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

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: causal analysis; divorce; educational attainment; heterogeneity; propensity score.

Fig. 1.

Effects of parental divorce on children’s educational attainment: Unadjusted and adjusted for the propensity score. Notes: Sample restricted to children who were at least 18 y old in 2012 and whose parents were married at the time of their birth. Parental divorce is measured as divorce that occurred when children were 0–17 y old. Estimates are based on linear probability models. Adjusted models control for propensity of parental divorce and child age in 2012 (estimates not shown). Propensity scores were estimated by a logit regression model of parental divorce on the set of predivorce covariates. Analytic sample (n = 5,176) is further restricted to age 19 and above for college attendance (n = 4,982), and age 23 and above for college completion (n = 3,901).

Fig. 2.

Matching–smoothing (MS) heterogeneous effects of parental divorce on children’s educational attainment for (i) high school completion, (ii) college attendance, and (iii) college completion. Notes: Sample restricted to children who were at least 18 y old in 2012 and whose parents were married at the time of their birth. Parental divorce is measured as divorce that occurred when children were 0–17 y old. Propensity scores were estimated by a logit regression model of parental divorce on the set of predivorce covariates. Analytic sample (n = 5,176) is further restricted to age 19 and above for college attendance (n = 4,982), and age 23 and above for college completion (n = 3,901).

Fig. 3.

Heterogeneous effects of parental divorce on children’s educational attainment: by propensity score strata. Notes: Sample restricted to children who were at least 18 y old in 2012 and whose parents were married at the time of their birth. Parental divorce is measured as divorce that occurred when children were 0–17 y old. Estimates are based on linear probability models. Adjusted models control for propensity of parental divorce and children's age in 2012 (estimates not shown). Propensity scores were estimated by a logit regression model of parental divorce on the set of predivorce covariates. Analytic sample (n = 5,176) is further restricted to age 19 and above for college attendance (n = 4,982), and age 23 and above for college completion (n = 3,901).

Fig. 4.

Depiction of treatment effect heterogeneity by the propensity for parental divorce (P) and unobserved resistance to divorce (U) for (A) all units under the ignorability assumption, (B) treated units under the ignorability assumption, (C) all units, and (D) treated units. Notes: A darker color indicates a larger treatment effect. Data from ref. .