Bellevue Legal News: Seattle Divorce & Domestic Violence Lawyer

Study: Cohabitation Replaces Divorce as Biggest Threat to Children

While divorce was once considered to be the biggest threat to a child's mental and physical well-being, a new study by the National Marriage Project and the Institute for American Values reports that cohabitation has become "the largest unrecognized threat to the quality and stability of children's family lives."

According to the report, titled "Why Marriage Matters, Third Edition: Thirty Conclusions from the Social Sciences," approximately 24 percent of children in the United States are born to cohabiting couples, and 42 percent of children have lived in a cohabiting household by age 12.

Children in cohabiting households are three times more likely to be physically, sexually or emotionally abused, in comparison to children of intact, married-parent homes, the study reports. The researchers also found that children of cohabiting households are five times more likely to experience "depression, difficulty sleeping, feelings of worthlessness, nervousness, and tension."

Additionally, the study reports that teenagers of cohabiting households are 60 percent less likely to graduate and more likely to become involved in drugs than their counterparts who have grown up in a household with married parents.

Researchers believe that the instability of cohabitation, which often includes adults coming and going in a child's life, is one of the main reasons for these statistics.

Critics of the study believe that cohabitation alone cannot be blamed for these findings, and assert that instability is not caused by cohabitation, but by a lack of education, jobs, and income.

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