The Effects Of Divorce On Children

Research in Britain and America (see http://extension.unh.edu/Family/Documents/divorce.pdf) suggests that children who experience the break-up of their parents’ marriage are disproportionately likely to leave school early and have a child early. They are therefore at greater risk than children from intact homes of becoming the next generation of badly educated low earners and single parents. Tellingly, children whose home is disrupted by the death of a parent are little different, on these indicators, from children whose parents stay together.

Such conclusions will always be open to challenge. The majority of children from divorced homes will do no worse than their happier contemporaries. And sociologists cannot conduct a controlled experiment to establish how children would have turned out had their parents stayed unhappily married. Married women nowadays are a lot more concerned with how to get him to settle down in the first place than worrying about if he is likely to leave once they have had children. But there is evidence enough for governments to consider how to make marriage more robust, bad though they are at social engineering. Their best bet is to copy their own approach to cigarette smoking: first understand and explain the damage it does; then seek to change public opinion; then-perhaps-change some of the rules.

Behind the rise in lone parenthood has been the erosion of two of the oldest underpinnings of marriage: safe sex and financial support for women. Once sex meant babies; now it means pleasure, and sometimes promiscuous pleasure. Once marriage provided a woman with the best guarantee of financial security. Now she can more easily escape from an unhappy marriage-even though escape often leads to poverty.

Governments can do little to help husbands and wives to be happy with each other. If governments were to reverse the general tendency to make divorce easier to obtain through the courts, some couples might rub along together instead of drifting into a break-up; but more people would choose to live together rather than get married, and others might have to endure a torture from which they can now break free. The only realistic option is to recognise the cost-saving merit of proper opportunities for conciliation before people arrive in the divisive hands of the legal profession.

More humane than changing court procedures is to change attitudes. The job market has transformed the lives of men and women faster than their expectations of marriage have altered. Now that men are no longer the only breadwinners, women have become too inclined to see marriage in purely romantic terms-a burden their grandmothers would never have put on the institution. At the same time, men have been slow to realise that their role at home may need to change as dramatically as that of their wives in the labour market. Boys also need to be told that it will be harder for them to get a girl pregnant and then do a bunk: science can now match father and child, and governments will increasingly demand that men give their offspring financial, if not emotional, support.

Even more important is to make sure that people understand the consequences of family disintegration. That potent force for social change, the market, may help here, rewarding those who stay together and penalising those who do not. One British building society has announced that it will lend money for house purchase at favourable rates to married couples with children, on the grounds that unmarried couples were 50% more likely to default than married ones, and that couples with children were safer bets than those without. More generally, people need to know the true costs of lone parenthood. What seems right for husbands and wives may be wrong for their children; when couples are boring rather than torturing each other, a bit more boredom may be better than splitting up.

Countries whose societies work badly will, in the next century, find it just as hard to compete as countries whose economies are a mess. When children are badly educated, when a chunk of national income must be set aside to house, care for or cure those who cannot provide for themselves, when a not-much-smaller chunk has to be spent on policing and security to ward off crime: then a country will find it hard to grow rich. Social self-discipline will become as valuable tomorrow as investment and good economic policies have been in the past. Read more…