Word's largest study on divorce confirms lasting harm on children

A major new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research confirms that divorce has long-term, negative consequences for children—economically, socially, and even physically.

The study, the largest of its kind, tracked over a million children across a span of fifty years, offering the clearest evidence yet that divorce is not just correlated with, but actually causes, significant harm to children.

Researchers Andrew Johnson, Maggie Jones, and Nolan Pope found that children whose parents divorced experienced household incomes less than half that of their peers in married households. That loss of income never fully recovered.

By their late twenties, these children earned 13% less than peers from intact families—an economic gap comparable to losing a full year of education or growing up in a significantly poorer neighbourhood.

The study also uncovered serious social and health-related consequences. Children of divorce were 60% more likely to experience teenage pregnancy, 40% more likely to spend time in jail and 45% more likely to suffer premature death than children whose parents remained married.

They were also much less likely to attend college and typically lived with significant geographical separation from at least one parent—on average, 100 miles apart.

Previously proponents of divorce have dismissed studies showing its adverse outcomes on children, arguing that divorce itself is not the cause of these outcomes.

However, this study used sibling comparisons within families to isolate divorce as the causal factor. This approach removed the possibility that underlying family dysfunction or poverty alone was to blame.

Grant Bailey of the Institute for Family Studies stated, “We now have convincing evidence that the negative outcomes associated with divorce are not merely from underlying household issues, but from the act of separation itself.”

While many children of divorced parents succeed in life, the broader societal trend revealed by this study is clear. The once-popular notion that “kids will be fine” has now been shown to be false.

There are heroic single parents doing all they can to provide stability, and they deserve respect and support. But as a culture, this research calls for a renewed commitment to the institution of marriage—for the sake of children, families, and future generations.