Why You Should Get Married Before Having Kids

Are you living with your partner and have you recently started discussing adding a baby to your family? Before you get all excited about ovulation calendars, folic acid and tiny socks, you may want to consider getting married first. Read on to discover why marriage is still important in modern society.

Isn't Living Together Essentially The Same As Marriage?

Forty-two percent of American children will now live in cohabiting households, meaing homes in which their parents are living together but are not married. This is almost double the 12 percent of children who will have divorced parents. This figure is hardly surprising. Marriage rates have been dropping, and most couples will live together before tying the knot, with many continuing to live together indefinitely without ever getting married.

Couples who are living together but are not married are just as likely to have kids — the result of either planned or surprise pregnancies — as married couples. Cohabitation appears to have become the new “marriage”. Living together is, for most people, just as respectable as being married. The social stigma of not being married has most definitely disappeared from most communities over the last few decades. 

It is easy to think that this means that living together is the equivalent of marriage, and that it does not matter whether you are cohabiting or married. Most children who aren't born to married parents will still have both parents in their lives. These kids are the 42 percent who will live in cohabiting households. What does it matter if they get recorded as being born to “unwed parents” in 2013, as long as mom and dad are both active, involved parents who are living together?

Unfortunately, it is not this simple. Cohabiting parents are much more likely to break up than married parents — they have about twice the break-up rate of married parents before their kids turn 12, in fact!

This could be partly due to the fact that leaving a cohabiting household when the going gets tough is much easier than getting a divorce. It is also possible that some cohabiting partners believe that living together is not as permanent a commitment as being married, and that they view themselves as being separate people rather than as part of a permanent unit.

When you see cohabitation as a transitional and temporary state, it is hardly surprising that a family enjoys less stability. Some men may agree to cohabitation for the very reason that they would like to avoid getting married, for example, and some couples begin informally living together when they are expecting a baby, without ever making a permanent commitment. Other couples agree not to get married “in case they get divorced later”.

Holding off on getting married makes a lot of sense to those couples who are not quite sure that "happily ever after" is going to be a part of their story. Those couples should keep in mind that children are just as big a commitment as marriage, if not an even bigger one — and that unlike marriage, children are absolutely permanent.

No matter what the reasons, cohabiting isn't all that it seems to be. Not only do cohabiting partners break up more easily and frequently than married couples, children growing up in such households are more likely to suffer from various forms of abuse. Kids in cohabiting households have a significantly higher risk of experiencing physical, emotional and sexual abuse than both children living with their own two married parents, and those who are being raised in single-parent households.