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24 Child & Fam. L. Q. 176 (2012)
Cohabitation, Marriage and Child Outcomes: An Empirical Analysis of the Relationship between Marital Status and Child Outcomes in the UK Using the Millennium Cohort Study

handle is hein.journals/chilflq24 and id is 180 raw text is: 176 Cohabitation, marriage and child outcomes: an empirical analysis of the relationship between marital status and child outcomes in the UK using the Millennium Cohort Study Claire Crawford, Alissa Goodman, Ellen Greaves and Rob Joyce* The proportion of children born to unmarried parents has risen dramatically over the past three decades; in 2010 just over three in ten of all live births in England and Wales were born to cohabiting couples. This significant change raises a number of important questions that cut across government policy areas and academic disciplines, perhaps the most fundamental of which is whether being born to cohabiting rather than married parents matters for children's well-being. In this article we assess whether there are differences in early measures of cognitive and socio-emotional development between children born to cohabiting and married couples, and if so, whether marriage is the cause of these differences. We show that children born to married parents exhibit higher cognitive and socio-emotional development at ages 3 and 5, on average, than children born to cohabiting couples. We then adopt a systematic empirical approach to try to identify whether marriage is the cause of these differences, or whether they are in fact accounted for by other characteristics of the parents which happen to be correlated with marital status. As this empirical strategy involves some judgment on our part, we cannot claim a definitive answer We do, howeve, regard our results as a strong indication that marriage plays a relatively small role, if any in promoting children's early cognitive or socio-emotional development. SECTION A: INTRODUCTION T here has been a dramatic increase in the number of births outside marriage over the last three decades, particularly to cohabiting couples. According to official birth registry statistics, nearly half of all live births in England and Wales occurred outside marriage in 2010, a rate that has been steadily increasing, from less than one in ten in the late 1970s. Of these, it is estimated that the majority - amounting to just over 30% of all live births - are to cohabiting couples. Meanwhile, the proportion born to lone parents has risen only slightly since official records began to distinguish between types Claire Crawford, Programme Director; Alissa Goodman, Deputy Director; Ellen Greaves, Research Economist and Rob Joyce, Research Economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The authors are very grateful to Dan Anderberg, John Ermisch, Hayley Fisher, Rory Gallagher, Kathleen Kiernan, Penny Mansfield, Jo Miles, Debora Price, Rebecca Probert, Kitty Stewart and Sharon Witherspoon for helpful comments and advice. Responsibility for interpretation of the data, as well as for any errors, is the authors' alone.

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