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1. Boys raised outside of an intact nuclear family are more than twice as likely as other boys to end up in prison, even controlling for a range of social and economic factors (Harper and McLanahan 1998).
2. Children who grew up in a single parent home are twice as likely to get divorced than children who grew up in a two parent biological family (Bumpass and Sweet 1995).
3. Children raised in a single-parent family are twice as likely to drop out of high school, and girls raised in such a family are more than twice as likely to have a child out-of-wedlock as a teenager compared to children who grow up with their biological parents (McLanahan and Sandefur 1994).
4. Individuals who cohabit before they marry face a significantly higher chance of getting divorced than those who do not cohabit. Married couples where both spouses have cohabited are between 33% (Cherlin 1992) and 50% (Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, and Michaels 1994) more likely to divorce than married couples where neither spouse has cohabited.
5. Because cohabitation does not provide institutionalized norms or a long-term horizon of relationship commitment, cohabiting couples place a much greater stress on equality and freedom in their relationships. “This freedom, however, comes with the loss of incentives to invest jointly in the relationship and of clear cultural guidelines for how partners might conduct themselves once they set up a household. Equality is a costly principle to maintain, in part because it requires frequent monitoring of each partner’s holdings.”
As a consequence, long-term cohabiting couples are much more likely to break up than married couples (Brines and Joyner 1999).
6. Single women under the age of 35 who never attend church are almost twice as likely to cohabit as those who attend church (Protestant or Catholic) on a weekly basis (Bumpass and Sweet 1995).
7. Men who attend church once a week or more are significantly less likely to physically abuse their wives.
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