Number 10 needs a Family Policy Unit
The costs – personal, social, economic – of family breakdown are vast and underappreciated. This is a social justice issue. My article for the political website ConservativeHome … A friend of ours is an amazing woman who has brought up her now teenage children on her own, having split from the father soon after their […]
Falling divorce rates mean more intact families, new ONS stats show
Falling divorce means more intact families, says Harry Benson, Research Director for Marriage Foundation New ONS Families and Household data for 2019 are released today “Today’s figures provide yet another reminder to politicians of all parties that if they want greater family stability, they must wholeheartedly back marriage and commitment. Despite the well-documented increase in […]
Happy wife, Happy life
It’s a well-known expression. But in an age of equality where men and women are equals, is it true? Does a happy wife really have more influence on a family’s well-being than a happy husband? Previous research has suggested this might be the case. Separate studies have shown that happy wives tend to influence their […]
A nation divided … over marriage
It’s not just Brexit. Britain is also a nation divided over marriage. The better off marry and mostly stay together. The less well off don’t marry and face a much higher risk of splitting up. New figures out from the Office for National Statistics show that the vast majority of parents start off as a […]
A really good news story to begin 2019
One of the issues we’ve tried to address at Marriage Foundation is to find out the scale of family breakdown. A few years back, we addressed this by analysing data from 2010 in a big national survey called Understanding Society. From this, we worked out that 45 per cent of all teens were not living […]
Keeping mum boosts mental health, teens told
PRESS RELEASE FROM MARRIAGE FOUNDATION Date: 02 August 2018 Keeping mum boosts mental health, teens told Mummy’s boys may be the butt of jokes and subject to name-calling, but they actually fare better in roughing out the challenges of teenage life than those more detached from their mother’s apron strings. New research by Marriage Foundation, […]
A simple policy on marriage for Mrs May
Government policy on marriage is lukewarm at best and downright ambivalent at worst. On the one hand, the state is terribly interested in marriage. We have strict laws on who can marry and how marriages can end, and we have special rules that favour transfers of assets between husband and wife in life and after death. But […]
Cheap sex, so why should men marry?
There’s a deep irony about the subject of marriage and men. On the one hand, marriage appears to benefit men more than women. Men’s health in particular, for example, is better among those who get and stay married. On the other hand, men appear to resist marriage more than women. In a couple of surveys […]
The ‘burning injustice’ that the poor no longer marry
Harry and Meghan have just done it. His older brother did it a few years ago. Some of his cousins have done it. And his father has even done it twice. Indeed it would be considered quite odd if Prince Harry and Meghan Markle hadn’t got married. Royal weddings and marriages are a bit of a […]
Does marriage really get worse over time?
Ever since the 1930s, conventional wisdom among researchers has been that marriage tends to start off looking good and then gradually deteriorates over time. Although most studies have followed couples over the first few years of marriage, a handful of studies have covered as long as forty years. Nonetheless the overall conclusion has been clear. The longer marriages […]