‘Healthier to be wed’

While this sounds like it makes a pragmatic case for valuing marriage and therefore a case to support marriage as part of social policy, I have concerns. The CT report is here: Church Times - ‘Healthier to be wed’ and the guts of the report are, I judge, this: "The Centre’s research found that co-habiting couples were more than twice as likely as married couples to break up, and that, on average, half of all cohabiting couples will break up by a child’s fifth birthday, compared with just one in 12 married couples.
The findings suggested that children from lone-parent families were 75 per cent more likely to fail at school, and 70 per cent more likely to succumb to drug addiction."
It's obviously one of those things to read more and further because what is stated above is tantalisingly brief. The main difficulty is that without a fuller exploration of the factors that produce the figures, it is hard to assess the significance. Why are co-habitees more likely to break up? Is it something intrinsic to either state or extrinsic but collateral? What would it be about lone-parent families that would produce the shocking figures above? It should be noted that it is a right-ish wing think tank set up by IDS.

One of the interesting bits in the CSJ report is a refutation of the idea that there were a lot of informal relationships in times past; it would seem that studies indicate that 98% of cohabitations were supported by records of a marriage (p.49-50).