Parental divorce and adolescent delinquency: ruling out the impact of common genes

Abstract

Although the well-documented association between parental divorce and adolescent delinquency is generally assumed to be environmental (i.e., causal) in origin, genetic mediation is also possible. Namely, the behavior problems often found in children of divorce could derive from similar pathology in the parents, pathology that is both heritable and increases the risk that the parent will experience divorce. To test these alternative hypotheses, the authors made use of a novel design that incorporated timing of divorce in a sample of 610 adoptive and biological families. They reasoned that if genes common to parent and child mediate this association, nonadopted youth should manifest increased delinquency in the presence of parental divorce even if the divorce preceded their birth (i.e., was from a prior parental relationship). However, should the association be environmental in origin, the authors reasoned that adolescents should manifest increased delinquency only in response to divorce exposure, and this association should not vary by adoption status. Results firmly supported the latter, suggesting that it is the experience of parental divorce, and not common genes, that drives the association between divorce and adolescent delinquency.

Figure 1

Note. Figure presents estimated marginal means (and standard errors) for adolescent delinquency by parental divorce history (as estimated in HLM): never divorced, divorced before having child (at least one rearing parent was divorced in a marriage preceding the birth/adoption of the adolescents), and divorced after having child (divorce of rearing parents occurred following birth/adoption of the adolescents). Prior to HLM analyses, each scale was standardized to have a mean of zero and a standard deviation of 1.0 to facilitate interpretation. Because the interaction between divorce and adoption status was not significant (i.e., the association between divorce and delinquency does not appear to vary across adopted and non-adopted youth), results are presented for the full sample.