Are children of divorce worse off than children in married two-parent families?

Since there is so much discussion of the effects of divorce on children, I want to begin by addressing whether there are really any differences between children who live in divorced families and children who live in married two-parent families (I will call them "intact."). In 1991 Amato and Keith examined the results of 92 studies involving 13,000 children ranging from preschool to young adulthood to determine what the overall results indicated. The overall result of this analysis was that children from divorced families are on "average" somewhat worse off than children who have lived in intact families. These children have more difficulty in school, more behavior problems, more negative self-concepts, more problems with peers, and more trouble getting along with their parents. A more recent update of the findings indicates that this pattern continues in more recent research (Amato, 2001).

Despite this general finding across many studies, there are important qualifications of these findings. First, the actual differences between the two groups are relatively small (Amato, 2001; Amato & Keith, 1991). In fact, the children in the two types of families are more alike than different. Amato (1994) reminds us that average differences do not mean that all children in divorced families are worse off than all children in intact families. These results mean that as a group children from divorced families have more problems than children from intact families.

Another way to examine this issue is illustrated by findings of Mavis Hetherington (1993). Hetherington, like many others, finds these average differences, but she also looked at some of her measures and examined the degree to which children in divorced and intact families had more severe problems. On a measure of behavioral problems, Hetherington (1993) reports that 90% of adolescent boys and girls in intact families were within the normal range on problems and 10% had serious problems that we would generally require some type of professional help. The percentages for divorced families were 74% of the boys and 66% of the girls in the normal range and 26% of the boys and 34% of the girls were in the problematic range. Amato (1999) estimates that about 40% of the young adults from divorced families were doing better than the young people from nondivorced families.

The implications of these findings are two-fold. On the one hand, the majority of children from divorced families do not have serious problems requiring professional help. On the other hand, a larger percentage of children from divorced families than intact families are likely to have serious problems. Another way to say this is that MOST children in divorced families do not need help, but MORE children in this group than in intact families are likely to need help. This is a complicated message and the media often errs on the side of one or the other of these two types of findings. Both findings are important.

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