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A new study indicates that parental divorce has “persistent, and mostly negative” effects on children that differ between boys and girls.
The study’s authors aimed to identify the causal effect of divorce for the child whose father left the family because he met a new partner at work.
It found that boys have lower levels of educational attainment, worse labor market outcomes and are more likely to die early.
Girls were also found to have lower levels of educational attainment, adding that they are also more likely to have children at an early age, especially in their teens.
Another of the findings was that girls lose less in terms of employment, which the authors state could be a direct consequence of teenage motherhood, which initiates early entry into the labor market.
The authors acknowledge that a number of “confounding factors” that provoke parental divorce may also be detrimental to child outcomes, with a note that divorce effects triggered by the father meeting another partner at work (the primary scenario examined in the study) may well be different from divorce effects on children arising from divorces due to, for example, domestic abuse or the drifting apart of the partners.
“If one were to use child outcomes emerging from a stable and healthy family background as a benchmark, it would be reasonable to expect a negative effect of divorce. Probably a more relevant counterfactual situation is a family background characterized by parental conflicts. In such a situation, children may even benefit from divorce if the post-divorce situation is comparably more beneficial than growing up in a two-parent household fraught with conflicts,” the introduction reads.
To establish a “causal effect”, the researchers centred their attention on the extent of gender balance in fathers’ workplaces, as previous studies demonstrate that individuals who have workplaces with a larger fraction of coworkers of the opposite sex are “significantly more likely to divorce later”.
This particular correlation is “in line” with the economic model of family formation and dissolution, which “stresses imperfect information at the time of marriage, and the acquisition of new information while married as key determinants of divorce”.
“New information regarding alternative outside options, i.e. extramarital relationships, is decisive. Gender-balanced workplaces reduce the cost of extramarital search and allow married individuals to meet alternative mates, which increases the likelihood of divorce,” the authors write, adding, “Thus, we aim to identify the causal effect of divorce for the child whose father left the family because he met a new partner at work.”
“Our results show that parental divorce — due to a high number of female potential partners in father’s workplaces —  has a negative effect on children’s long-term outcomes. We find a substantially lower level of educational attainment for both sexes. The effects on family formation behavior, labor market and health outcomes differ by sex. In the case of boys, we find little effect on their fertility or marriage behavior. However, we find a higher likelihood of early mortality and worse labor market outcomes. In the case of girls, we find strong effects on their fertility behavior. Parental divorce increases the likelihood of a pregnancy during teenagehood and up to the early twenties. Regarding labor market outcomes, we find some evidence for more unemployment for girls,” the authors write.
The study, ‘How does parental divorce affect children’s long-term outcomes?’, is authored by academics from Austria, Germany and the United Kingdom, and published in the Journal of Public Economics.
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