Premier Research Documents Long-Term Divorce Harms for Adult Children

A sophisticated new research report published by the National Bureau of Economic Research charts new findings in how divorce is not a temporary bump in the road for children. It has long-term, deleterious effects far into adulthood. This is not a new finding overall. It has long been an established finding in leading academic investigations into the impacts of divorce on children throughout their lives.

However, this important new study does chart some important new ground. Conducted by scholars at the University of Texas at Austin, University of Maryland and the U.S. Census Bureau, these authors examined data on “over 5 million children to examine how divorce affects family arrangements and children’s long-term outcomes.” These children were born between 1988 and 1993.

Because of their sophisticated research methodology, these scholars were able to document the causation of divorce’s harmful impacts on children well into adulthood. This is an important contribution to the literature and this research team did this by looking at children within families to see how the younger children fared after their parents’ divorce, in contrast to their older siblings who spent more of their growing-up years being raised by intact married parents. These scholars explain,

Family scholar Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, explains the value of this unique research approach: “By comparing siblings from the same family who were different ages when their parents divorced, they can control for a lot (though not all) of the factors that might create concerns about comparing apples to oranges.” It does this by examining 1 million sibling groups whose parents divorced.

Grant Bailey at the Institute for Family Studies adds, “By comparing siblings, the authors can see how divorce affects, say, a 10-year-old versus an 18-year-old within the same family.”

This mitigates selection bias where it could be charged that children of divorce show greater negative outcomes, not because of divorce per se, but because they came from an unhealthy family to start, with parents who had a contentious relationship. This approach shows how outcomes changed at the point of divorce for various siblings within the same family setting. Thus, these scholars assert, “we estimate the causal effects of divorce on children’s adult outcomes.”

So, what did these scholars find?

As economists and not psychologists, they look at three very objective consequences of divorce and their impact on child well-being: changes in financial resources, decline in neighborhood quality due to establishing new housing locations and distance from non-resident parent.

They noted that 95% of children live with their mother after divorce splits their home. Half of parents remarry after 5 years, introducing stepparents and often stepsiblings into kids’ lives, creating greater complications and divided loyalties.

First, income drops considerably for children living in divorced homes. These authors explain,

“When parents divorce, household income drops by half as families divide into separate households. This decline moves the average divorced household from the 57th percentile of the income distribution to the 36th. Households recover about half of their initial income loss over the next decade.”

This means children lose important resources that diminish their housing quality, nutrition, health care and education. They also live further from one of their parents, almost always their father, and this lessens their essential contact with the non-resident father.

“In the year of divorce, the distance between children and their non-resident parent increases to 5 miles at the median and over 100 miles at the mean, and this distance grows significantly over time after the divorce.”

What is most concerning are the measurable impacts they discovered that divorce has on children as they enter their teens and young adult years. They explain, “We find that teen births and child mortality increase following divorce and remain elevated throughout the observation window, suggesting that divorce represents a turning point in the trajectory of children’s outcomes.”

Specifically, children of divorce face the following serious challenges in their teen and early adult years:

• Teen births increase by 60%. Of course, rates of teen pregnancy will be higher.
• Child mortality (early death) increases from 35 to 55 percent.
• 40 to 45% increase in incarceration rates.
• They earn substantially less (9 to 13%) in adulthood, equal to obtaining one less year of education.
• Decreased chance of attending college.

Kids who do not experience parental divorce do not suffer these significant setbacks. These scholars found that up to 60 percent of the negative divorce effects on adult children are due to three leading factors: substantial declines in household income, lowered neighborhood quality after divorce due to multiple moves, and obvious distance and disaffection from at least one parent.

To be sure, these scholars only looked at a relatively small set of outcomes from divorce. They did not examine broader psychological outcomes on children experiencing the death of their mother and father’s marriage. Others have examined such things and the outcomes are equally negative.

Data like these further document why it is so important that churches, para-ministries like Focus on the Family, clinicians and extended families do all they can do to help married couples in crisis gain access to marriage-saving insights and resources so that everyone can avoid the measurable damage divorce brings to the lives of children, their parents and society at large.

Focus on the Family’s Hope Restored crisis marriage ministry provides a lifeline to couples who are struggling. Struggling individuals and couples can call 1-855-771-HELP (4357) weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. (Mountain Time), or complete our Counseling Consultation Request Form to be connected with one of our licensed or pastoral counselor.

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