In some ways, children get over divorce faster than their parents. Some improvement in children’s behavior and distress is found even by the end of the first year or year and a half after the divorce. Behavior that is a reaction to the acute stress of the separation has usually diminished or disappeared. Children’s fear, grief, shock, confusion, disbelief, and de- sire for parental reunion fade quickly.84These feelings of shock and upset have a relatively limited life span. Children’s behavior problems, especially aggressive behavior, also drop sharply after the first year or so.85In a national study of school-aged children in The Netherlands, aggression was more than twice as frequent in the first year as it was in later years.86Amato’s meta-analysis also showed that the effect of di-
vorce on aggressive behavior problems was stronger in the first two years than later.87
One feeling that may not diminish over time, however, is anger. Ten years after the divorce, shock and sadness were at a low level in one study of adolescents, but anger at the parent who had left them con- tinued into adulthood.88 Another outcome that may not disappear over the years following divorce is impaired cognitive and social com- petence.89 Effects on boys’ academic achievement (grades and tests) did not diminish over the five years after divorce in one study, and deficits in test scores in math, science, reading, and social studies were actually worse three years after divorce than earlier in a study of nearly ten thousand high school students.90 High-school dropout rates are equivalent for children whose parents divorced during the preceding five years compared with children whose parents divorced six or more years earlier.91Psychological problems such as anxiety and depression also may persist.92 In Wallerstein’s study, five and ten years after di- vorce, about one-third of the children who were preschoolers or school age when their parents divorced were still depressed and spoke wist- fully of life in an intact family.93If they had problems in the early years after the divorce, they were likely to have problems ten years later, and if a change occurred it was downward.94In the study with the National Association of School Psychologists, students from divorced families were still doing worse on average than students from intact families when their mental health was evaluated six years after the divorce.95
Long-Term Consequences
Far from disappearing, then, some problems of divorce persist into adolescence and later life for some individuals. In her longitudinal study, Wallerstein found that when children whose parents had di- vorced reached adolescence, they expressed a new sense of powerless- ness and a yearning for their father and they were afraid of disappoint- ment in love relationships.96These emotional longings are sometimes expressed in early sexual activity and pregnancy.97In the Virginia Lon- gitudinal Study of Divorce and Remarriage, girls whose parents di- vorced when they were young children reached puberty earlier, initi-
ated sex earlier, had more sexual partners and pregnancies, and left home at younger ages.98At age fifteen, percent of the early matur- ing girls in divorced families had had sex, compared with only per- cent of early maturing girls in intact families. In nationally representa- tive surveys, the risk of childbearing before age twenty is about percent for adolescents from divorced families versus only percent for adolescents in two-parent families.99Psychological problems have also been observed. In one fifteen-year longitudinal study in New Zealand, with a sample of approximately one thousand, adolescents whose parents had divorced when they were children were more likely to have a range of psychological problems, including conduct disor- ders and mood and anxiety disorders.100One-quarter of the adoles- cents whose parents divorced six years earlier had clinically significant mental disorders in another longitudinal study in the United States.101 Adolescents from divorced families are also more likely to use drugs and alcohol and to have friends who do so.102They are more likely to commit delinquent acts and to be arrested and convicted of juvenile crimes. Even if they are not delinquents, adolescents whose parents di- vorced when they were younger are twice as likely to drop out of school as adolescents from intact families.103
The problems that are evident in adolescence may persist and even increase in adulthood.104 A meta-analysis carried out by Paul Amato to integrate studies dealing with the long-term consequences of divorce when children from divorced families reach adulthood re- vealed that across thirty-seven studies and eighty-one thousand indi- viduals, adults who had experienced their parents’ divorce had lower levels of psychological well-being than adults whose parents were con- tinuously married.105They have more symptoms such as depression, anxiety, paranoia, and narcissism than the adult children of nondi- vorced parents.106They are more likely to be troubled, impulsive, and irresponsible; more likely to be aggressive and commit crimes; more likely to abuse substances.107In the National Survey of Children, percent of the young adults from disrupted families had received psy- chological help.108
Growing up in a divorced family can also hurt young people’s hopes for educational and occupational success. For one thing, finan- cial support for college is often lacking. The majority of divorced fa-
thers do not provide support for higher education.109Consequently, on average, adult children of divorce have lower levels of education, lower occupational status, and less likelihood of getting and keeping a steady job; they have lower incomes, fewer financial assets, and higher levels of economic hardship.110
Adults from divorced families may also have relationship prob- lems. Growing up in a divorced family, they are not surprisingly less likely to trust people and more ambivalent about getting involved in romantic relationships.111When they have a romantic relationship, it is likely to be more insecure, conflicted, and unhappy than the rela- tionships of adults from intact families.112In one study of seventeen- to twenty-six-year-olds whose parents were divorced, three-quarters reported insecure close relationships.113These problems in relation- ships, of course, can lead to problems getting married. In her longitu- dinal study, Wallerstein found that twenty-five years after their parents’ divorce only percent of the children, then ranging from their late twenties to their early forties, had married, compared with percent in the general population.114The individuals who had not married, Wallerstein concluded, had no idea what a loving relationship should