We all know divorce is awful for everyone — not just the husband and wife, but especially the kids, who suffer sometimes for the rest of their lives because of it.
But just how negative are the outcomes for children of divorce? Well, several researchers — two academics and a Census Bureau worker — recently published a paper with the National Bureau of Economic Research, one that easily and brutally dispels the myth that children are generally okay after divorce:
Here's the introduction, which gives you a sense of just how staggeringly massive this study really is:
Nearly a third of American children experience parental divorce before adulthood. To understand its consequences, we use linked tax and Census records for over 5 million children to examine how divorce affects family arrangements and children's long-term outcomes.
Yes, you're reading that number right:
A study this size is a useful foil to any claims of cherrypicking or selective data usage. The researchers basically examined children of divorce at population scale. You can't get away from data trends with these kinds of numbers.
And boy, did they find data trends:
Following divorce, parents move apart, household income falls, parents work longer hours, families move more frequently, and households relocate to poorer neighborhoods with less economic opportunity. ... We find that parental divorce reduces children's adult earnings and college residence while increasing incarceration, mortality, and teen births.
In other words:
Of course, we've known it's bad for years. All the reliable data we've had for decades of easy divorce has shown us that splitting up families is overwhelmingly ruinous for children by just about every meaningful metric.
Surveying a whopping 5,000,000 children, of course, makes it a bit more definitive. And what's even more compelling is that the researchers were able to compare responses to divorce between siblings:
To measure long-term effects in a way that accounts for selection into divorce, we compare siblings within a family who had different lengths of exposure to the same divorce. Younger siblings are exposed to the divorce earlier and for longer than their older siblings, but they make useful comparisons since siblings share many common factors, including a similar initial environment and an inherited endowment from the same parents.
The findings were arguably unsurprising: if parents divorce when a child is between 0-5 years old, the split reduces adult income at age 25 by 9 percent," with the income reduction soaring to 13 percent by age 27.
Among the study's findings:
Divorce increases teen births by 73 percent and mortality by age 25 by 35 percent.
It also significantly drives up rates of incarceration, by about 43 percent.
And it drives up mortality "by 35 to 55 percent at divorce," with those higher levels persisting "for at least 10 years."
The researchers note that "changes in household income, neighborhood quality, and parent proximity account for 25 to 60 percent of these divorce effects."
There are times, sadly, when a split is required — say, if one parent poses a danger to the other or to the children.
But the overwhelming majority of divorces happen simply because parents don't want to work out their problems and would rather just end it.
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