The UK’s Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), which last June spoke out against daycare, has now said that children do best when raised in families headed by two parents married to each other.  Such parents are far more likely than cohabiting parents to stay together and provide a safe and stable home environment.  Children receive great benefits from such stability early in life, and in later life are more likely to be steadily employed and stay out of trouble with the law.

The report from the country's most prominent and influential Left-leaning policy group contradicts eight years of Government rhetoric saying that all families are equally good.

Billions of pounds have been targeted at single parents while ministers have undermined the legal and social status of marriage, according to critics.

But yesterday the policy institute acknowledged that research clearly showed that 'children who grow up with both biological parents do better on a wide range of outcomes than children who grow up in a single-parent family'. It added: 'While this research may be instinctively difficult for those on the Left to accept, the British evidence seems to support it.'

The IPPR report attributes worsening behaviour of British teenagers to the decline of the traditional married family.

‘Changes to families, such as more parents working, and rising rates of divorce and single parenthood, have undermined the ability of families to effectively socialise young people.'
. . .
The report said: 'Single parents, it has been shown, can be less emotionally supportive, have fewer rules, dispense harsher discipline, are often more inconsistent in dispensing discipline, provide less supervision, and engage in more conflict with their children.'

As the report admitted, the evidence shows that children raised by cohabiting parents or single parents tend to do worse in life than children of married parents.

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