Divorce, Couples Conflict, & Separation

July 21, 2007

This paper summarizes the argument and findings of a longer and more technical paper that won the 2007 Graduate Student Paper Award in Social Demography from the Section on Population of the American Sociological Association.

Many research studies have shown that, on average, children of divorce have more behavior problems than children growing up in two-parent families. Divorces are sensitive situations so those that are going through it may want to use the services of someone like a chicago divorce lawyer to help them through this difficult process. It’s a good idea to involve a lawyer as things might get a little heated and this can have a huge effect on your family. There are loads of lawyers out there that you can use, so you just have to find the right one for you. This might mean that you use someone like this Russel Family Law firm, or you might use someone else. All that matters is that things run as smoothly as possible. But the question for social scientists is whether the problems seen in the children of divorced parents were caused by the divorce, or whether something else caused BOTH the divorce and the children’s problems.

Researchers wonder, in particular, whether some couples have personal characteristics and/or parenting patterns that increase the chance that their children will have behavior problems AND ALSO increase the chance that the couple will be unable to resolve marital issues. If this “something else” causes both divorce and behavior problems, then it is likely that that children would still have had problems even if their parents had somehow managed to remain married. Divorce can be difficult for children as it is a sensitive situation, so working with a law firm similar to the ones found at PETERSMAY.COM may give you the support needed to get through such a difficult time.

How do we look for that “something else”? We know that it is a mistake to compare children of divorced parents with children of continuously-married parents without taking into account differences between divorcing families and continuously married families PRIOR to the marital disruption. Parents who are more likely to divorce may also be more likely to be impoverished, to live in disadvantaged neighborhoods, to be less educated, to have been raised in divorced families themselves, or to have more children than average. These factors may impair a child’s well-being whether the parents stay together or not, but also be more likely to produce a marital disruption.

To test the effect of pre-existing family characteristics versus the effect of divorce itself, prior studies have used statistical analysis to “control” for the differences we can see between divorced and continuously-married families prior to the disruption. This is done by taking into account the socioeconomic status of the parents, their race or ethnicity, and other “variables” that can be determined by having respondents fill out a paper or computerized questionnaire. Some studies also take into account prior differences in child well-being between the two types of families prior to the disruption. The old consensus is that taking these pre-existing factors into account helps explain some of the association between parental divorce and children’s behavior problems – but not all. It reduces the average difference between the two groups but still leaves some average deficits for children of divorce, deficits that are not explained by controlling for these observed differences.

But what about the unique characteristics of each family that we do not as yet have the tools to measure? Things such as personality, parenting strategies, and detailed aspects of a person’s biography all affect children, but researchers haven’t been able to measure many of these constructs, far less to include them in large-scale studies. Therefore many studies end up comparing apples and oranges. The proper test of the impact of divorce on children is not to compare the children of divorced parents to the children of continuously-married families, and thus risk ignoring all the unobservable factors that may lead both to greater behavioral problems and to higher chances of divorce. It works better to compare the behavior problems of the same child before and after divorce. So, traditional methods often do not adequately estimate the impact on children of being in a family that is headed for divorce.

Several recent studies, including one of my own, which use more advanced and sophisticated research methods, present a powerful challenge to the old consensus that the average impact of divorce on children is negative. These studies are able to eliminate the impact of both “observable” and “unobservable” family differences that result in variations in child outcome, independent of divorce, and this provides a more accurate estimate of the “true” impact of divorce.

All these new studies have discovered the same thing: The average impact of divorce in society at large is to neither increase nor decrease the behavior problems of children. These studies suggest that divorce, in and of itself, is not the cause of the elevated behavior problems we see in children of divorce. They include Aughinbaugh, Pierret, and Rothstein (2005), Foster and Kalil (2007), and Li (2007).

My study

While previous studies have compared the outcomes of children whose parents divorced to those of children whose parents remained together, I use a longitudinal study that measures changes in the behavior of children whose parents were not divorced at the beginning of the study but who divorced later. This allows me to investigate the counterfactual question, “What would have happened to the children’s behavior if their parents had remained married?” For an example of how this method works, and why other methods tend to over-estimate the impact of divorce on children’s behavior problems, see the Appendix at the end of this report.

