Chinese Couples Are Right to Choose Marriage Over Cohabitation

Across the West—from the UK to the US, and from Canada to Chile—cohabitation is on the march and marriage is in retreat. One indication of cohabitation’s advance: in all these countries, more than 20 percent of children are born to cohabiting couples. As of now, however, cohabitation has not established a major beachhead in East Asia, especially when it comes to childbearing. The share of children born to cohabiting couples in East Asia— including mainland China and Hong Kong—is negligible. That’s good news.

We can debate the merits of cohabitation for adults. Some believe it’s a good way to maximize your freedom before settling down or to test the waters before marriage, all in ways that pose no risk to your future marital prospects. Others think it can prematurely lock you into a suboptimal relationship or degrade your capacity to commit to a marriage down the road.

But if we put aside thinking about adults and focus instead on the welfare of children, the case for not combining cohabitation and children looks strong. That’s because, at least in the West, cohabitation has proved much less stable than marriage as a context for the bearing and raising of children. In a recent report for the Social Trends Institute and Institute for Family Studies, “The Cohabitation-Go-Round: Cohabitation and Family Instability Across the Globe”, my co-authors and I found that children born to cohabiting couples in Europe and America are about 90 per cent more likely to see their parents break up, compared to children born to married parents, even after controlling for a range of background factors. Moreover, this general pattern holds true in countries as different as the United States, Britain, Italy, and Norway.

What’s more, when we looked at trends in more than 60 countries across the globe—from South Africa to Mexico—we found that family instability generally increases in countries as cohabitation advances. In these countries, over the past two decades or so, every percentage point increase in the share of children born to cohabiting couples was linked to a decline of 0.27 percentage points in the share of children living with both biological parents around the age of 12. In other words, as marriage loses ground, boys and girls are more likely to be exposed to family instability and single parenthood.

Continue reading at the South China Morning Post . . . .