The Not-So Fact Based "Marriage Works" PR Campaign
According to a new ad campaign sponsored by the Baltimore-based Campaign for Our Children (CFOC) and apparently funded in part with public dollars, married people "earn more" and have smarter kids. According to CFOC's website:
The campaign’s core message is a practical, added-value approach that can be summed up in just two words: Marriage Works.
....
Using available research – and there’s plenty of it – we explain the benefits of marriage in fact-based, no-nonsense ways that teens and adults can understand and respond to. And as the facts demonstrate, the benefits of marriage are compelling and far-reaching.
With focused, persuasive television and radio commercials, billboards, bus shelter ads and a web presence, Marriage Works drives home the practical benefits of matrimony.
CFOC argues that "research suggests that children do best when two parents who have a healthy marriage raise them." However, their ads drop the "healthy" part in favor of a simplistic "marriage good" message. Moreover, there's no consensus among researchers on whether higher levels of well-being in married families are due to marriage itself or to other unmeasured factors. If it's the latter, marriage promotion efforts could actually reduce child well-being (both directly by encouraging couples to marry who would be better off unmarried, and indirectly, by stigmatizing children of unmarried parents). A new working paper finds evidence to support this less sanguine conclusion:
... [our] estimates suggest that unobserved factors rather than a causal effect drive the negative relationship between never-married motherhood and child outcomes for blacks and Hispanics, at least for the children of women whose marriage decisions are most affected by variation in incarceration rates for men. For Hispanics, in particular, we find evidence that these children may actually be better off living with a never-married mother.
In their lit review, the authors cite additional recent research suggesting that the impact of marriage on child well-being may vary by socio-economic status.
Another simplistic claim made in the CFOC ads is that "married people earn more." Here, again, recent research suggests things aren't so simple. According to a summary of some of this research by Justin Wolfers:
... Kelly Bedard and Olivier Deschenes ... find that divorce actually led women to live in households with greater income per person. ....
And Ananat and Michaels agree, finding similar effects. They then slice and dice this surprising finding, concluding that divorce may raise incomes on average, but it leads some women to lower incomes, and some to higher incomes. Those who gain tend to be in a (slight) minority, but they tend to gain more, which explains the rise in average income.
In short, there is strong evidence that the decisions couples make to dissolve their unions (or not enter into them in the first place) are often beneficial. In the best interests of children, CFOC would be wise to discontinue ads that provide a partial and misleading picture of the evidence on this score.