In May of this year, the Institute of Family Studies reported on groundbreaking research about the effects of divorce on children and families.

The short version? It’s not good. But that shouldn’t surprise those of us who believe there’s a reason that marriage is among the oldest human institutions.

The study by Andrew Johnston, Maggie Jones, and Nolan Pope used tax records for more than 5 million children born between 1988-1993 to study the long-term effects of divorce, including its affects on income, teen birth rates, incarceration, child mortality, and college residency. Intentionally tracking sibling groups, the study compared the way divorce can affect different members of the same family and different aged children. As Grant Bailey explained in his write-up on the study, “Far from being a mere change in legal status, Johnston, Jones, and Pope demonstrate that divorce has a tangible negative impact on factors relevant to child outcomes.”

Let’s start with the economic effects of divorce, which can be devastating for a family. Prior to divorce, the average income for families in the study was between $90,000 and $100,000. Yet average household income plummeted to $42,000 after divorce. These incomes usually rise again, but generally never reach their pre-divorce levels.

Unsurprisingly considering the economic turmoil involved with divorce, the study found that parents must work more afterwards, with fathers working 16% more hours per week and mothers working 8% more. One of the parents, at least, will also need to find a new home post-divorce, thus bringing more instability to the children. Thirty-five percent of children change addresses in the year of the divorce, often moving to a lower-quality neighborhood, due, again, to the decline in family income.

The economic effects of divorce are long-lasting. The study further found that children who experience divorce in early childhood will earn 9% less at age 25 than the average earnings for that age, and the gap grows to 13% at age 27.

But financial woes aren’t the only problem tangled up with divorce. Teen birth rates balloon for children whose parents divorced: prior to divorce, the number of teen girls giving birth hovers around 7 per 1,000. After divorce, the number grows to 13 per 1,000. Even more shocking, in the aftermath of divorce, child mortality rises from 10 to 15 deaths per 100,000 children annually.

Summarizing these findings, the authors of the study comment:

These results reveal substantial effects of divorce on children’s outcomes. The absence of pre-trends in both outcomes supports a causal interpretation. The magnitude of the effects—a 35 to 55 percent increase in mortality and up to a 63 percent increase in teen births—underscores how divorce can dramatically reshape children’s outcomes, potentially through changes in resources, supervision, and family dynamics.

Defenders of divorce once argued that child-divorce outcome research isn’t that accurate because children from such families are different than children from families that remain intact. Divorce is a symptom of other underlying issues, they said, not a cause. But by tracking sibling groups and looking at outcomes for children within the same family – and how they differ based on the child’s age – this new study challenges that line of thinking, lending credence to the idea that the divorce itself is the root of many of the negative outcomes children experience in the ensuing years.

None of these negative statistical outcomes are surprising. It would be far more shocking to learn that divorce doesn’t cause significant and long-term damage to the life of a child.

Divorce is a tragedy that shatters a child’s world. According to the nonprofit Family Means, it’s common for children of a divorcing couple to feel anger, confusion, guilt and anxiety because of the divorce. They may manifest a decline in academic performance and loss of interest in social activities. And they’re more likely to engage in destructive behavior, including crime and drug use. These children are also more likely to divorce in their own marriages, losing faith in the institution of marriage completely, thus perpetuating a tragic cycle.

But children aren’t doomed to follow their parents’ footsteps. Resilient children can overcome the hurdles cast their way by the divorce of their parents, and they can go on to have stable, intact families of their own one day. But none of that means we, as a society, should take lightly the immense trauma we’re putting children through via divorce and the ways it undercuts their own future flourishing.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

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