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Unmarried Parents Five Times more Likely to Separate than Married

WASHINGTON, August 2, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The weekly Family Update from the World Congress of Families today revealed that cohabitating couples are five times more likely to separate than married couples.

Citing research from the UK, the Congress revealed how these statistics are having a devastating effect on children: “An estimated 88,000 children under age five were affected by the separation of their unmarried parents in 2003, compared with about 31,000 children under five whose married parents divorced, the research concludes.” Harry Benson, lead author of the research, said, “The evidence is irrefutable. Unmarried parents are five times more likely to break up than married parents.”

Adding to these demoralizing statistics, the Congress cited further research from the US’ Fragile Families Study, which found that unmarried couples were more likely to be unemployed or have incomes below the poverty line. Fragile Families Study author, Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan, pointed out that the relationships between cohabiting couples are more “fragile;” thus, “nearly half of cohabiting mothers ... have ended their relationship with their child's father by the time their children are three years old.”

McLanahan, whose research was published in the journal Demography, added that, when comparing cohabiting-couple families with married-couple families, “breast-feeding and language stimulation are less common, whereas harsh parenting is more common.”

The higher rates of separation also mean cohabitation results in more single-parent families – with even greater poverty consequently. “Across all Western industrialized countries, children in single-mother families have much higher poverty rates than children in two-parent families,” McLanahan pointed out. Besides poverty, McLanahan warns that single motherhood is a source of “multiple risk factors that do not bode well for children.”

Visit the World Congress of Families web site, at:
http://www.worldcongress.org/WCFUpdate/Archive06/wcf_update_631e.htm#a

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