Divorce Increases Children's Risk of Death by 55%, Study Reveals
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Children whose parents divorce when they are aged five or younger are more likely to experience early death, a new study has claimed.
The research paper—authored by professor Nolan Pope of the University of Maryland, Andrew C. Johnston at the University of California, Merced and Maggie R. Jones of the U.S. Census Bureau, found that American children whose parents divorce while they are still in infancy face a variety of marked disadvantages through life as a result.
These include reduced earnings and an increased likelihood of teen pregnancy, incarceration and early death. Much of this was attributed to the disruption divorce causes to the family household.
Parents move apart as a result, household income falls, single parents then often work longer hours, move more often and relocate to poorer neighborhoods with fewer economic opportunities. All of which leads to social and financial struggles for their children.
The authors write: "These changes in family life reveal that, rather than an isolated legal shock, divorce represents a bundle of treatments—including income loss, neighborhood changes and family restructuring—each of which might affect children's outcomes."
File photo of a smashed picture frame.
File photo of a smashed picture frame.
Jupiter Images/Getty
The researchers linked data on more than 5 million children born between 1988 and 1993 from federal tax records, the Social Security Administration and the Census Bureau. This allowed them to compare siblings with different lengths of exposure to the same divorce.
Unsurprisingly, household income was found to drop by around 50 percent when families split into separate households. However, the research also revealed that these households were only able to recover around half of the initial income loss in the decade following a divorce.
The probability of moving was also found to nearly triple in the wake of divorce with families relocating to neighborhoods with lower incomes. Half of the parents also remarried within five years of divorce, introducing stepparents to children's lives, and adding more dependents to the household as a result.
The research paper also identified how a "lot of things with family life change" as a result of divorce. Mothers were found to work 8 percent more hours while fathers 16 percent.
By far the most concerning statistics from the study, however, concerned the impact on children of divorce under the age of 5 when their parents split. While the downward shift in family finances was found to impact educational outcomes, even more worrying was the data showing that experiencing a parental divorce before the age of 5 increased teen births by roughly 60 percent and mortality by as much as 55 percent.
The authors were keen to note the study offered no insight on the impact of remaining in a harmful or unhappy marriage and that the findings offer a generalized view on the issue.
"As such, I would not want our results to deter someone from an abusive or highly damaging relationship from seeking help and potentially getting divorced," Pope said.
"There are many additional dimensions of divorce—particularly the impact on the lives and happiness of the parents—that our study is unable to address, which are also important when making decisions about divorce."
The findings touch on those of a 2017 study which found children whose parents divorce were more likely to experience frequent bouts of sickness as adults.
In 2014, another piece of research found that parents' separation can increase behavior problems for children—especially those 5 or younger—but mostly in high-income families, not lower-income ones.
Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about the impact of divorce? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.
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