In previous generations, it was common for unhappily married couples to stay together “for the sake of their children.”
Later, that became less the norm, as attitudes shifted and couples concluded that not only were they unhappy but so were their children in a family where the heads of the household were in conflict. Some academic studies backed up this change in perspective.
A new, rigorous study, though, suggests that the earlier attitude was the correct one, at least if the objective is to give children the greatest chance of success as adults.
That study, conducted by economists at two American universities and the U.S. Census Bureau, found that when parents divorce, it tends to have a long-term detrimental impact on their offspring, particularly if the split occurs while the children are 5 years old or younger.
To reach those findings, the researchers tracked over several decades the government information on all the children born in the U.S. between 1988 and 1998. They looked at data from the Internal Revenue Service, Social Security Administration and Census Bureau to determine the parents’ marital history and income and to see how the children fared through adulthood. The study found a correlation between divorce and reduced future earnings for the offspring, as well as an increased risk of teen pregnancy, incarceration and early death.
The researchers theorized that these undesirable outcomes resulted from three post-divorce changes that are often common in a child’s life: less income in the family, a move to a less desirable neighborhood and less parental involvement, because one of the parents has moved out, and the other is working more to try to keep the family afloat.
The negative outcomes diminish, however, the older the children are when their parents divorce. In general, if divorce doesn’t occur until the children are in their late teens — that is, they are already starting to make their own way in the world — there is no discernible impact on how things will turn out for them.
Some will refute these findings, pointing to examples of children of divorce who have done splendidly. There will, of course, always be exceptions to the rule, but that does not mean what the data shows as the more likely outcome is incorrect.
Relationships are complicated. Some marriages are doomed because the couples were mismatched from the start, or because they entered into marriage with an immature expectation of what married life would be like. Sometimes there are circumstances in a marriage that make them intolerable or even dangerous for the children, such as addiction or physical abuse. Staying in a toxic relationship like that has to be more detrimental for children than getting out of it.
Nevertheless, it would be dishonest to not acknowledge that there are negative repercussions of divorce on children, and that these repercussions have generally not received the same attention or study as the repercussions of unwed parenthood.
There are, though, a couple of encouraging points to note.
First, the researchers found that while divorce is still common, the rate has gone down by about a third over the past decade and a half.
Second, if the research is correct, parents in a loveless marriage do not have to be resigned to staying in it forever. Instead, the study suggests that if a couple can stick it out at least until their children are grown and out of the house, that might be sacrifice enough.
