Marriage, divorce and cohabitation in Idaho
Report to the Legislative Family Task Force – 9/24/07
Marriage rates, divorce rates, cohabitation and the impact on the Idaho Family
By Bryan Fischer, Executive Director
The trends
David Popenoe of Rutgers argues that long-term trends point to the gradual weakening of marriage as the primary social institution of family life, due to a broad cultural shift away from religion and social traditionalism.
Because this shift is a central feature of modern societies, it is unlikely to be reversed without a cultural awakening that reestablishes the view that personal happiness is a function of high-trust and lasting relationships.
The benefits of marriage
According to Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, the current U.S. marriage rate is the lowest it has ever been, men and women are delaying first marriages, the divorce rate has doubled since 1960, and the number of cohabiting couples has increased by more than a factor of 10.
Yet Maher’s research shows that marriage benefits children through complementary parental roles, in which children develop their conscience and their self-worth and their capacity for intimacy and empathy through their emotional bond with their mothers, while involved fathers contribute to their emotional health, academic achievement, and higher job status as adults.
Children with married parents are less likely to engage in risky behavior such as premarital sex, substance abuse, delinquency and suicide. They learn a template for future marriage, and according to Judith Wallerstein, are “reasonably happy” even in a home with an unhappy marriage. They suffer less abuse and neglect, have better health, enjoy more economic security, and achieve higher academic scores.
Marriage benefits adults, who have better health than the unmarried, enjoy longer life spans, are less prone to suicide, and enjoy higher incomes. Marriage is the safest relationship for women, while cohabiting couples report rates of physical aggression that are three times higher than those reported by married couples.
And marriage benefits society through fewer abortions, safer homes, safer communities, less premarital sex (due to parental influence), less poverty and more wealth, more marriage and less divorce, and less government and lower taxes as fewer welfare programs are needed or used by those in strong marriages. Teen childbearing alone costs U.S. taxpayers about $7 billion per year for welfare, incarceration, and foster care costs.
The situation in Idaho
As data from Idaho Health and Welfare indicate, the divorce rate in Idaho (5.0 per 1,000 in population) is about where it was in 1970, before the advent of no-fault divorce. Idaho’s divorce rate, however, is almost 40% above the national average of 3.6 per 1,000.
Factors which significantly reduce the chances of divorce, according to Rutgers researcher David Popenoe, are an income of over $50,000, having a baby after rather than before marriage, delaying marriage until age 25, coming from an intact family, having a religious affiliation (which reduces the chance of divorce by 14% all by itself), and having some college level education.
While there is good news – Idaho’s national marriage and fertility rates are higher than the national average - the marriage rate in the Gem State has fallen in half since 1970, which matches the national trend. At 10.4 per 1,000 today, it is about 40% of what it was at the high water mark in the late 1960’s, and is the lowest it has been in 50 years. Thus it may be that a lower marriage rate should be as much of a public policy concern as the divorce rate.
The declining marriage rate is a strong indication that increasing numbers of Idaho couples are choosing to cohabit rather than marry, which means they will not show up in either the marriage or divorce statistics.
Thus the effective “divorce” rate – the rate at which couples who live together separate – is actually likely to be a good deal higher than 5.0, since co-habiting couples tend to break up at higher rates than married couples. These break-ups, of course, do not show up on official divorce summaries.
If people are connecting and hooking up at roughly the same rate today as in the 1960s, this may indicate that as many as 40% of Idahoans who a generation ago would have walked down the aisle have chosen instead to live together without the commitment and solemnity of marriage.
Because of the benefits marriage produces for both spouses and their children, it is in the best interest of Idaho families and Idaho’s children for lawmakers to establish policies which actually encourage couples to make a marriage commitment.
There may be any number of reasons why couples choose to cohabit rather than marry. Cohabitation has lost much of the stigma it carried a generation ago, and the well-known failure rate of marriages may make it attractive to couples to avoid making a commitment which will be cumbersome and costly to undo.