The data I used included all children born to a national representative sample of American women born between 1958 and 1965. These same women had been surveyed repeatedly since 1979, and their children had been surveyed since 1988. Forty-seven percent of these mothers in my sample had been divorced by 2002. I used a 28-item checklist to measure behavior problems for children between 4 and 15 years of age. Mothers in each of the biennial survey filled out a questionnaire about whether their child engaged in behaviors such as cheating, deliberately breaking things, crying or arguing frequently and so forth. The mother of an average boy reported 8.7 items and the mother of an average girl reported 7.8 items that are often or sometimes true.

My study included a national sample of 6,332 children. It revealed that the estimated effect of a parental divorce on children’s behavior problems is so small that fewer than half of the divorced mothers would observe a one-item increase in the 28-item BPI checklist of their child. This is not a statistically significant effect.

Why would I get this result when other carefully-constructed studies, which controlled for observed differences, found larger, and statistically significant effects of divorce? The kind of observed differences that show up in surveys may fail to catch subtle differences between families that eventually divorce and those who do not. For example, certain aspects of child temperament and behavior are associated with parental personality traits that may be hereditary. If a child has parents with difficult temperaments and divorce-prone personality traits, the child will likely exhibit greater behavior problems whether or not the parents divorce, but the child will also be exposed to a higher risk of parental divorce. Or take the fact that the resources parents are able and willing to provide for their children may vary dramatically across marriages and across divorces. If so, there may be “good” parents and “bad” parents, as well as “good” spouses and “bad” spouses. It is plausible that a “bad” spouse may well have been a “bad” parent prior to marital disruption (and may, thus, have been a factor in causing the disruption).

Disengaged or unloving parents are detrimental for children’s emotional well-being and behavior. The lack of love on the part of one or both parents may increase the chance that the parents will divorce, but it may also create behavior problems in children whether or not their parents divorce. If so, we should not attribute the worse behavior of their children to the divorce itself, but to the impact of the unloving parent or parents. The point is that “bad” marriages are more likely to harm children’s well-being than good ones AND more likely to lead to divorce, and a marriage can be “bad” in many unobserved ways.

I am not saying that divorce doesn’t increase the behavior problems of some children, because I have focused only on the “average effect of divorce for the divorced.” It is possible that the dissolution of some marriages decreases some children’s behavior problems and the dissolution of others increases children’s behavior problems, so that they cancel each other out, creating the zero effect that I found when I totaled the average effect of divorce. However, for this to be true, one must admit that while certain divorces harm children, others benefit them. My findings contradict the widely-accepted claim that MOST divorces increase children’s behavior problems and that only a tiny minority of divorces do NOT.

It should be noted that my findings are only relevant to the kind of marriages where parents have qualities that make them likely to divorce. They should not be interpreted to imply that breaking up a randomly selected marriage in society would not lead to increased behavior problems for the children. But these findings do imply that to help children of divorce, social scientists and policy-makers should seek to understand and intervene in the processes both before and after a marriage comes apart, rather than seeking to simply prevent the divorce from occurring.

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About CCF

Founded in 1996 and now based in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Miami, the Council’s mission is to enhance the national understanding of how and why contemporary families are changing, what needs and challenges they face, and how these needs can best be met. To fulfill that mission, the Council holds annual conferences, open to the public, and issues periodic briefing papers and fact sheets.

November 15, 2006

Tricky Business of Estimating Divorce

By Patrick Heuveline
Population Research Center
University of Chicago
pheuveli@uchicago.edu

In a research brief from the Council on Contemporary Families, University of Chicago’s Patrick Heuveline explains how divorce rates get calculated. If you ever report on divorce rates, this article will give you confidence in how you interpret them, and will show you the key questions to ask your sources when they are reporting on divorce statistics. The full brief appears below, but first Dr. Heuveline, a fellow of the Council on Contemporary Families, answers two common questions.

Q. What is the overall divorce rate?

A. Divorce rates have come down slightly since 1981, but part of the decline is accounted for by a drop in the number of marriages. Nowadays, the idea of marriage is less popular amongst couples and so they just decide to continue cohabitating. The drop of divorce may also be down to the fact that more couples are now considering couples therapy to be an option if they run into marital issues, instead of just going straight into divorce proceedings. The proportion of first marriages that will eventually end in divorce still appears to be very close to one-half, while it is slightly higher for second and other marriages, and slightly lower for marriages with children. The divorce process can be complicated when there are children involved. Fortunately, a child custody lawyer lincoln can make it as smooth as possible. For people in their first marriages, in 1995 1 out of 5 married women divorced within the first five years of their marriage. Studies of marriages over that past few decades show that one out of 3 married women divorced within the first 10 years of their marriage. And 2 out of 5 had exited by year 15 of their marriage.

