Something big is happening with babies in Chile—and it's at the heart of a unique study into what it means to be born to married versus unmarried parents.
In Chile, the proportion of births among women based on their marital status has shifted dramatically in the last 30 years. More unmarried women today give birth relative to married women. While this trend has been happening in most of the Western world, the drop has been especially sharp in Chile.
This has allowed Florencia Torche, a professor of sociology in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, and Alejandra Abufhele of the Universidad Católica de Chile to investigate a key question about marriage's effects on child development and society's role in promoting them.
Social scientists have long known that the offspring of married couples have significant, lifelong advantages over children born to unwed mothers, including better mental and physical health, higher levels of education and higher incomes. Research into this "marriage premium" has identified the multitude of individual differences—in race, socioeconomic status, personality, among other characteristics—to account for the discrepancies between children of married and unmarried parents.
But what about society's role? When it comes to the marriage premium and child development, society's influence has always been part of the conversation, but assumptions about its impact have not been proven.
"The question of the institution of marriage—how normative or accepted it is within society—and how it might affect the marriage premium has been curiously missing as a focus of research," said Torche, whose research focuses on inequality and well-being across generations, including the effects of early life exposures to shocks such as natural disasters, armed conflict and crackdowns on immigration.
Torche and Abufhele saw in Chile a "unique and exceptional opportunity" to tackle this question head on. In a paper published April 14 in the American Journal of Sociology, the pair detail striking evidence that societal perceptions of matrimony also contribute to the marriage premium.
"As marriage has lost its normative status in Chile, the marriage premium for children also declined to the point where it fully disappeared," Torche said. "Our analysis of that decline shows that the status of marriage in society matters."
The researchers say their findings do not discount the role that parents and their marital circumstances contribute to the marriage—it's just not the whole story. "Both factors matter," Torche said. "Individual characteristics matter and the extent to which marriage is a norm in a society also matter."
Source: Phys,org
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