Parental divorce is not uniformly disruptive to children’s educational attainment

Jennie E. Brand, Ravaris Moore, Xi Song and Yu Xie ()
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Jennie E. Brand: Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1551
Ravaris Moore: Department of Sociology, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA 90045
Xi Song: Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637-1767
Yu Xie: Department of Sociology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019, vol. 116, issue 15, 7266-7271

Abstract: Children whose parents divorce tend to have worse educational outcomes than children whose parents stay married. However, not all children respond identically to their parents divorcing. We focus on how the impact of parental divorce on children’s education varies by how likely or unlikely divorce was for those parents. We find a significant negative effect of parental divorce on educational attainment, particularly college attendance and completion, among children whose parents were unlikely to divorce. Families expecting marital stability, unprepared for disruption, may experience considerable adjustment difficulties when divorce occurs, leading to negative outcomes for children. By contrast, we find no effect of parental divorce among children whose parents were likely to divorce. Children of high-risk marriages, who face many social disadvantages over childhood irrespective of parental marital status, may anticipate or otherwise accommodate to the dissolution of their parents’ marriage. Our results suggest that family disruption does not uniformly disrupt children’s attainment.

Keywords: divorce; educational attainment; heterogeneity; causal analysis; propensity score (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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