Q. Does that mean that every married couple has a 50 percent chance of ending up in divorce court?

A: No, because the chance of divorce varies by how long you’ve married, and also by region and education. The risk of divorce gets less the longer a marriage has survived. College-educated individuals have lower divorce rates than people with a high school education or less. People who marry young also have a higher risk of divorce. But divorce seems to be a very prevalent, and probably permanent, part of our family landscape. If you are going through a divorce, then you should probably get a lawyer involved (such as prime lawyers Sydney) to help make the divorce go smoothly.

One of the most frequently cited statistics about divorce in the United States is that half of all marriages end in divorce. Often this proportion is then used to predict the chance that any given (“average”) marriage will end in divorce.

At first glance it may seem easy to measure the proportion of marriages that will end in divorce. After all, all marriages must eventually end, either in death or divorce. So the proportion of marriages that end in divorce is simply the ratio of divorces to the total number of marriages that have ended. But the problem arises when you try to determine what will happen to people marrying today by using a measure derived from the past, from marriages that have all already ended, especially when the phenomenon you are trying to measure is changing over time. And as regards divorce, times have been changing.

Take the following assertion from the March 5, 2005 issue of The Economist: “Unlike marriage, divorce shows no sign of going out of style” in England and Wales. The article goes on to state that “for every 100 weddings [in 2003] there were 57 divorces.” Many observers yield to the same temptation to compute the ratio of divorces in a given year to weddings in that year because it is easy to access from vital statistics and can be based on marriages and divorces in a recent year, which skirts all the problems of having to examine marital events from the past. But this ratio is not very useful because it divides apples by oranges. Except perhaps in Hollywood, the people who divorce in a given year are rarely the same people who married that year. Even if the risk of divorce were constant, and a doubling in the number of marriages one year would result in a doubling of the number of divorces, the rise in divorces would not take place in the same year as the rise in marriages.

For example, if there is a big rise in marriages in a given year, that will make the ratio of divorces to marriages for that year drop significantly. Similarly, if the annual rate of marriages is dropping, as it has been in England and Wales, then the ratio of divorces per weddings in a given year is going to rise and will overestimate the chance that any particular marriage will end in divorce.

Demographers use a very different measure to determine from recent marital data the chance that any given marriage will end in divorce. That tool is the life table. The likelihood of divorce using the life table is more difficult to compute than simply dividing divorces in a given year by marriages that same year, but the underlying idea is relatively simple. The life table builds on the observation that the risk of divorce varies strongly by marriage duration. The divorce rate typically increases after marriage to a high about three years later, and then decreases with the duration of the marriage. So we begin by examining the data on marriages and divorces by duration. We can calculate the proportions of marriages that ended in divorce in a given year for marriages contracted that same year, the year before, two years before, ten years before, and so on. The life table then splices together all these proportions to represent how many marriages are still likely to remain intact after “n” years of marriage. In practice, life table estimates are most often based on sample surveys with the respondents reporting on their own experiences.

A survey-based life table study of the net risk of divorce for 15- to 44-year-old women in 1995 found that the proportion of first marriages having ended in divorce was 20 percent five years after marriage, 33 percent after ten years, and 43 percent after fifteen years. Since the risk of divorce in the next year gets less the longer a marriage has survived, the fact that the rate was 43 percent within 15 years suggests that the 50 percent figure is roughly correct for the total life span of recent cohorts. For second marriages the likelihood of divorce was higher, already reaching 39 percent after ten years of marriage.

The life table is the widely accepted approach to estimating the proportion of marriages that end in divorce. But when we project into the future we have to bear in mind that the table only tells us the proportion of marriages that will end in divorce if marriages were subjected throughout their duration to the risk of divorce observed during the most recent year for which there is data. In that sense it functions like a car speedometer. It only indicates how many miles will be driven in the next hour if a constant miles-per-hour speed is maintained. An experienced driver knows she must wait until her speed has stabilized before making any mileage inferences from her speedometer. So too demographers know that estimations can be greatly distorted when conditions are rapidly changing.

For instance, the introduction of laws making divorce easier to obtain may result in people getting divorced earlier than they otherwise would have, even if it doesn’t affect the total proportion getting divorced. We must take this “timing” bias into account or we may misread the life table estimates computed just after the change takes effect. Just after divorce becomes easier to obtain, we are likely to see a greater incidence of divorce among long-married people who were previously forced to stay together. So there will be a temporary spike in the divorce rate among people married for longer durations. But people married more recently won’t face the same obstacles to divorce in the future and are therefore less likely to be divorcing after a long period of marriage.

