You seem to think this is about proving how enligthened European men are, when it’s just about the fact marriage is being increasingly paralleled by cohabitation as a family context in which children are born, to the extent several countries are indeed adopting laws to formally recognise cohabitation and civil partnerships (such as the French PACS). It’s really as simple as that.

The point of that mention of legal duties is, even from the legal point of view alone, nevermind the cultural and social aspects that have been already discussed, marriage alone doesn’t make a father automatically more responsible for his kids. Child support after separation is based on recognising children legally, not on being married. Biological paternity aknowledgement, birth certificates, that’s what establishes paternity, not marriage. So it applies even to unmarried couples. There may be a different legal system where fathers have no legal responsibilities whatsoever towards the children registered as theirs, but if there is I haven’t heard of that—besides, there also EU-wide laws (and a specific Convention on the legal status of children born out of wedlock, dating 1975…) as well as international laws on human rights.

On the general point – are you seriously telling me you need a bunch of articles in academic journals to even begin to acknowledge that cohabitation is widespread in Europe and many children “born out of wedlock” are born from parents living together? This is a trend that’s been going on for decades, and you make it sound like someone’s claiming there’s scientific proof that a statue of the Virgin Mary started weeping?

No offence, but if you really know so little of what you’re discussing, try looking up things for yourself first, without relying on others to provide links for you.

It also feels surreal to have to read some of the comments here. People who think tv ads equal legal intervention and that men are emasculated by Turkish toilets, are they even serious or not? What is so offensive about promoting more responsibility towards children?

Unmarried cohabited couples with children is a much more widespread situation in Europe than unmarried single parent with children with absent parent.

It’s not anecdotical evidence from two or three friends. Just do a quick search for “statistics on cohabitation in europe”, you’d find stuff like this:

Cohabitiation in Western Europe
Investigating changes in patterns of forming partnerships. (1999)
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/article.asp?ID=609&Pos=4&ColRank=2&Rank=432

Cohabitation is strikingly most common in the Nordic countries of Denmark, Sweden and Finland, and France also has relatively high proportions cohabiting. For example, in these four countries around 30 per cent of women aged 25-29 years were cohabiting.

Key findings ● In most West and Northern European countries cohabitation has eclipsed marriage as the marker for first partnership whereas in Southern Europe it continues to be marriage. ● In many Western and Northern European countries, with Britain being one of the exceptions, there is little evidence that the propensity to become a couple has declined, as cohabitation has simply replaced some of the marriages of yesteryear.

http://www.mzes.uni-mannheim.de/eurodata/newsletter/no1/househol.html

(1) Countries where cohabitation established itself as socially accepted behaviour are Sweden, Denmark and Iceland. In the other Scandinavian or Nordic countries Norway and Finland the number of cohabiting couples has reached a high level. (…) The majority of children today are no longer born within marriage in these countries, but in cohabitation.

(2) The second group of countries where cohabitation slowly emerges as a form of living arrangement includes Austria, Finland, Norway, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany. Within this group two subgroups can be distinguished. The rate of children born out-of-wedlock is high in (a) Austria, Finland, France, Great Britain and Norway, but rather low in (b) the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland. These observations suggest the following interpretation: in Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany cohabitation means that childless partners live together and marry when children arrive. This is not true for Austria, Finland, Germany, Great Britain and Norway; in any case, births of children occur much more frequently within cohabitation, although the cohabiting couples often marry afterwards (see also Haskey 1992).

In some Nordic countries the number of children born outside marriage has risen tremendously. The share of births out-of-wedlock (in % of all live births) is particularly high in Iceland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, but it is also remarkable in France, Finland, Great Britain and Austria (Graph 2). (…) In the Nordic countries most of the children born outside marriage are born within cohabitation and not, for example, to a “single” mother.

The notion of “born out of wedlock” as some negative thing has become outdated because there is no longer such a negative connotation to the word “unmarried”. Children born from cohabiting couples are considered exactly like children born from married couples. Even aside from the cultural and social aspect, in most places as far as I know the father still has legal duties to do his part to provide for the children who are legally recognised as his own, even if the couple split up. So there isn’t really that much of a difference with marriage.

And as for divorce, you surely realise the US is the world leader in this field! Off the top of my head, the UK is pretty high, but not anything like the US, and the rest of western Europe lags substantially.

From a western European perspective, the US seems a pretty weird place, with high rates of marriage, low average ages at marriage, and huge rates of divorce. And as you’ll surely acknowledge, divorce has a really bad effect on fathers’ involvement, on average.

The legalisation of abortion has caused out-of-wedlock births to lose their former stigma (very strong until the early nineteen-sixties), to the point where some people do not marry because this way they receive more benefits; besides the mother is in a stronger position to keep the children if they do separate, then if they got divorced. When you think about it, unless the prospective spouse is wealthy, there is really not much point to getting married these days, rather than just cohabit.

Heh. That was the source of a few arguments early in my marriage. In response to, “Honey will you do x?” my answer was “Sure I’ll be in charge of that”. And then a while later, I’d get, “I thought you said you’d do x?” To which, I’d say, “Nope, I said I’d be in charge of it—and being in charge means deciding when to do it, and how to do it, and how often to do it. It’s my job now, you don’t need to worry about it.” Then the next response would typically be, “Well, then forget it, I’ll do it myself”. And I’d have to say, “No, sorry, that’s my job now.” It only took a few of those before we reached an understanding. I’m happy to take my share of the responsibilities, but I don’t take direction.

The remark about coaching is very much to the point. likewise time spent in car maintnence seldom gets counted as housework. Stats that sya women do whatever, 70% of the housework, are also suspect, in other words, how much of this housework is discretionary – who gets to decide what does and doesn’t need to be done, or is that just a woman’s purview?

BTW “child rearing” and “homemaking” are only loosely related. Doesn’t coaching or scout leading count for anything?