Children are the big losers from the decline of marriage

Funny, isn’t it, the way people bandy the word 'bastard' nowadays, without any notion that it pertains to the condition of being born outside marriage? It says lots about how illegitimacy was once regarded that its descriptive noun is now simply a bad word. And yet most children who were born last year are what we’d once have called illegitimate; the Office for National Statistics finds that 51.3 per cent were born to mothers who were neither married nor in a civil partnership. It’s the first time this has happened since records began, in 1845.

The most troubling aspect about it is that we’re really not troubled. Time was, this situation would have raised uproar in the press. Politicians would have sounded off. And everyone would have asked what the established church was doing about it. Now, well, how many MPs are even talking about it? What about the Archbishop of Canterbury, poor thing? 

But the situation is the inevitable consequence of the decline of marriage. The number of heterosexual couples getting married in 2019 was the lowest since records began – a fall of 50 per cent since 1972. We’re in new territory here in so many ways.

My father was illegitimate and when he was born it was a calamity for the mother. The child, it was said, didn’t have a name – that is to say, a father’s name. Now, in more tolerant times, we do not distinguish between parents in terms of marital status. The inheritance rights of those born outside lawful marriage are pretty well the same as those born within it. It's quite hard nowadays for young audiences to get their heads round the parallel plot in King Lear, premised as it is on the notion that giving equal standing to bastards and lawful children is asking for trouble.

In other words, there’s an historic absence of social stigma when it comes to children born outside marriage. That means there remains only the mildest incentive to get married in the tax system; a transferable tax allowance for those on the basic rate. 

It also doesn’t help that weddings now cost as much as the deposit on a house – nearly £20,500 this year, according to a wedding insurance comparison site. Does no one now consider the simple option of sandwiches and cake? The big fat wedding is an actual disincentive to matrimony.

But the real problem with how relaxed we are about the decline of marriage is that the outcome isn’t good for the most important players: the children. As the Centre for Social Justice points out in an excellent report by Sophia Worringer called 'Family Structure Still Matters', even controlling for income and education, there are very different outcomes for children born to married and cohabiting couples; let alone single mothers. It finds that family structure has a greater impact on physical and mental health, school attainment, social and emotional development, than education or income. It’s the reality that we don’t talk about: commitment counts, though we’ve yet to see the results of this government’s introduction of the exciting concept of no-fault divorce.

The CSJ report points out that: 

'Family breakdown rates vary considerably between cohabiting and married parents: a child of cohabiting parents is more than twice as likely to experience parental separation. After income controls were applied, 88 per cent of married couples were still together when their child was aged five, compared to 67 per cent for cohabitees.' 

We’re talking here about what you might call psychological stability or that valuable thing for a child, a sense of security.

As The Spectator established some years ago, marriage is increasingly the preserve of the middle classes. The CSJ report observes that among the top 20 per cent of couples by income, 84 per cent marry; among the bottom 20 per cent, only 45 per cent do so. That wasn’t always the case; only a generation or so ago, the working classes married as much as anyone else.

The churches no doubt care, but can’t say so. (It was interesting when the marriage age was raised to 18 that there was only one CofE bishop in the Lords debate on the matter who felt able to point out that it was an historic development for the age of marriage and the age of sexual consent to be different.)

It’s striking that these developments have happened indifferently under Conservative and Labour administrations. In fact most of the socially liberalisation of the last couple of decades has taken place under a Conservative government. Makes you wonder really; what on earth are they for?