In retrospect, life table estimates of the proportion of marriages ending in divorce based on data from the 1970s and early 1980s seem to have slightly overestimated the divorce rate to be expected. But the life table estimates were still more useful than the alternatives discussed at the outset of this paper. Moreover, in the 1990s the proportion of a marriage cohort getting a divorce and the timing of that divorce appear to have stabilized, correcting that earlier slight overestimation of the divorce rate. Today, the proportion of first marriages that will eventually end in divorce appears to be very close to one-half, while it is slightly higher for second and other marriages, and slightly lower for marriages with children.

For Further Information

For more information on recent divorce and remarriage rates and trends, contact Andrew Cherlin, Griswold Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University: cherlin@jhu.edu;
Frank Furstenberg, Jr., Zellerbach Family Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania: fff@sas.upenn.edu;
or Paula England, Professor of Sociology, Stanford University: pengland@stanford.edu.

Also, if you’re in a troubled divorce situation it is absolutely critical you use a trusted divorce solicitor, not a cheap one. As they can miss important parts which could come at a cost to both parties.

On historical trends in divorce and remarriage, contact Stephanie Coontz, Professor of History and Family Studies, The Evergreen State College: coontzs@msn.com.

For Further Reading

“Cohabitation, marriage, divorce, and remarriage in the United States.” Vital and health statistics, Series 23, Data from the National Survey of Family Growth, No. 22.

On children’s experience of divorce in the United States: Bumpass, Larry L. 1984. “Children and Marital Disruption: A Replication and Update.” Demography 21(1):71-82.

On children’s family situations in the United States: Bumpass, Larry L. and Hsien-Hen Lu. 2000. “Trends in Cohabitation and Implications for Children’s Family Contexts in the United States.” Population Studies 54(1):29-41.

On comparing children’s experience in the United States and other Western countries: Heuveline, P., Timberlake, J.M., & Furstenberg, F. F., Jr. 2003. “Shifting Childrearing to Single Mothers: Results From 17 Western Countries.” Population and Development Review 29(1):47 -71.

About CCF

The Council on Contemporary Families is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to providing the press and public with the latest research and best-practice findings about American families. Our members include demographers, economists, family therapists, historians, political scientists, psychologists, social workers, sociologists, as well as other family social scientists and practitioners. Founded in 1996 and based at the University of Miami, the Council’s mission is to enhance the national understanding of how and why contemporary families are changing, what needs and challenges they face, and how these needs can best be met.

To learn more about other briefing papers and about our annual April conferences, including complimentary press passes for journalists, contact Stephanie Coontz, CCF’s Director of Research and Public Education: coontzs@msn.com.

May 1, 2004

Will Providing Marriage Rights To Same-Sex Couples Undermine Heterosexual Marriage? Evidence From Scandinavia

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By M. V. Lee Badgett
Professor of Economics
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

As a way to understand what might happen, some writers have looked to the experience of those Scandinavian countries that pioneered giving a marriage-like status to gay and lesbian couples. Denmark adopted such a law in 1989, Norway in 1993, Sweden in 1994, and Iceland in 1996. Since then, three other countries (France, Germany, and Finland) have also created a new status for same-sex couples, and two (the Netherlands and Belgium) opened marriage to same-sex couples.

What can we learn from the experience of these countries about the impact of giving gay couples the right to marry on heterosexual marriage patterns? On the one hand, the fact that Danish marriage rates increased slightly after the passage of partner recognition laws has led some observers to conclude that gay couples are saving the institution of marriage. On the other hand, Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institute claims that allowing gay couples to marry or have marital rights has undermined the institution of heterosexual marriage in Scandinavia (Kurtz 2004a). In this paper I show that this argument, which has been widely reprinted and quoted around the country, is based on the consistent misuse and misinterpretation of data.

The argument that same-sex partnerships undermine heterosexual marriage rests on four claims:

In the European countries that allow same-sex couples to register as partners, marriage and parenthood have become separated, and married parenthood has become a minority occurrence.
The separation of marriage and parenthood in those countries is disastrous for children because of higher rates of break-up among cohabitors.
Allowing gay marriage is both an effect and a cause of the separation of parenthood and marriage.
If the U.S. allows gay couples to marry, heterosexual people in the U.S. will adopt European-style family dynamics.

