Children of Divorce Have Reduced Earnings

US children whose parents divorce when they are age 5 or younger have reduced earnings as adults and increased chances by young adulthood of teen pregnancy, incarceration, and death, according to a study released this month.

• After a divorce, a household's income typically is halved as a family splits into two households, and it struggles to recover that lost income over the ensuing decade. Families after divorce also tend to move to neighborhoods with lower incomes that offer reduced economic opportunities, and children are farther away from their non-custodial parent, according to the working paper by economists at the University of California, Merced; the US Census Bureau; and the University of Maryland.

• The three events—loss of financial resources, a decline in neighborhood quality, and missing parental involvement because of distance or an increased workload required to make up for lost income—accounted for 25% to 60% of the impact divorce has on children's outcomes, the study said.
• "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," the economists wrote.
• Almost a third of American children live through their parents' divorcing before reaching adulthood, according to the study. Many children of divorce have reached the heights of professional success, including former President Barack Obama and Vice President JD Vance, who lamented that divorce was too easily accessible during a 2021 speech at a Christian high school in California, the AP reports.

• The US divorce rate has been on a decline for the past decade and a half, going from over 10% in 2008 to about 7% in 2022, according to the Census Bureau.
• While the study shows the negative impacts of divorce, it can't show what families' lives would have been like if parents had stayed together, says Philip Cohen, a University of Maryland sociologist with no ties to the study. "Probably nobody can tell better than the parents facing the conditions of the marriage and the opportunity for divorce," Cohen says. "I believe parents are aware divorce may have harmful consequences for their children, and make difficult judgments about what is in their own best interest, as well as the interest of their children."
• The study compared outcomes among siblings by the amount of time a childhood was spent with divorced parents. It found that children whose parents divorced when they were age 5 or younger had a 13% smaller income by age 27, but there was little or no impact if the child was older than 18 when their parents divorced. A parental divorce increased the chances of teen pregnancy if it took place before the child was age 15. But that effect disappeared by age 20, as did the impact of any divorce on the chances of incarceration.

(More divorce stories.)