical over the last year.
26. A child who is not living with his or her own two married parents is at greater risk for child abuse.
For additional information on the importance of marriage visit the Institute for American Values at www.avericanvalues.org. Research taken from the Institute for American Values' publication "Why Marriage Matters, Second Edition: Twenty-Six Conclusions from the Social Sciences."
"Marriage Facts" page brought to you by:
Department of Health and Human Services; Administration for Children and Families; Compassion Capital Fund
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