In fact, none of these claims fits the actual evidence of the Scandinavian experience.

Divorce rates have not risen since the passage of partnership laws and marriage rates have remained stable or actually increased.
The average Scandinavian child spends more than 80% of his or her life with both parents – more time than the average American child! Norwegian children spend, on average, 89 percent of their youth living with both parents. American children, by contrast, spend, on average, just 67 percent of their youth living with both parents.
Non-marital birth rates have not risen faster in Scandinavia since the passage of same-sex partnership laws. Although there has been a long term trend toward the separation of sex, reproduction, and marriage in the industrialized West, non-marital birth rates changed just as much in countries without partnership laws as in countries that legally recognize same-sex partnerships.

Married parents are still the majority in Scandinavia

Marriage and child-bearing have become less directly connected over time in many European countries, including Scandinavia. But as we shall see, this separation hardly qualifies as the death of marriage, and it cannot be blamed on the passage of same-sex partner laws. In fact, Denmark’s long-term decline in marriage rates turned around in the early 1980s, and the upward trend in heterosexual marriage has continued since the 1989 passage of the registered partner law Today, Danish heterosexual marriage rates are the highest they have been since the early 1970s. The most recent marriage rates in Sweden, Norway, and Iceland are also all higher today than they were in the years before the partner laws were passed.

No research suggests that recognizing same-sex couple relationships caused the increase in marriage rates. But heterosexual couples in those countries were clearly not deterred from marrying by the legalization of same-sex partnerships. And couples who do marry in these countries did not become more likely to divorce after the introduction of same-sex partner registration.

Cohabitation rates are indeed on the rise in Scandinavia and other European countries, as is the likelihood that an unmarried cohabiting couple will have children. In Denmark, the number of cohabiting couples with children rose by 25% in the 1990s. Roughly half of all births in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and almost two-thirds in Iceland, are to parents who are not married. From these figures, Kurtz concludes that “married parenthood has become a minority phenomenon” (Kurtz 2000a).

In fact, however, the majority of families with children in Scandinavia are still headed by married parents. In 2000, for instance, 78% of couples with children were married couples in Denmark. Even if we also include single-parent families in the calculation, almost two-thirds of all families with children were headed by a married couple. In Norway, 79% of couples with children are married.

How can this fact coexist with high non-marital birth rates and cohabitation rates? The main reason is that most cohabiting couples marry after they start having children. In Sweden, for instance, 70% of cohabiters marry after the birth of the first child, most of them within five years. As a result, high rates of married couple parenting and rising marriage rates in Scandinavia are not incompatible with high non-marital birth rates.

The Impact on Children

Kurtz claims that the rise in non-marital births hurts children because unmarried couples are more likely to break-up than married couples. It is true that unmarried cohabiters’ unions are more likely to dissolve than are marriages, even when children are present. But when cohabiting parents marry in Scandinavian countries, as most eventually do, they are not more likely to divorce than are couples who were married when they first had their children.

As a result, children in Scandinavia countries still spend most of their lives with their parents living together. In fact, they spend more time than kids in the U.S. do!

Gunnar Andersson has calculated how much time the average child in Europe and America spends living with both parents in the same household. Of the countries he examined, the lowest average is in the United States, where the time spent with both parents is 67%. The highest is in Italy, where it is 97%. In Sweden the average is 81%, in Finland it is 88%, and in Norway it is 89%. In other words, combining the time that parents are cohabiting and married demonstrates that Scandinavian children are spending the vast majority of their young lives with their parents.

Did gay marriage widen the split between parenthood and marriage?

No one would argue that marriage plays the same role in Scandinavia and in other parts of Europe that it once did. And to his credit, Kurtz himself recognizes that changes in marriage in Scandinavia were in many ways cause rather than effect of the legal recognition extended to gay couples. He acknowledges that high rates of cohabitation and the changing role of marriage in Scandinavia made it more likely that those countries would be the innovators in giving marriage-like rights to gay people. The decline of religious practice and belief, the rise of the welfare state, advances in contraception and abortion, and the improving economic status of women – all long-term trends in Scandinavia – probably contributed both to the rise in cohabitation and to the equalizing of rights for gay and lesbian people.

But Kurtz claims that registered partnerships “further undermined the institution” of marriage and that gay marriage “widened the separation” between marriage and parenthood. In other words, things were already bad, but gay marriage made it worse.

