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Each year, over a million American children suffer the divorce of their parents. Divorce causes
irreparable harm to all involved, but most especially to the children. Though it might be shown
to benefit some individuals in some individual cases, over all it causes a temporary decrease
in an individual’s quality of life and puts some “on a downward trajectory from which they might
never fully recover. Source: Amato, P. (200). The Consequences of Divorce for Adults and
Children. Journal of Marriage and Family 62.
Divorce introduces a massive change into the life of a boy or girl no matter what the age.
Witnessing loss of love between parents, having parents break their marriage commitment,
adjusting to going back and forth between two different households, and the daily absence of
one parent while living with the other, all create a challenging new family circumstance in
which to live. In the personal history of the boy or girl, parental divorce is a watershed event.
Life that follows is significantly changed from how life was before. Source: Pickhardt, C.
(2011). The Impact of Divorce on Young Children and Adolescents.
From earlier reports of "broken" families, interparental conflict has been consistently identified
as a major source of behavior problems in children across a wide array of family structures
and settings (Davies & Cummings, 1994; Grych & Fincham, 1990), including divorced and
separated families (Hetherington et al., 1978). There is some evidence to suggest that parental
conflict is the most salient influence on children's adjustment to divorce. In a recent meta-
analysis, Amato and Keith (1991) compared the relative efficacy of three variables (parental
absence, economic disadvantage, and parental conflict) to mediate the effects of divorce on
children's adjustment. Although moderate effect sizes were found for both parental absence
and economic disadvantage, parental conflict accounted for more of the negative
consequences of divorce. Source: Pickhardt, C. (2011). The Impact of Divorce on Young
Children and Adolescents.
People whose parents divorced are slightly less likely to marry. They are much more likely to
divorce when they do marry. According to one study the divorce risk nearly triples if one
marries someone who also comes from a home where the parents divorced. The increased
risk is much lower, however, if the marital partner is someone who grew up in a happy, intact
family. Source: Popenoe. (n.d.). Ten Important Research Findings on Marriage.
Forty percent of children growing up in America today are being raised without their fathers.
Source: Wade, Horn and Busy, “Fathers, Marriage and Welfare Reform” Hudson Institute
Executive Briefing, 1997) cited in “The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark
Study by Judith Wallerstein, Julia Lewis, and Sandra Blakeslee.
The relationship between children and their nonresidential parents also must undergo a great
transformation following divorce. The frequency of contact obviously changes as
nonresidential parents, typically fathers, establish a new homeostatic balance with their
children. Source: Pickhardt, C. (2011). The Impact of Divorce on Young Children and
Adolescents.
Studies indicate that daughters of divorced parents have a 60-percent higher divorce rate in
marriages than children of non-divorced parents, and sons have a 35-percent higher divorce
rate. Source: Blakeslee, S., Lewis, J., & Wallerstein, J. (2000). The Unexpected Legacy of
Divorce: a 25 Year Landmark Study.
Teenagers in single-parent families and in blended families are three times more likely to need
psychological help within a given year. Source: Hill, P. (1993). Recent Advances in Selected
Aspects of Adolescent Development. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
Compared to children from homes disrupted by death, children from divorced homes have
more psychological problems. Source: Emery, R. (1988). Marriage, Divorce and Children’s
Adjustment. (Cited in Blakelee et., al.’s The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year
Landmark Study)
A study of children six years after a parental marriage breakup revealed that even after all that
time, these children tended to be “lonely, unhappy, anxious and insecure. Source: Wallerstein,
J. (1991). The Long-Term Effects of Divorce on Children. Journal of the American Academy
of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
Children of divorce are four times more likely to report problems with peers and friends than
children whose parents have kept their marriages intact. Source: Breen, D.T. & Crosbie-
Burnett, M. (1993). Moral Dilemmas of Early Adolescents of Divorced and Intact Families.
Journal of Early Adolescence.