The costs of divorce
Research done by David Schramm of Utah State University indicates that each divorce costs taxpayers around $30,000 in direct and indirect costs for such things as child support enforcement, Medicaid, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, food stamps, public housing, correctional facilities, unwed childbearing, drug problems and delinquency.
There were 7,118 divorces in Idaho in 2005, meaning that taxpayers incurred over $213,000,000 in costs for that year alone.
The effects of divorce on children, adult children of divorce, and on those who divorce
- Children. Research compiled by the Family Research Council (FRC) reveals a correlation between divorce and increased emotional and behavioral problems (aggression, acting out, depression, delinquency), less educational attainment, and more illegal drug use (1½ times more likely to use drugs by age 14). Children of divorce are twice as likely to cohabit and have children out-of-wedlock as those raised by married biological parents.
- Adult children of divorce are twice as likely to suffer depression and to attempt suicide (compared to those raised in intact families), show less economic achievement, have double the risk of divorce, and have weaker extended family relationships.
- Those who divorce experience more depression and lower self-esteem than their married counterparts, are twice as likely to commit suicide, and women in particular experience a 50% decline in family income.
Cohabitation
Over half of all first marriages are now preceded by cohabitation, when a century ago virtually none were. In fact, cohabitation was illegal in all 50 states prior to 1970. The number of cohabiting couples in America has jumped from less than 440,000 in 1960 to around 5.4 million today, a twelve-fold increase.
Two-thirds of high school senior boys think cohabitation prior to marriage is a good idea, as do 61% of high school senior girls. Approximately 10% of all American households are of the unmarried partner variety today, with the trend line increasing.
But according to Rutgers researchers Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe, living together before marriage increases the risk of breaking up after marriage. And cohabiting parents break up at a much higher rate than married parents, with devastating and long lasting consequences for both the adults and the children involved.
In fact, a 1992 study found that marriages preceded by cohabitation had a divorce rate that is about 46% higher than for noncohabitors. This is likely because the partners in a cohabiting relationship are less committed to each other and more committed to personal autonomy than married couples, inclinations difficult to unlearn once learned. Such couples seem more inclined to resolve relational conflict through dissolution than problem solving.
It also increases the risk of domestic violence for women, and the risk of physical and sexual abuse for children. Research shows that aggression is at least twice as common among cohabitors as among married partners, and that women in cohabiting relationships are nine times more likely to be killed by their partners than women in marital relationships.
Fully three quarters of children born to cohabiting parents will see their parents split up before they reach the age of sixteen, compared to about a third of children born to married parents.
Children living with a mother and her unmarried partner have significantly more behavior problems and lower academic performance than children in intact families.
Evidence suggests that the most unsafe of all family environments is one in which the mother is living with someone other than the child’s biological father, an environment in which the majority of children in cohabiting households are found.
And cohabiting couples have lower levels of happiness and wellbeing than married couples. They report lower levels of sexual exclusivity and sexual satisfaction, and poorer relationships with their parents. Annual rates of depression among cohabiting couples are more than three times what they are among married couples.
Cohabiting couples with children have only about two-thirds the income of married couples with children, in part because when men marry, they tend to become more responsible and productive. Plus, the private transfer of wealth between extended family members is considerably higher for “in-laws” than it is for boyfriends and girlfriends.
Evidence suggests that the act of cohabitation actually diminishes religious participation, whereas marriage tends to increase it.
The increasing acceptance of cohabitation is due in part to the sexual revolution, in part to the rise of feminism, in part to a rise in “secular individualism,” and in part to an erosion of confidence in the stability of marriage. Aware of the fragility of marriage brought about by no-fault divorce, couples are taking cautionary actions which include settling for a weaker form of union, one that avoids marriage and thus an eventual divorce.
The bottom line is that cohabitation is not in children’s or society’s best interest.
“No-fault” divorce a major contributor to family breakups
There are a number of explanations for the increase in cohabitation, including the rise of feminism and its criticism of marriage as an institution, and the sexual revolution which has virtually revoked the stigma long associated with sex outside marriage.
