Cohabitation Not Good For Children

One of the greatest problems for children living with a cohabiting couple is the high risk that the couple will break up. Fully three quarters of children born to cohabiting parents will see their parents split up before they reach age sixteen, whereas only about a third of children born to married parents face a similar fate. ...

Parental break up, as is now widely known, almost always entails a myriad of personal and social difficulties for children, some of which can be long lasting. For the children of a cohabiting couple these may come on top of a plethora of already existing problems. Several studies have found that children currently living with a mother and her unmarried partner have significantly more behavior problems and lower academic performance than children in intact families.

David Popenoe and Barbara Defoe Whitehead, “Should We Live Together? What Young Adults Need to Know About Cohabitation before Marriage.”  A publication of The National Marriage Project, pg.8