Does Divorce Matter to Kids?
From RAND, a new working paper finds that divorce might not so bad on kids after all.
Social scientists and commentators disagree on how much of the association between parental divorce and child well-being is causal. This paper reexamines the claim that parental divorce is detrimental to children’s emotional well-being, measured in terms of behavior problems. The author analyzed panel data from the 1986-2002 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979, and found that parental divorce is associated with a higher level of behavior problems in children. However, after controlling for unobserved factors that are either constant over time or change at a constant rate over time, the effect of parents’ divorce substantially declines and its influence on their children’s emotional well-being is not statistically significant.