"Three quarters of all family breakdowns [in Great Britain] affecting young children now involve unmarried parents, new research suggests.

...An estimated 88,000 children aged under 5 were affected by the separation of their unmarried parents in 2003, compared with about 31,000 children under 5 whose married parents divorced, the research concludes. According to the 2001 census, 59 per cent of households with children are married, 11 per cent are co-habiting and 22 per cent lone parent families.

...The findings show that it is no longer plausible to argue that all relationship types were equal, [Harry Benson, author of the research] said. 'The evidence is irrefutable. Unmarried parents are five times more likely to break up than married parents.'"

(Source:  Alexandra Frean, "Unmarried Families Are More Likely to Fall Apart," The Times [London], February 5, 2005; http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1471297,00.html .)

"My research on marriage and family life seldom leads me to agree with Dr. Dobson, much less to accuse him of understatement. But in this case, Dr. Dobson's warnings come 30 years too late. Traditional marriage, with its 5,000-year history, has already been upended. Gays and lesbians, however, didn't spearhead that revolution: heterosexuals did.

Heterosexuals were the upstarts who turned marriage into a voluntary love relationship rather than a mandatory economic and political institution. Heterosexuals were the ones who made procreation voluntary, so that some couples could choose childlessness, and who adopted assisted reproduction so that even couples who could not conceive could become parents. And heterosexuals subverted the long-standing rule that every marriage had to have a husband who played one role in the family and a wife who played a completely different one.

(Source:  Stephanie Coontz, "The Heterosexual Revolution," The New York Times, July 5, 2005; http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/05/opinion/05coontz.html?th&emc=th .)

Some progressive commentators are too busy celebrating the growing diversity of family to acknowledge that children typically do not do well growing up with a single or cohabiting mother.  Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan is sufficiently in tune with regnant orthodoxies to argue that "some single motherhood is probably a good sign of society insofar as it indicates that women have the freedom to opt out of bad relationships."  Nonetheless, in a study recently published in Demography, McClanahan expresses deep reservations about the beneficence of trends giving us more and more single mothers, and more and more cohabiting unmarried parents.

 "We should," McLanahan writes, "be concerned about the high prevalence of single mothers, especially among mothers in the lower social strata."  After all, she notes, "across all Western industrialized countries [including Sweden, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, and the United Kingdom], children in single-mother families have much higher poverty rates than children in two-parent families." McLanahan stresses that the economically disadvantaged status of single mothers persists "even though many countries provide substantial single support to single mothers."  

But McLanahan has her eye on more than economics.  She sees in single motherhood "a proxy for multiple risk factors that do not bode well for children."  She cites data showing, for instance, that "unmarried mothers with low education (a high school degree or less) are more likely to suffer from clinical depression and to have used drugs and tobacco during their pregnancies than married mothers with similar levels of education."

It also disturbs McLanahan that the children of a single mother typically see little or nothing of their father, and she regards "father absence" as potentially "harmful to children."   Further, she believes that "high levels of father absence are likely to be a sign of social disorganization and isolation."

But even if the father is present in the home, McLanahan sees potential risks for children if he is not married to their mother.  Comparing the families formed by cohabiting couples with those formed by married couples, McLanahan identifies distinctively problematic characteristics of cohabiting-couple families.  Compared to married-couple families, such families "are much more likely to include children from other relationships and parents' relationships are more fragile."  The fragility of cohabiting-couple families shows up in statistics showing that "nearly half of cohabiting mothers ... have ended their relationship with their child's father by the time their children are three years old."  It further troubles McLanahan that when cohabiting-couple families are compared to married-couple families, "breast-feeding and language stimulation are less common, whereas harsh parenting is more common."