Revisiting the Role of Marriage: A Cornerstone of Social Stability and Well-being

As we confront the multifaceted social challenges of the modern world, the institution of marriage stands as a crucial, yet often overlooked, pillar of societal stability. This is not only the case in South Africa but holds true globally, with long-running social science work linking marriage and family stability to downstream outcomes in communities, including economic security and social cohesion, as argued by Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher in The Case for Marriage published in 2000.

In recent decades, marriage rates have declined, while levels of divorce, cohabitation, and childbearing outside of marriage have risen. Internationally, scholars such as Andrew Cherlin have described this shift as a weakening of marriage as a social institution, a theme he set out in his 2004 work on the deinstitutionalisation of marriage, and South Africa’s own official statistical reporting on marriages and divorces helps place local trends within that wider global pattern through Statistics South Africa’s regular Marriages and Divorces releases.

That benchmark matters because South Africa’s marriage rate is now low even by international standards. Statistics South Africa reports 105 123 marriages and unions registered in 2023, and a crude marriage rate of 1.7 marriages per 1 000 people, down from 2.8 per 1 000 in 2014. The OECD puts its 2023 average at 4.3 marriages per 1 000, with most member countries sitting between 3 and 5.

The OECD is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a club of mostly high income countries that publishes comparable social and economic indicators so readers can see how one country stacks up against another on the same yardstick.

What makes this more than a cultural debate is what children actually experience inside households. In its latest General Household Survey, Statistics South Africa reports that 31.4% of children lived with both parents, while 45.5% lived with only their mothers. The OECD Family Database tracks a related but not identical measure, and reports that across an OECD 22 country average the share of children living with two married parents fell from 73% in 2005 to 65% in 2023, while the share living with two cohabiting parents rose from 9% to 17%.

None of this is unique to South Africa. Eurostat estimates that 41.1% of live births in the European Union in 2023 were outside marriage, a sign of how widely childrearing has decoupled from marriage in many modern societies. The South African picture is sharper because a low marriage rate sits alongside a household reality in which fewer than a third of children live with both parents, and that combination magnifies the pressure on families already asked to do more with less.

Marriage has long been recognised as a fundamental institution in human societies, forming the foundation for family life, childrearing, and broader social cohesion. The core argument is not romantic, but practical, because a large body of empirical research has found that, on average, children raised in stable two-parent households tend to fare better across schooling and behavioural measures than children raised in single-parent settings, an association documented in the classic work by Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent, published in 1994.

Decades of research consistently demonstrates that children raised in stable, two-parent households, particularly those in marriages, tend to experience stronger emotional, academic, and social outcomes compared to those raised in single-parent or unstable cohabiting arrangements. Researchers such as Paul Amato have repeatedly tested these links across multiple studies and datasets, including his 2005 work on how family formation change shapes child well-being, while McLanahan’s later work on diverging destinies, published in 2014, situates family stability within broader inequality trends that increasingly shape children’s life chances.