By Stephen Smoot
For a half century, American society has battled the rise of drug abuse, child abuse and neglect, and what were once called in the 1980s “throwaway children.” Studies have noted both correlations and also direct connections between broken families and poor outcomes in that time. One of the latest, and most profound, has come from researchers with the United States Census Bureau.
“Perspectives about the impact of divorce on children, however, diverge sharply,” shared the study in its introduction. It explained that “one view holds that unhappy marriages fundamentally harm children through exposure to parental conflict and poorly modeled behavior, making marital dissolution beneficial for both parents and their children.”
Researchers with the Census Bureau, however, concluded that studies concluding neutral or positive outcomes used mainly “small retrospective surveys that likely fail to measure true causal effects” and could not access broad enough information to support their conclusions.
The Census Bureau studied five million children born between 1988 and 1993. In their methodology, it states that “we use tax records to trace out marital histories for each parent and link them to data on households and child outcomes. We address selection into divorce using both panel methods and a within-family design that compares siblings who had different lengths of exposure to the same divorce.”
They then used data to address three main questions. First it examines “the effect of divorce on family circumstances,” meaning what did the family do in response to the dissolution of the marriage. Second, it looks at the outcomes with the children involved, including “adult earnings, teen birth, mortality, college residency, and incarceration.”
Finally, the Census Bureau researchers identified three key aspects of post divorce life that created significant alterations to family life. These are “changes in financial resources, neighborhood quality, and distance to non-resident parents. We find that each mechanism partially contributes to the effects on child outcomes.”
“Together, these three mechanisms—changes in family resources, neighborhood quality, and parent proximity—explain between 25 and 60 percent of divorce’s effects on children’s outcomes,” the Census Bureau stated. It also explained that the remainder of influences on the outcome could not be derived by examination of the data. Further investigation would require more in-depth engagement of those studied as they went through divorce and related issues.
Additionally, this study did not presume to make conclusions on “unhappy families that remain intact” because it could not look at their outcomes with the data. It focuses solely on measurable outcomes of children who experience divorce while growing up.
Overall it concluded that “because divorce has negative effects on children’s outcomes and is more common among low-income families, marital instability likely perpetuates disadvantage across generations.”
Data suggests that three major changes take place when a marriage dissolves. Household income drops considerably, but it can be mitigated somewhat by directed or voluntary support from the non-resident parent. Also of high importance, the custodial parent often has to move into a neighborhood of lower quality and living standard. Finally, the distance between children and non-resident parents can negatively affect adult outcomes as well.
The Census Bureau found that the lowering of household income had a direct negative impact on the child’s earning potential as an adult, between 10 and 44 percent, but by itself was not as much of a contributing factor to teen pregnancy and had almost no effect on later incarceration as an adult.
Moving into a neighborhood of lesser quality and more social challenges had strong and measurable effects on all of those outcomes, however. The Census Bureau noted that “deterioration in neighborhood quality explains a moderate portion (16 percent) of divorce’s effect on children’s adult income, and a somewhat larger share of other outcomes—accounting for 17 percent of the effect on teen birth and 29 percent of the effect on incarceration.”
Finally, the distance between children and non-resident parents had a powerful potential impact as well, possibly leading to “15 percent of divorce’s effect on mortality and 22 percent of its effect on teen births. These effects likely reflect the role of distance as a proxy for parental investment, supervision, and involvement.”
The study also charts the decline of the traditional family over the decades. Liberalized divorce led to the increased breakup of families while the never married, but with children occurrence rose from one percent in 1965 to 13 percent at the opening of the 21st century and is likely much higher now.
This has contributed to a skyrocketing demand for assistance once provided within the household or by the extended family, but now is sought more and more from social service agencies or the government.
Data indicates that those hit hardest by the decline of the traditional family are those already struggling in some fashion, “with the transformation most pronounced among low income families and those without a college degree.” The Census Bureau added that “for parents with no more than a high-school degree, rates of single parenting more than tripled from 20 to 65 percent between 1950 and 2013.”
While the study covers the ground of economic and social outcomes, the researchers advise building on their work. They stated that “future research should examine additional channels through which divorce affects children, particularly those not observable in administrative data, such as changes in parental time investment and family dynamics.”
As more attention focuses on how families fare both socially and economically from generation to generation, this study suggests that “given that divorce has negative effects on children’s outcomes and is more prevalent among low-income families, addressing its impacts may be crucial for reducing the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage.”
