And plenty of others are born to unmarried people who aren't bothering to shack up.
But theirs is not an example that should be imitated.
His career success is.


Cohabitation is appealing to many adults because it offers more freedom, more flexibility and less commitment than marriage.
With no-fault, unilateral divorce, legal marriage is primarily a commitment to 1) have the breadwinner, usually the man, share his earnings (sometimes in perpetuity), and 2) have the man tagged as financially responsible for any child born to the woman, no matter how that child was conceived.
 And it’s not without its own benefits — for the adults. An Ohio State study finds that young adults — especially women — get about as much of an emotional boost from living with a partner as they do from marriage.
Right. She gets attention from a man regardless of whether there's a marriage license. Women get something out of shacking up.
Cohabiting families in America, partly because they are characterized by markedly lower levels of commitment, are also characterized by markedly higher levels of instability.
Another way of saying this is that if you're a legally married breadwinner, you're less likely to bail even with things are bad because there's a virtual gun to your head.
In fact, children born to cohabiting parents in the United States are almost twice as likely to see their parents break up by age 12, according to my research.
The problem with this is that it compares all marriages with children and all shackups with children. What about marriages for people in Johnson's position? He's been divorced at least once, with a child from that marriage.. In general, second marriages with stepchildren have a 70% divorce rate. And what about for men with careers similar to Johnson's? And not all cohabitation is the same. There's a difference between when people end up shacking up in a parent's basement because one of them wanted to move out of their family house, or couldn't pay rent, and a couple who intentionally planned to move in together and had serious discussions about their expectations and goals.
That instability matters because children are more likely to flounder when they face a revolving cast of caretakers and unrelated adults in their lives, particularly when those unrelated adults are men.
Yes, that's terrible. So let's hope Hashain doesn't behave in such a way. And let's not forget that it could be that the kind of parents who less likely to be married to the one and only parent of their children could be bad parents in general.
Let’s compare the outcomes of two hypothetical, yet representative, children: Sarah, a child living with her mom and a cohabiting boyfriend who is not her dad, and Amanda, whose parents are married. In grade school and middle school, Sarah will be more than four times more likely to experience serious emotional problems than Amanda, according to research by the Urban Institute.
See, maybe Sarah's mom is a nutcase or a bitchy woman, which is one reason she wasn't able to keep Sarah's father around, and Sarah has inherited, by genes or example or whatever, the same problems.
Children living in cohabiting families with an unrelated adult are about 10 times more likely to be physically, sexually, or emotionally abused, according to a 2010 report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
People look at me like I'm bizarre when I point this out. But let's not get sidetracked. The two people in querstion are, presumably, both the biological parents, and either they are abusive people or they aren't. A state contract won't change that.
What can be done to improve outcomes for kids?
Stop encouraging people to make babies so that only people who are truly desiring and prepared to raise kids do?
We also need to change the culture. Cultural icons like the Rock are outliers among successful Americans: Most people who "make it" don’t do so as actors, but in much less glamorous jobs.
In other words. Johnson should sacrifice his financial security to be a good example.
They know that stable marriage is best for their kids, and act accordingly.
But that use of "marriage" is more about behavior, not about the state contract. If Johnson behaves like a good husband and father, the children will benefit even without the parents having a state contract.

Marriage has partly lost ground among the poor and working-class because men in these communities are having a tougher time finding decent-paying, stable jobs.
But women are totally not gold-diggers.
That’s why it’s high time for our schools, media outlets and, yes, even Hollywood superstars to come around on a norm that is timeless: 
It’s best to get hitched before having children.
Good luck with that. We recently had a big national debate, capped off with a ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States, that decided that marriage is not about children; it's about insurance, sharing an estate with a partner, and da feelz of adults. That's where the logic leads. So men like Johnson should not feel obligated to marry unless they feel like it.

So here's an opinion published in a major newspaper trying to goad Johnson into signing a very bad contract that has a 70% chance of going from bad to the worst, a contract that makes ir harder for him to leave and would financially reward her for leaving.