Читать книгу Living in Love and Faith - Bishops of the Church of England - Страница 38

The overall birthrate, inside and outside marriage, is falling fast in the UK. In 2018 it was 1.7 per woman, whereas a ‘replacement rate’ of 2.1/2.2 would be needed for population numbers to be stable. This is a major trend in the Western world, and it gives rise to an ageing population. Women are having fewer children (one per family is now more common) and women tend to be starting child-bearing later in life.

The percentage of live births outside marriage continues to increase: 48.4 per cent of live births were outside marriage in 2018. There is evidence across a number of measures that ‘children born to parents who are cohabiting are more likely to see their parents separate than those children born within marriage’.⁷⁹

A question that arises from these statistics is the relationship between marriage and the well-being of children. An in-depth US study (corroborated by a more recent UK study) of the link between marriage and child well-being asserts that ‘children raised by two biological parents in a stable marriage do better than children in other family forms across a wide range of outcomes’.⁸⁰ There are many possible factors that may account for this seemingly consistent phenomenon, such as family income, parents’ physical and mental health, and parenting quality. The study concludes that ‘studies of child well-being that attempt to control the indirect effects of these mechanisms typically find that a direct positive association remains between child well-being and marriage, strongly suggesting that marriage is more than the sum of these particular parts’. In other words, the author of the paper suggests that there is something about marriage that is able to have a further and particular influence, which is difficult to replicate in other forms of relationship.