I suppose you shouldn’t expect much from a right-wing misinformation rag like this but anyone with half a brain can tell that their conclusion doesn’t follow from their very questionable Center for Christian Value “study” led by Brad Wilcox, “a professor of ancient scripture”. They see the correlation between poverty and not getting married and conclude that not getting married is the cause of poverty. As we all know throwing a wedding is a great way to earn money. That’s it. That’s the whole study. There’s 60 pages of “look at this chart!” and a chapter dedicated to how churches should encourage marriage, but all they say is that poor people don’t get married.

They also for some reason assume every single-parent family is a single-parent family because the parents got divorced and any children live with their mother. Single father are mentioned twice in the entire study as an afterthought and don’t seem to be included in the data they use.

My favourite part was their claim that children living with married parents were 10 times less likely to have witnessed domestic violence than children whose parents had at some point split up. Clearly domestic violence was because they broke up! It’s not like people break up because of domestic violence, that’s just silly. I’m not even exaggerating there, they do admit that domestic violence can lead to breakups but conclude that breaking up is actually the cause of most domestic violence.

Why are children in disrupted families more likely to experience domestic violence? Physically aggressive behavior on the part of one partner sometimes leads to the couple divorcing or not getting married in the first place. But the dynamics of the divorce process can also increase the probability of one or both partners becoming frustrated and angry. The legal system can encourage combat rather than cooperation between litigants, for instance. Sexual jealousy may play a role as well, as one or both parents develop new intimate relationships. And in the case of parents who never marry, a new boyfriend or girlfriend frequently assumes a step-parental role, whether formally or informally. This can lead to conflict over the legitimacy of the substitute parent’s authority over the children, differences in parenting styles or willingness to tolerate disobedient behavior by the children, or the non-resident biological parent feeling that he or she is being displaced. Cases of child neglect and abuse often involve a boyfriend or girlfriend caregiver who does not have biological ties to the child victim.29

That citation on the end is them citing themselves. Most of their citations are. In fact, over 10% of citations are just Wilcox specifically citing his own book. It’s the academic equivalent of saying “it’s true because I said it yesterday too”.