Divorce

Researchers have consistently found that children from divorced families score significantly lower on a variety of indexes of well-being compared to children from two-parent families. An analysis of ninety-two studies involving 13,000 children found, however, that the differences are small, ranging from .08 of a standard deviation for psychological adjustment (e.g., depression, anxiety) to .23 for conduct problems (e.g., aggression, delinquency). Intermediate-sized differences were found for academic achievement (.16), social adjustment (.12), and self-concept (.09). Similar differences emerged across thirty studies conducted in the 1990s.

These findings may not appear to justify the strong public concern expressed about the harmful effects of divorce on children. But despite these small differences, some children experience serious problems following parental divorce. For example, in large nationally representative samples, researchers have found that children whose parents divorce are twice as likely to see a mental health professional compared to children from two-parent families. But receipt of mental health services may over-or underestimate psychological problems. It is therefore worth noting that on a widely used measure of child adjustment, approximately 20 percent of boys and 25 percent to 30 percent of girls who had experienced parental divorce showed clinically significant problems compared to approximately 10 percent of children from two-parent families. These data show that children from divorced families are at risk for serious problems but that resilience is the most common outcome. In fact a handful of studies even document positive outcomes for children when their parents divorce.