Early adolescents of divorce reported more family-related moral dilemmas than did early
adolescents of intact families. The results appear to support the Kegan theory of development,
which postulates that early adolescents of divorce may not advance as soon as other early
adolescents from embeddedness in the family to embeddedness in the peer culture. Source:
Breen, D.T. & Crosbie-Burnett, M. (1993). Moral Dilemmas of Early Adolescents of Divorced
and Intact Families. Journal of Early Adolescence.
Statistical comparisons of the mean moral maturity scores suggested that male delinquents
whose fathers were present attained higher moral maturity scores than those whose fathers
were absent. Source: Bieliauskas, V.J. & Daum, J.M. (1993). Fathers' Absence and Moral
Development of Male Delinquents.
New data from a national Dutch survey are used to examine the effects of divorce and re-
partnering on the relationships that fathers have with their adult children. Compared with
divorced fathers who live alone, re-partnered fathers have less frequent contact with their
children, they exchange less support with them, and the quality of the relationship is poorer.
Divorce and re-partnering thus have cumulative negative effects. Source: Kalmijn, M. (2013).
Relationships between Fathers and Adult Children: The Cumulative Effects of Divorce and
Repartnering.
Although many children from divorced families will never show signs of severe
psychopathology, a substantive body of research indicates that divorce does place children at
an increased risk for three different types of adjustment difficulties: (1) externalizing problems,
(2) internalizing problems, and (3) cognitive deficits (Amato & Keith, 1991; Emery, 1988;
Wallerstein, 1991; Zill, Morrison, & Coiro, 1993).
The most robust and consistent finding in the divorce literature relates to the association
between divorce and children's externalizing problems (Grych & Fincham, 1992). These
include such behaviors as delinquency, aggression, and disobedience. Using data from the
National Survey of Children (NSC), a nationally representative sample of 1,423 was evaluated
three times between 1976 and 1987 when children were ages 7-11, 12-16, and 18-22,
respectively (Furstenberg & Allison, 1989; Furstenberg, Peterson, Nord, & Zill, 1993; Zill et al.,
1993). The majority of families remained married during this 11-year duration; however, a
large minority experienced a parental separation before or during the course of the study,
permitting investigators to examine the effects of age and divorce on children's short- and
long-term functioning at home and school. At all three age periods, children of divorced
parents were found to have higher rates of externalizing problems than children from two-
parent families according to mothers, teachers, and their own self-report. Source: Ingoldsby,
E.M. & Shaw, D.S. (1999). Children of Divorce.
The Heritage Foundation reports that children of divorced households tend to enter high-risk
marriages. Even worse, says researcher Patrick Fagan, is that these children often do not
marry and start families of their own, a phenomenon that can disturb social harmony. Source:
Vrouvas, M. (n.d.). The effects of divorce on society.
In most functioning societies, an intact family helps children develop strong moral character.
Lacking such guidance, children of divorce are more likely to behave as social deviants.
Specific findings reported by The Heritage Foundation are that these children are more likely
to commit minor and serious crimes, run away from home, be suspended from school, smoke
cigarettes, abuse alcohol, carry weapons, engage in physical fighting, and use marijuana and
cocaine. And both male and female adolescents living in single-parent households have
experimented with sex by age 11. Source: Vrouvas, M. (n.d.). The effects of divorce on society.
In reviews by Hetherington, Camera, Featherman (1981) and Shinn (1978), children from
single-parent families show deficits in (1) IQ scores, ranging between 1 and 7 points; (2) school
achievement scores averaging less than one year in school; and (3) grade attainment of three-
quarters of a year. However, not all of these families attained single-parent status via divorce.
Data from the 2004 Monitoring the Future survey examined a nationally representative cross-
sectional sample of 8th to 12th grade adolescents in rural and urban schools from across the
United States (N = 37,507). Results found that drug use among daughters living with single
fathers significantly exceeded that of daughters living with single mothers, while gender of
parent was not associated with sons’ usage. Source: Crano, W. & Hemovich, V. (2011). Family
Structure and Adolescent Drug Use: An Exploration of Single-Parent Families.