Recent Research has Important Lessons for Blended Families
An interesting working paper published recently argues that children suffer far more ill effects from their parents’ divorce than we previously thought. Working papers are not final and not yet peer-reviewed, but are published for discussion and comment. Thus, it’s too early to fully rely on the results and statistical analysis, but the paper's research does indicate some important effects that we need to notice and counteract with principles of resilience.
The researchers used tax and Census records for more than 5 million children, comparing the lives of children from divorced and non-divorced families. The researchers concluded that divorce “reduces children’s adult earnings and college residence while increasing incarceration, mortality, and teen births. Changes in household income, neighborhood quality, and parent proximity [as a result of divorce] account for 25-60 percent of these divorce effects.”
The latter measure is complicated. The researchers used tax records of the parents, attempting to trace income, changes in neighborhoods, and how close the parents remained geographically to their children. Admittedly, the data was challenging and not easy to pigeonhole. But the most interesting statistic for those of us raising other people’s children is that the farther the children were from their parents after divorce, the greater the impact on child mortality and teen birth. According to the paper’s authors, “These effects likely reflect the role of distance as a proxy for parental investment, supervision, and involvement.”
The researchers also compared siblings from the same divorced families, who, by virtue of their ages, had different lengths of exposure to divorced parents. The paper's authors used this calculation to try to assess long-term effects. They concluded that the younger the children were when their parents divorced, i.e., the longer the children lived with the divorce, the lower their adult income and education level, and the higher the rate of teen births, mortality, and incarceration.
I lack the mathematical ability to evaluate this paper, and we’ll have to see if its findings hold up. It will also be important whether other researchers can replicate its findings. Nevertheless, the early indications have some important lessons for foster, adoptive, and stepparents.
We can’t control the fact that our kids have suffered trauma and have lost their intact biological family. What we can control are ways to help them develop resilience to overcome the effects of that trauma. We can try to keep their biological parents involved in their lives whenever we can safely do so. We can invest time and energy in their lives if they need us to fill in gaps in their lives. Of course, doing all this while handling our jobs and household tasks is a heavy lift. And our kids may not recognize our contributions for many years, if ever. But raising other people’s children requires us to make that level of commitment and do all we can to give them ways to move past their trauma.
