Thursday 21 July 2011

As we all suspected

From the IFS press release:

Children born to married parents achieve better cognitive and social outcomes, on average, than children born into other family forms, including cohabiting unions. This report asks why this is so: is it the parents' marital status per se that results in better outcomes for their children, or is it because married and cohabiting couples are different in some other ways, such as their level of education, which also matter for child development?

Differences in outcomes between children whose parents are married and those who cohabit may simply reflect these differences in other characteristics rather than be caused by marriage...


Go on, tell us! Damn, we're going to have to skip right to the end of their report:

Taken together, these findings support the broad conclusions reported in Goodman and Greaves (2010a and 2010b) and suggest that the gaps in cognitive and socio-emotional development between children born to married and cohabiting parents mainly or entirely reflect the fact that different types of people choose to get married (the selection effect), rather than that marriage itself has a direct effect on relationship stability or child development.

On the basis of this evidence, therefore, there does not seem to be a strong reason in terms of child development for policymakers to encourage parents to get married before they bear children. There is, however, good reason for policymakers to continue to try to increase the educational attainment of today’s children (tomorrow’s parents) as a means of improving the outcomes of future generations of children.

6 comments:

Sean said...

If you are married you are very likely to have more than one child.

Thus more language in the home as there are more people to talk too.

More language, more interaction, quicker and more sustained brain development.

There are obviously a lot of other factors going on, and you cant say there are hard and fast rules, but language use and development seem to me to be more developed from children from happy homes, and ive taught a lot to climb and trek so ive come across the problem ones to compare them against.

Anonymous said...

Soooo

How do we encourage people to become the sort of people who get married, before they have children?

Anonymous said...

By stopping the state getting involved??

"Marriage" means that your spouse can use the force of the state to steal things that are yours if things go sour. And maybe the state grants women the ability to change their title to Mrs. Is there anything else?

Mark Wadsworth said...

S, children of married parents do better in life, that's indisputable. Quite why is more or less irrelevant.

AC, I dunno. Like Anon says, the state militates against marriage in a number of ways, like the welfare system, the family courts, the tax system (no joint taxation like in any other civilised country), it militates against young people being able to settle down (high house prices) or find jobs (tax system) and it provides education of a patchy standard.

Anon, agreed, of course. Again, other civlised countries have binding pre-nups, or statutory pre-nups where the groom can tick one of three boxes: a) I don't want to get shafted, what's mine's my own
b) Fair enough, she can have half
c) I give in, she can have the lot, it's better than the eternal bickering.

It's then up to the bride to put emotional pressure on him to tick (c) unless she is independently wealthy in which case she puts emotional pressure on him to tick (a).

Anonymous said...

"On the basis of this evidence, therefore, there does not seem to be a strong reason in terms of child development for policymakers to encourage parents to get married before they bear children. "

Maybe, but there is a strong reason for discouraging the unmarried from having children and encouraging the married to have them instead.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Anon, perhaps you overlook the fact that the government discourages men from getting married (savage divorce laws); it discourages co-habitation and marriage (via the benefits system); and it encourages 'single' women to have children (via benefits system and Tax Credits).

Before we dream up ways to encourage what we think is 'good behaviour', let's stop encouraging 'bad behaviour' and penalising 'good behaviour', and then see what happens.

It's all in the MW manifesto.