It’s hardly news to hear about the huge number of couples who live together outside of marriage. The numbers have risen sharply over the past few decades, such that a majority of young adults will cohabit with their significant other at some point and most couples who marry today are already living together.

 Now that cohabitation is becoming so common, it shouldn’t surprise us that more kids are being born into homes where mom and dad aren’t married. But it should concern us.

 Recently released government statistics confirm this rise, but the numbers are actually a bit troubling. The percentage of first births to unmarried, cohabiting moms has jumped 83 percent since 2002. Ten years ago, 12 percent of births were to moms living with a male partner. By the years 2006-10 that percentage jumped to 22 percent.

 That’s a lot of kids born into a home that doesn’t benefit from a mom and dad bound by the committed bonds of marriage. That isn’t to say these children aren’t loved by their parents. The vast majority of them certainly are. It’s just the likelihood of that child being raised in a stable home and enjoying positive outcomes in life is measurably higher if mom and dad are married.

 There really isn’t much debate about this. We know from a couple decades worth of research that kids do best when raised by their married parents. And cohabitation is not a worthwhile substitute for getting married, no matter what the social trends are.

 Unmarried cohabitation is a topic I’ve written about quite a bit. And I’ve done so because it’s an issue about which there’s much confusion and upon which false hopes are built. Simply put, it doesn’t accomplish what many couples assume it does.

 There’s evidence that living together creates an uncertain foundation for future marriage. The obligations created by the living arrangement make it harder to objectively assess the health of the relationship. If someone is having doubts, it’s not as easy to call things off like it would be in a traditional dating relationship.

 Couples who slide into cohabitation (as so many do) often slide into marriage because it’s easier than breaking up. The result is a poor basis for the lasting commitment required in a lifelong relationship.

 At its best, marriage seals a relationship in a unique and meaningful way that is more likely to be enduring. It’s a man and woman signifying to one another (and the public) their commitment to each other to the exclusion of all others.

 On the other hand, when cohabiting precedes the marriage certificate it’s less like a seal than it is a slide — not a hard and fast declaration of faithfulness, but more like a change to one’s Facebook relationship status. There’s less permanence in cohabitation and therefore less incentive to fight for a cohabiting relationship. Not exactly good news for the children involved.

 For kids, it’s much better to be raised in a home where both parents have committed to one another and have more incentive to make things work, even if times get hard. After all, children must deal with the wreckage of a fractured family as much as their parents. In many ways, it’s harder for them to process and cope as they are forced to make sense of mom and dad’s separate worlds.

 The conditions for children to thrive are less likely in a cohabiting household than they are in a married home.

 

The Georgia Family Council, led by President Randy Hicks, is a non-profit research and education organization committed to fostering conditions in which individuals, families and communities thrive. For more information, go to www.georgiafamily.org, (770) 242-0001, stephen.daniels@georgiafamily.org.