It is also likely that one reason for increased cohabitation is that marriage, through no-fault divorce, has become an increasingly unstable institution. Couples see the frequency with which marriages dissolve, and the messiness of the dissolution process, and make a pre-emptive decision to keep things simple so that dissolving their household will be less complicated should the relationship fracture.
This will produce much of the same results divorce produces, because in both cases a once-committed relationship has fractured, children suffer, and the patterns are likely to be repeated in the next generation.
The advent of no-fault divorce in 1970 made it possible for people to opt out of marriage unilaterally, leaving spouses with no legal protection for the bond they have created in marriage.
As Maggie Gallagher observed, marriage “has become less binding than the average business deal. Marriage is one of the few contracts in which the law explicitly protects the defaulting party at the expense of his or her partner.”
Gallagher’s research indicates that no-fault divorce has contributed to a 25% increase in the rate of divorce all by itself.
If banks could foreclose on your house anytime they felt like it, whether you were in default on your mortgage or not, it wouldn’t be long before banks would have no one to lend to – the inherent fragility of this arrangement would turn people into renters in a hurry. And so we are entering into a “rent-a-spouse” era in which couples cycle through a series of intimate relationships rather than committing themselves to one.
This absence of legal protection means spouses are not given the security and incentives to devote themselves to marriage they once had, and have more of an incentive to focus on self-preservation than on being faithful to their vows.
It is likely that this inherent instability has contributed significantly to the increase in destructive cohabitation.
Reforming no-fault divorce can and should be part of the solution. By strengthening the institution of marriage, and increasing its security and longevity, couples will once again be drawn into marriage rather than cohabitation and Idaho’s children will have more secure and stable homes in which to grow and mature.
Possible public policy solutions
- Make sure Idaho’s public policy does not subsidize illegitimacy. If public benefits are awarded to single parents that are not available to married parents, we, perhaps unwittingly and out of a misguided sense of compassion, are in effect subsidizing out-of-wedlock childbirth, rewarding cohabitation, and encouraging decision-making which is harmful to children. Welfare benefits can have a powerful influence upon behavior simply by the kind of behavior they reward and incentivize. The awarding of public benefits should be directed toward encouraging the building of stable marriages and families.
- Replacing “no-fault” with “mutual consent” divorce, especially when minor children are still in the home. Mutual consent divorce allows couples who mutually agree to obtain a no-fault divorce. It alleviates the unilateral problem of no-fault divorce, because a spouse cannot leave without the consent of the other spouse. Mutual consent divorce involves the least amount of government intervention in the process, as it allows the couple, rather than a judge, to determine child custody and financial matters. Mutual consent gives some “leverage” and “bargaining power” to the spouse who does not want the marriage to break up.
The one state in the union that does not have “no-fault” divorce is New York. One of the chief reasons “no-fault” divorce has never been enacted there is because of intense lobbying pressure from feminist groups who recognize the exposure no-fault divorce creates for women, especially those who have left the workforce to devote their full energies to raising children.
- Eliminating “no-fault” divorce altogether. Reinstituting fault by eliminating “irreconcilable differences” as grounds for divorce ameliorates the injustice against the spouse who has not committed a serious fault and may not want the divorce. Sanction falls on the spouse who is at fault, while the innocent spouse can bargain for an appropriate settlement.
- Child-care tax credit for stay-at-home parents is recommended by marriage researcher Alan Carlson as a way to strengthen families. By making the child-care credit available only to parents who work outside the home, we incentivize mothers going into the workforce. By extending it to moms (or dads) who choose to make the sacrifices necessary to be a full-time parent, we will encourage more couples to consider keeping one parent at home, which is the optimal arrangement for children.
Sources:
The State of our Unions, co-authors Barbara Whitehead and David Popenoe, 2007
Online at: http://marriage.rutgers.edu/Publications/SOOU/TEXTSOOU2007.htm
Should We Live Together?, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe, 2002
Online at: http://marriage.rutgers.edu/Publications/SWLT2%20TEXT.htm
Deterring Divorce, by Bridget Maher, 2004. Available from the Family Research Council.
The Benefits of Marriage, by Bridget Maher, Family Research Council.
Online at: http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=IS05B01
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