However, this argument does not hold up either, since the non-marital birth rate began rising in the 1970s, long before any legal recognition of same-sex couples. From 1970 to 1980, the Danish non-marital birth rate tripled, from 11% to 33%. It rose again in the following decade, but by a much smaller amount, reaching 46% in 1990, but then leveled off. Denmark’s non-marital birth rate did not increase at all when the Danish partnership law was passed in 1989. In fact, it actually decreased a bit after that date!

From 1980 to 1989, before Denmark passed the registered partner law, the number of cohabiting couples with children rose by 70%. Between 1989 and 2000, the figure rose by only 28%, and between 2000 to 2003, the number increased by a barely perceptible 0.3%. This will appear to the average reader to contradict the previous claim. Do we need it? If so, it needs to be framed better.

Norway’s big surge in non-marital births also occurred well before the passage of same-sex partnership recognition in 1993. In the 1980s, the percentage of births to unmarried parents rose from 16% to 39%. In the first half of the 1990s, the non-marital birth rate rose more slowly, leveling off at 50 % in the mid-1990s. If the partnership law had “further” encouraged non-marital births, the rate should have increased faster, but in fact, as in Denmark, the increase in non-marital childbearing slowed down or stopped after the passage of registered partnership laws.

The Netherlands show a slightly different pattern, but here too there is no correlation between recognition of same-sex partnerships and rising rates of non-marital births. The Dutch lagged well behind Scandinavia in births by unmarried couples, with rates remaining below 10% until 1988. Sometime around 1992 the non-marital birth rate started increasing at a somewhat faster rate, but this acceleration began well before the Netherlands implemented registered same-sex partnerships in 1998 and gave same-sex couples the right to marry in 2001.

It is also instructive to compare the trends of countries that have a partner registration law with those that do not. If recognizing gay couples contributed to the increase in non-marital births, then we should see a bigger change in countries with those laws than in countries without them. Data from Eurostat shows that in the 1990s, the eight countries that recognized registered partners at some point in that decade saw an increase of eight percentage points in the average non-marital birth rate – from 36% in 1991 to 44% in 2000. In the EU countries (plus Switzerland) that didn’t recognize partners, the non-marital birth rate rose by exactly the same amount, though it started from a lower base. In this case, the increase was from 15% to 23%.

Only one piece of evidence supports Kurtz’s argument that same-sex partnerships created a new wedge between parenthood and marriage – and that piece of evidence directly contradicts Kurt’s ideas about the cause of such a separation. Contrary to what many observers believe, Scandinavian parliaments did not give same-sex couples the exact same rights as heterosexual ones. Quite deliberately, the various Scandinavian parliaments chose to provide legal ties for same-sex couples through a special new legal relationship, not by the simpler path of extending the right to marry to same-sex couples. And they denied same-sex couples the right to adopt children (including their non-biological children raised from birth) or to gain access to reproductive technologies.

Thus Scandinavian governments did create a wedge between marriage and reproduction – but they did so by design and for same-sex couples only. Despite some loosening of those prohibitions over time, registered partners who want to have children still face legal hurdles that heterosexual married couples do not.

The Impact of Gay Marriage in the U.S.

In the end, the Scandinavian experience suggests that those who worry that heterosexual people will flee marriage if gay people get the same rights have no basis for their concerns. This is especially true in the United States, where couples have many more tangible incentives to marry. Scholars of social welfare programs have noted that our country relies heavily on the labor market and families to provide income and support for individuals. In the United States, unlike Scandinavia, marriage is often the only route to survivor coverage in pensions and social security, and many people have access to health care only through their spouse’s employment. Scandinavian states are much more financially supportive of families and individuals, regardless of their family or marital status. The lack of support alternatives plus the tangible benefits of marriage all lead to one conclusion: If and when same-sex couples are allowed to marry, heterosexual couples will continue to marry in the United States.

Conclusion

Overall, there is no evidence that giving partnership rights to same-sex couples had any impact on heterosexual marriage in Scandinavia. Marriage rates, divorce rates, and non-marital birth rates have been changing in Scandinavia, Europe, and the United States for the past thirty years. But those changes have occurred in all countries, regardless of whether or not they adopted same-sex partnership laws. Furthermore, the legal and cultural context in the United States gives many more incentives for heterosexual couples to marry than in Europe, and those incentives will still exist even if same-sex couples can marry. Giving same-sex couples marriage or marriage-like rights has not undermined heterosexual marriage in Europe, and it is not likely to do so in the United States.