By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
A Canadian study has found that children living in households with cohabiting parents are more likely to engage in risky behaviors than children who are raised in intact two-parent families.
According to a report by LifeSiteNews.com the study was conducted by Dr. Frank Jones, Research Fellow at the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada (IMFC). It relied on data from a Canadian Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth examined children of married and cohabiting parents at age six to 11 years, than interviewed them again eight years later when they were between the ages of 14 to 19 years.
Researchers found that teens who lived as children in homes where parents were living together were more likely than teens of married parents to smoke, be involved in drug dealing, to have a lower age of sexual initiation and engage in sexual intercourse, to have poor relationships with their parents, and to have parents who have a poor relationship with each other.
The study’s authors attributed these differences to three aspects of the dissimilarity between married and cohabiting couples:
First, married couples in the study tended to be more highly educated and were more like to be religious than their cohabiting counterparts. These attributes among parents were associated with a lower likelihood of teens to abuse drugs, to delay sexual initiation and to report being happier with life.
Second, cohabiting partnerships are much less stable than married relationships. For instance, the study found that 49 percent of children age six to nine living with cohabiting parents lived with only one biological parent in the home. On the other hand, 94 percent of children age six to nine with married parents had both biological parents in the home. A related American study found that unwed parents have high rates of union dissolution and experience significantly more partner changes, which increases stress on children and may lead to increases in behavioral problems.
Finally, cohabiting parents may be less committed to raising children because no binding commitment has been made to the partner or the resulting children. Dr. Jones refers to a study by American sociologist Bradford Wilcox, who reported that married fathers are more likely to demonstrate affection to their wives and families than cohabitating men.
The study concludes that the increased likelihood of teens engaging in risky behaviors should be of concern not only to parents, but to the education system, community social programs, justice and healthcare systems, which bear the burden of dealing with the consequences of teens with behavioral problems.
Dr. Jones points out that highlighting the difference between marriage and cohabitation is not a condemnation of those who choose not to marry, but a recognition that marriage offers unique societal benefits.
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