They’re ignoring the evidence on marriage and child health

Children’s health in this country is declining, according to the Royal College of Paediatricians and Child Health. Its State of Child Health report came out in July and says outcomes for children have “worsened or in some cases stagnated, reversing years of progress”. It looked at twelve indicators, from babies dying to obesity.

Now, we already know something that helps. Study after study has found that children raised by their own married mother and father do better on average – in health, in school, in how life turns out – than children from cohabiting or broken homes. You would expect the people measuring children’s health to be all over that. They are not, and that is a matter of concern.

The first thing the paediatricians ask ministers for is not money. It is better figures. They want one clear national measure of how our children are doing, because nothing like it exists today.

So, what should that measure count?

When a baby is born, one of the things the registrar takes down is the date of the parents’ marriage or civil partnership. If there is no date, that gets recorded too. Every birth in England and Wales is sorted that way, all 585,270 of them last year.

And then nobody ever looks at it again.

In May, the Office for National Statistics published its report on the babies who die before their first birthday. Every one of those deaths is a family’s world broken, and the State rightly asks question after question about them. It looks at the mother’s age, at how early and how small the baby was, at where the family lived, at how poor the family was, at what work the parents did and at the family’s ethnic group. Marriage is not among the questions, there or anywhere else. That says nothing about any grieving family. It is a choice made in an office about what gets examined.

The same choice runs right through the paediatricians’ work too – nothing on marriage in their report for England, nothing in their twelve measures, nothing in what they have asked ministers to do.

Two big reports on our children’s health this year, and marriage has been left out of both. So, neither of them can tell you what difference a married mum and dad make to a child’s health in this country. Not because the answer is awkward but because officialdom has never looked.

The reason for the findings of the research is no mystery. By the time a child is five, more than half of children born to cohabiting parents will have watched their parents split up. For children born to married parents it is fewer than one in six. That gap is the difference between a childhood that holds together and one that comes apart.

Someone will say that what matters is stability, then, not marriage. But marriage is where the stability is. That is exactly what those figures show.

There is better news here than you might expect. Last year, most babies in England and Wales were born to married parents – around 53 in every 100. In 2022, it was fewer than half.

None of that undoes what I wrote to you a fortnight ago about marriage among adults. But among the babies arriving now, married parents are back in the majority, and it's the first good news on marriage I’ve had to give you in a long while.

Whether it shows up in those children’s health, none of us can say, because nobody is keeping the score. I would like that changed. So, this week, I’m writing to the team behind the report at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and to the minister responsible for public health at the Department of Health and Social Care. Record a child’s health, and record whether the parents married, and let the figures say what they say. Marriage is written down at every birth in this country. It is long past time the country looked at it.