Mental Health of Children Most Harmed Before Divorce

The most harm to a child's mental health takes place in the years before parents split up, according to a University of Alberta study that suggests staying together for the sake of the kids is not always the right choice.

"Perhaps we should pay more attention to what happens to kids in the period leading up to parental divorce rather than directing all our efforts to helping children after the event occurs," said Dr. Lisa Strohschein, from the U of A's Department of Sociology. "For example, levels of child antisocial behaviour actually drop following parental divorce for kids living in highly dysfunctional families." Her work is published in the current edition of the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Nearly one in two divorces in Canada involves dependent children. This trend has lent urgency to the ongoing debate as to whether parental divorce is damaging to child mental health. Earlier studies have compared children whose parents are divorced with those in intact two-parent families but failed to take into account the quality of family life prior to divorce. Strohschein looked at divorce as a process, which enabled her to track its effects on child mental health before, during and after the divorce event. This approach allows researchers to separate effects on child mental health that are actually due to divorce and not due to other family characteristics.

Strohschein compared children whose parents divorce between 1994 and 1998 with kids whose parents remained married during that period. Statistics Canada launched the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth in 1994 and continues to reinterview the original cohort of children every two years. The sample is made up of almost 17000 children of ages 0-11, with 88.3 per cent of those children participating in the third cycle of data collection. Using that data, Strohschein found that differences in child mental health exist well before the divorce event. In other words, in 1994--before a divorce took place--kids whose parents eventually divorce displayed higher levels of anxiety/depression and antisocial behavior than kids whose parents stay married.

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This is probably no surprise to people raised in a poisonous environment by people who stayed together "for the sake of the children" or because "divorce is a sin" even though the children would have welcomed a divorce to end the fights, the cold shoulders, the tension, the walking on eggshells.

The common-sense conclusion is:

"In addition to these pre-existing differences, there are changes in child mental health that occur after a divorce. On average, levels of child anxiety/depression increase following parental divorce. But in some highly dysfunctional families, the level of a child's antisocial behaviour drops after a divorce."

You have a really bad marriage and then divorce (none of this 'stay together for the kids' business'), and most of the damage is already done: it was so bad that things can only get better. At the same time, for other kids--probably most of them, but that's an empirical question that speculation won't resolve--'divorcing to spare the kids' does more damage than staying together would.

This study made the rounds in the media a month or two ago, and really does call into question many previous studies.