Unwed parents should marry before their kids' turn 3: study

Washington: A new study has claimed that the best time to tie the knot for unmarried couples who have kids, is before their kids' 3rd birthday.

Federal policies have often presumed that unmarried parents will be most receptive to marriage right after a baby's birth, a period that has been dubbed the 'magic moment', and as per author Christina Gibson-Davis from Duke University, it turns out that the period lasts longer than conventional wisdom has held, lasting even longer for some subgroups.

But patterns vary greatly by race, with more African-American mothers marrying much later than mothers of other races or ethnicities.

The study also found that 64 per cent of children born out of wedlock see their moms get married, where most of those marriages don't last. Nearly half of post-conception marriages end in divorce, and those numbers are higher still for African-American women.

Gibson-Davis added that such marriages were fragile, and very few kids born out of wedlock got to experience a stable marriage.

She continued saying that the odds improve somewhat when mothers marry their child's biological father. After 10 years, 38 percent of post-conception marriages involving biological parents had dissolved. In the same period of time, 54 per cent of marriages to a stepfather had ended. Those findings held true across racial lines.

The study draws upon a nationally representative survey that looks at 5,255 US children born out of wedlock.