Kids from Married Parents do significantly better than those from Cohabitating parents

[drosophila]

According to Gloria Hunniford this morning on 'Heaven and Earth'. They were having a debate about marriage Vs commitment without marriage and Gloria announces that according to research (she didn't provide a source) kids do much better (not sure what she meant perhaps academically) if their parents are married than if they simply live together.

DP and I have been together for 18years and we have two kids. Are our kids worse off than say a couple who have been married for say 5 years. I'm not against marriage particularly just wonder where we would get the time to do it.

Anyone care to share their thoughts?

Hi Riab, yes, I think I was thinking (in that less than crystal clear way one does after midnight) that the sensible thing would be to require anybods who wanted to be legally paired off to form a civil partnership, and keep the religious (or for that matter humanist / existentialist / whatever) marriage a separate ceremonial , non-legal affair.

Apart from that, I agree with bibliophile, how much of a fuss you make of 'your day' is entirely up to you & yours. I've been to church weddings with meringues and full choirs and others with half a dozen people in the front pew. One civil wedding I went to took over an entire country house hotel, while another took over .... a London black cab

As for the children, my hunch is that what makes the difference to them is how committed their parents are to each other, irrespective of bits of paper. If your parents are committed to staying together & working at their relationship with each other, married, partnered or not, they're surely more likely to work at their relationship with you the child(ren), besides providing good role models for 'how to be an OK human being'? Getting married / civilly partnered is surely just a (probably not highly accurate, given the divorce rates) marker for some degree of commitment.

You can do the same thing on a DIY basis with parental rights recognition, wills, joint tenancies etc. and I know people who have done, and just had a big party.

Mind, some of the DIY can be a right faff - a few years back a friend had to adopt his own children in order to be legally their father, because although he and his partner had been together for over 10 years, they were not married (& had no intention of becoming so). I know the law's been changed since then - good thing too!

Wonder why my point about non-marrieds having their parents as their next of kin is being ignored

Haven't read all the posts but it is interesting as I'm kind ogf in this same situation.

Dp and I got engaged a few weeks ago and I thought that a marriage would follow - even if it was in a couple of years - but dp is know backtracking and saying that being engaged is enough.

But for me, being married would make our relationship more complete ( he disagrees and says all is fine as it is, we have a baby and a mortgage surely thats commitment enough?)

I don't know how to explain it, but it would make it more official and I'm sure ds would benifit us being one unit and with me having the same name as him.

am not ignoring you Cam but is your point that we should get married to acheive independence from our parents?

officially anyone can nominate who their next of kin is. you can put it on a little card and carry it around. I have one. and legally that's ok. trouble is the hospital or whatever doesn't always recognise it in an emergency.

the title: Kids from Married Parents do significantly better than those from Cohabitating parents, is just not true and a sweeping generalisation

Southeastastra agree. Children who have both parents living with them, married or not, are extrememly lucky nowadays.

I'm not married, for reasons linked to Fennel's points. DS is clearly stunted, warped and off the rails as a result, but it could be worse.

I don't whinge about it, either. afaik, there are some advantages to NOT being married - yes,you would have to pay inheritnace tax on your dp's half of the house, BUT if you are not married and own a house as 'tennants in common', you can both leave the full amount inheritance-tax-free to your children. (when I expire, dp will have to go and live in an ashram in india as he threatens, while DS sets himself up nicely. Not that our house is worth twice the threshold for inheritance tax!).

I do think it is unfair that based on exactly the same payments IN, married couples benefit more from a pension than either single or co-habitees who don't draw payments down for a spouse. All payments are based on a proportion of what is in the fund - I think you should have to sign up for s 'self-only' pension or a 'spouse / partner' pension and make payments accordingly.

The idea of being a 'wife' gives me the eebie-jeebies. The idea of being totally committed does not.

Hate the thought of either me or dh being on our uppers when one of us kicks it....oldest dd is already self-sufficient and youngest dd will be able to earn her own dosh...much prefer the situation where the spouse automatically inherits.

I think it all depends on how you experience very individual subjective responses to it all. atm I feel I'd rather dp or I had to live in a tent, and DS become a very spoilt property-owning brat of a young man than allow any extra pennies in IHT to go to the damn government!

Though generally, I'm all for higher taxes and better education and health care.

Think the trick is to sell up to downsize at a certain point and give over some money then to offspring (the only catch being that you have to guarantee to live for at least another 7 years to avoid IT)

Cam when DP's brother died there was a point at the hosp where they needed to do some radical surgery to try and save his life. His partner (mother of his children) was not asked for consent as they were not married and his parents were. There was a moment when the Mum hesitated about the treatment (it was radical) and i will never forget the look on the partner's face. Technically your children will be your next of kin when they reach the age of majority.

Even after seeing all this DP and I still haven't married but we feel we should but I think deep down we have misgivings. I think it has something to do with us both being products of unhappy marriages where our mothers were trapped.

see this link which suggests (about 3/4 down the page, under "Scope of the project.... we shall also not consider") that next of kin for NHS purposes does include cohabiting partners. The law commmission are not considering changing next of kin rights because in their opinion partners already have this.

but I am not sure if in practice this has filtered down to the people who would matter in an emergency.

Me and my OH are not married. Our ds is 22 months old. We have been living together since we left school and got engaged soon after. We were beginning to plan our wedding when I found out I was pregnant - well we couldn't afford both.

We do really want to get married, and would be able to afford a small registry office wedding. However there are several problems with this.

1. We both come from very religious families and they would be very hurt if we did not get married in a church. We are very close to our families and do not want to hurt them in this way.

2. Both my parents come from very large families (mum has 4 siblings and dad has 10) and so any wedding would be large because of the number of family involved which would make any wedding expensive.

Personally me and OH would be happy with a registry office wedding however the hurt it would cause to our parents and other relatives is too much for us.

Therefore until our financial circumstances change we will remain cohabiting parents - this is something that gets to me, but we don't have the money to change it.

Very intersting fennel.

Yes, interesting.

"Consultation" but would an unmarried partner's views hold sway over the parents?

Kinship has always required a legal relationship.