Children and Divorce: Educational Performance and Behaviour Before and After Parental Separation

This study uses the National Child Development Survey (a cohort study of all the children born in one week of March 1958), to explore the effects of parental divorce on children. The longitudinal nature of the data has made it possible to examine children's behaviour and educational performance both before and afer divorce. The results suggest that some of the problems which have been attributed to parental divorce/separation in previous cross-sectional studies may in fact be present prior to the parental separation. For each of the outcome measures, children whose parents divorced when they were between seven and sixteen years old were found to obtain worse scores than those children whose parents remained married. This was the case at age sixten, after the parental separation/divorce, but also at age seven when the parents were still married and living together. Additional analysis comparing children living only with a custodial mother, with children whose mothers had remarried, found that having a stepfather had a deleterious effect on behaviour scores, but no effect on academic performance.