Parents who marry have a significantly lower chance of separating than those who do not, regardless of income, according to new research that argues family stability should play a far greater role in the Government’s efforts to tackle child poverty.
The report from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) concludes that marriage itself is strongly associated with more stable family relationships, challenging the view that the differences between married and unmarried couples are explained largely by factors such as income, education or age.
Based on doctoral research by Dr Harry Benson, ‘The Stability Advantage’ report analysed data from more than 3,200 first-time parents tracked over the initial 14 years of parenthood through the Millennium Cohort Study.
Even among the lowest 20% of income households, parents who married had a higher chance of staying together than parents in the highest 20% who never married, despite accounting for dozens of other socio-economic and demographic factors like religion, age, ethnicity and education.
The report argues that this challenges a long-standing assumption in public policy that family stability is primarily a result of economic circumstances.
Instead, it concludes that “family structure plays an independent and powerful role in shaping outcomes”.
The research also found a close relationship between family stability and economic mobility.
Parents who remained together were around twice as likely to climb the income ladder as those whose relationships broke down.
In the lowest-income households, couples who remained together were almost twice as likely to move into a higher income bracket as those who separated - 53% vs 29%.
At the other end of the income scale, 88% of the highest-earning couples who separated dropped at least one income quintile, compared with 45% of those who remained together.
The report argues that family breakdown should therefore be viewed not simply as a consequence of poverty but as “a key mechanism through which poverty persists and deepens”.
The findings also challenge previous research, particularly by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which argued that the enduring stability of married couples was largely explained by “selection effects” - the idea that couples who marry are already older, wealthier or better educated.
Dr Benson argues that those earlier studies excluded a significant proportion of the available data, disproportionately omitting unmarried and separated couples.
By using a more complete dataset and extending the analysis over 14 years, he concludes that marriage itself has a substantial independent association with relationship stability.
The report suggests several reasons why marriage may strengthen long-term relationships.
It points to commitment theory, which argues that marriage reinforces both emotional dedication and practical commitment; cognitive consistency theory, which suggests people align their behaviour with commitments they have publicly made; and signal theory, which views marriage as a stronger public demonstration of lifelong commitment than cohabitation.
The CSJ argues that the findings have important implications for public policy. It says successive governments have focused primarily on employment, income support and early years provision while paying comparatively little attention to family stability, despite parental separation being one of the strongest predictors of long-term disadvantage for children.
“Child poverty and inequality in the UK cannot be fully understood without addressing family stability,” the report states.
It warns that policies described as neutral towards marriage are “not neutral in effect” if marriage contributes independently to stronger family stability.
Among its recommendations, the report calls on the Government to remove financial disincentives to marriage by tackling the welfare system’s “couple penalty”, which it says can leave some low-income families thousands of pounds worse off if parents marry or move in together.
It also recommends redesigning child benefit to provide greater support for married or civil-partnered first-time parents during the first three years of a child’s life, when relationship breakdown is most common, and embedding family stability more explicitly within the Government's child poverty strategy through services such as Family Hubs.
The report concludes: “If this is correct, then a strategy to reduce poverty that ignores family stability will remain incomplete … Strengthening families is not an alternative to economic policy: it is a necessary complement to it.”
It adds, “The Government can help create the conditions in which more families are able to form, endure, and thrive.”
