Prospects for Marriage and Prosperity Worse for Unwed Mothers

A study by researchers at Cornell University has shown that single women who have children are significantly less likely to get married and instead are more likely to cohabit than women who have no children. And if single mothers do marry, their husbands are more likely to have poor job prospects. Researcher Daniel Lichter, professor of policy analysis and management and director of the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center, said the findings show that unwed mothers are not likely to improve their socioeconomic status by getting married. "We find that women who bear children outside marriage are at a considerable disadvantage in the marriage market," Lichter said. "Both the likelihood of marriage and the quality of marital partners are adversely affected by out-of-wedlock childbearing." Lichter believes that promoting the idea of marriage to unwed mothers may not be an effective way to reduce poverty and welfare dependency. Rather than promoting marriage, Lichter says, government should instead focus on reducing the number of children born outside wedlock.

The study, funded in part by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, was conducted by Lichter and two colleagues from Ohio State University, Zhenchao Qian, associate professor of sociology, and graduate student Leanna Mellott. The three reviewed Current Population Survey data on more than 100,000 women ages 18 to 34, over 5,000 of whom were living with someone at the time of the survey. 16,064 of the participants had married in the two years prior to the survey. The study also revealed strong racial differences between unmarried mothers and single women without children. Unwed white mothers were more likely than childless white women to marry or cohabit with men of a different race, whereas minority single mothers were less likely to partner with men of a different race. Both white and black unwed mothers were about 30% less likely to marry than women of other races, but unwed Hispanic women were 56% less likely to marry than single childless women.

Lichter explained the importance of studying marriage patterns of unwed mothers by pointing out that study after study shows that married women are far less likely to be poor than unmarried mothers. Over 36% of families headed by unwed mothers live below the government's poverty line, compared with only 6% of married couples with children. Previous studies have shown that marriage today is less likely to lead to upward social mobility, as it did in the past, and having children outside marriage may be part of the explanation. Therefore, researchers concluded, marriage promotion policies for unwed mothers may be misplaced if the eventual partners of the mothers lack good education and qualities necessary to achieve a healthy relationship.

According to Qian, "Out-of-wedlock childbearing also often marks the beginning or continuation of a series of transitory or serial relationships in which cohabitation is common. Government efforts to reduce out-of-wedlock childbearing may have the indirect and long-term benefit of encouraging better matched and, therefore, more successful or healthy marriages." He added that although marriage-promotion policies may be effective, it would probably be better to spend money on promoting employment and educational opportunities for low-income women and men. Doing so would prove to be a better long-term solution to the problem of marriage not increasing the socioeconomic status of unwed mothers.