ON Sunday, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson told the Observer that ‘we don’t know why British children are some of the unhappiest’. She blamed screen time and a lack of outdoor play. She described a ‘funny kind of paradox’ in which parents can track their children’s every move but are increasingly reluctant to let them go outside.
It was a striking admission from the minister responsible for children’s wellbeing – and it was almost entirely wrong. Not wrong about the screens, which are plainly a problem. Wrong about the ‘we don’t know’. We do know. The evidence has been piling up for years. The Government simply will not say the word. The word is marriage.
Two days before Phillipson’s interview, the Times ran a story based on a new study by Denson and Denson, published in the Journal of Family Issues. The headline read ‘Does parenthood make you happy?’ The answer, according to the study of more than 26,000 people across 24 European countries, is ‘no’. Parents and non-parents showed no significant difference in overall happiness.
The Times treated this as news. But the finding is a statistical artefact, and a well-documented one at that. The Denson study pools together every kind of parent – married, cohabiting, single, divorced – and compares them with every kind of non-parent. When you do that, the answer comes back flat. It is like asking whether exercise makes people healthier by averaging marathon runners and people who have just fallen off a treadmill.
The Institute for Family Studies has been asking the question the Times did not: among parents, are married parents happier than unmarried ones? The answer is overwhelming. The most recent analysis of the US General Social Survey 2022 data, conducted by Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang, found that 40 per cent of married mothers report being ‘very happy’ compared with just 17 per cent of unmarried mothers. Among men, 35 per cent of married fathers report being ‘very happy’ compared with about 15 per cent of unmarried childless men. The University of Chicago identifies marital status as ‘the most important differentiator’ of who is happy in America, with a 30 percentage point happiness gap between married and unmarried Americans.
The European data tell the same story. Blanchflower and Clark, analysing more than one million observations from the Eurobarometer surveys, found that when all parents are pooled, the correlation between children and wellbeing is zero or negative. But when disaggregated by marital status they found that ‘marital status matters. Kids do not raise happiness for singles, the divorced, separated or widowed’. When financial difficulties are controlled, children make married couples happier.
The so-called ‘parenthood penalty’ is not a penalty for having children. It is a penalty for having children outside a stable marriage.
Phillipson says she does not know why British children are unhappy. Her own department’s data should give her a clue.
The Children’s Society’s Good Childhood Report 2024 found that UK 15-year-olds have the lowest life satisfaction in Europe – 25.2 per cent reporting low life satisfaction, compared with 16.6 per cent across comparable European countries. Unicef’s Report Card 18 2025 ranked the UK 27th out of 36 rich countries on children’s mental health, and joint second from last for teenage life satisfaction.
What sits underneath these rankings? Family stability. The most methodologically sophisticated recent UK research – from Stastna, Mikolai, Finney and Keenan at St Andrews – found that children whose family trajectories included parental separation or the entrance of a non-biological father had the worst mental health outcomes of any group studied. Over a quarter of UK children do not continuously live with both biological parents during their first ten years. The Institute for Fiscal Studies found that cohabiting parents were three times more likely than married parents to have separated by their child’s fifth birthday – 27 per cent versus 9 per cent, even after controlling for the mother’s education, ethnicity, and background. And cross-national data from the World Family Map found that 62 per cent of British children born to cohabiting parents had experienced family breakdown before age 12, the highest figure in any developed country studied.
So why will the Education Secretary not say the word? Because in our age anyone who mentions family structure in a policy context gets called sinister or exclusionary.
Last week, Zoe Grunewald wrote in the New World that pro-family policy is ‘sinister’, framing it as coded ethno-nationalism. Two days later, Labour minister Olivia Bailey told the Guardian that pro-family policies are ‘an exclusionary sham’ that fail to support ‘families of all different shapes and sizes’.
These arguments deserve to be taken seriously, and then answered. The critique commits a basic category error: it moves from ‘some pro-natalists have objectionable motives’ to ‘all policy that recognises the benefits of marriage for children is suspect’. That does not follow. The evidence that children do better in stable married families is not produced by any political party. It is produced by the Institute for Family Studies, the St Andrews ESRC research group, the Children’s Society, Unicef, the Avon Longitudinal Study, the General Social Survey and Eurobarometer. Dismissing the evidence because you dislike some of the people who cite it is not serious policy thinking.
No government department under any party has ever formally recommended marriage as beneficial for children’s wellbeing. This Labour Government has moved in the opposite direction: consulting on extending quasi-marital rights to cohabiting couples, while the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill does not contain a single reference to marriage or family structure. The couple penalty in Universal Credit remains untouched. A married couple with children in this country is actively penalised by the system for being married.
Phillipson says she does not know why British children are unhappy. The evidence says otherwise.
British children are unhappy because they are growing up in the most unstable family environments in the developed world – because cohabiting relationships dissolve at three times the rate of marriages, because more than a quarter of children do not continuously live with both biological parents, and because the government has spent 16 years refusing to say the word ‘marriage’ in a policy document.
The answer is not more screen time guidance. The answer is not breakfast clubs or family hubs or another consultation on cohabitation law.
The answer is marriage. The evidence is clear. The Government knows it. And until someone in Whitehall has the courage to say it, Britain’s children will go on being some of the unhappiest in the developed world.
