Turns out marriage isn’t on the way out…
Upwards of 70% of young people:link-icon: (presumably in Britain, where the survey evidently took place) — including co-habiting couples — still want to/plan to get married.
The aspiration to walk down the aisle to marry the man or woman of one’s dreams continues to be a very common one, even though the growing number of cohabiting couples may seem to prove the contrary.
Evidence of support for commitment came in a book recently published by the London-based Institute for the Study of Civil Society. “Second Thoughts on the Family,” by Anastasia de Waal, compiles information taken from a specially commissioned opinion poll, plus interviews with 27 “opinion makers.”
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The evidence found in the institute’s studies show that the real divide over the family today is one of economic class, due to strains that result in much higher rates of cohabitation and divorce for lower income families.
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In the book’s summary of the findings, de Waal cites data from the Millennium Cohort Study, a survey that examined the situations of families that began family life around the year 2000. The study found that:
– Among those who were single parents at the time of their child’s birth, 28% had no educational qualifications. For those who were cohabiting the level was 13%, while for those who were married just 8% had no qualifications.
– By contrast, 43% of mothers who were married at the time of their child’s birth had the highest level of educational qualifications. Among those cohabiting this fell to 24%, and among single parents it was only 10%.
– At the time of birth 68% of married parents lived in economically advantaged areas, while this was true for 56% of cohabiting couples and only 35% of single parents.
Faced with this sort of information, de Waal maintains that all parties on the political spectrum should be concerned about family structures and marriage. The combination of lower marital rates in low income areas, higher divorce rates and more single-parent families among the less well-off are strongly connected to structural poverty.
I suppose the question has to be asked: is poverty the causative force here, or the result? Is, say, the lack of educational qualifications among unmarried mothers, as compared to married mothers, a result of living in poverty…or is the poverty itself a result of poor life choices, including economic and Sexual irresponsibility?
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