Divorce Versus Education

Written November 2019

Parents generally want the best for their children. They hope to instill strong values in their kids’ lives that will prove useful in the “real world,” and when those kids grow to attend school and sometimes pursue higher education, everyone—the community, state, teachers, and parents—hope for their success. However, home situations can often become inevitable factors in a child’s academic success without anyone being able to determine the effects. 

According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, more than forty percent of American children will experience the divorce of their parents. In Rhode Island alone, about 23% of adults aged 50-54 were divorced in 2017. This is hardly a surprise since the divorce rates between 1980 and 1990 spiked to an all-time high and the dissolution of marriage became a far more normalized concept. In fact, you probably know your own fair share of people around you with divorced parents or who have gone through a divorce themselves. Divorce can be a tough alteration in any family, especially when it comes to the potential children involved, but just how great of an impact could this have on their education?

Divorce and separation have been found to correlate significantly with diminished school achievement and performance. Since parental separation often results in negative effects on children, including perceived guilt, blame, stress, and diminished resources for the children, it is not surprising that parental separation has also been reported to negatively affect a child’s motivation, engagement, and learning behavior in the classroom. The fact of the divorce alone, however, is not often what causes this complication. Students experiencing divorce are recognized to have deterred performance in school mainly due to the distraction that is causes. “Coming home everyday knowing that I needed to adjust to new routines and learning to live with only one parent -half my support system- was definitely a lot harder for me to do when I simultaneously had to focus on studying for a big test the next day,” says one junior who recently experienced the divorce of their parents. The stresses that a child is going through regarding school have to become second to the stresses being dealt with at home such as involvement in arguments between parents, probable moving situations, and even court attendance.

The statistics of the effects on a child’s education, however, demonstrate that the situations from which the divorce stems or the background of the family long before the divorce are really what display educational outcomes. The age of the child is one substantial factor that can make a difference in the effects of a divorce. Generally, when a divorce happens in a child’s life at a young age, it has less of an impact on that child’s schoolwork. This is due to the fact that when kids enter into middle school and high school, they are also entering into more rigorous schooling with increased homework and serious progression in the math, science, english, and history courses. 

One senior at Lincoln High says that their parents divorced when he was only seven, and the fact that they did before the stresses of middle and high school was better for him both mentally and emotionally. “It’s definitely a good thing that the divorce actually happened when I was younger rather than them staying together unhappily for many years. I feel like I grew up in a better way than I would have if they had divorced later in life.” 

While this transition happened so early in life for this senior, a junior at Lincoln High went through a parental divorce only last year, which she felt truly impacted her studies. “Even a year later, I am still affected by the lack of time and space that school allowed for me to really take in and process my parents divorce,” she said. Not only was this academically overwhelming, but it placed a mental distress on her as well. “All of this added stress caused my mental health to suffer with long-lasting effects.”

It has also been shown that children whose education is most affected by divorce are those whose parents’ are not statistically likely to divorce, based on socioeconomic status. Those that fall into a more advantaged class, according to a study conducted by Jennie Brand which examined data on the family and socioeconomic backgrounds of 11,512 children, tend to exhibit additionally affected education outcomes. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also studied 4,931 mothers. Brand and her fellow researchers found that the mothers who were most likely to get divorced were women who themselves grew up in single-parent families, have inflexible work hours, and have depressive symptoms. Divorce was also more likely in instances where spouses were of different races or had different levels of education. In these situations, while divorce still affected the children in various ways, school performance seemed to deter the educational success of those who came from statistically unexpected divorce. The paper noted that children in a group of “likely to divorce” parents already had lower levels of academic achievement — so a divorce generally didn’t make things better or worse for them.

Although many studies have been done to test the effects and likelihood of divorce and the ways in which it impacts the education of children experiencing it, it’s truly impossible to measure the effects on each group of child because every divorce is so incredibly different. “Our findings suggest that divorce is just one of many hardships that disadvantaged families face, which makes the event less disruptive,” Brand wrote In the University of California: Los Angeles’ report of the study. Brand is also is the director of the UCLA California Center for Population Research and co-director of the UCLA Center for Social Statistics. Divorces vary so much that other hardships may or may not come into play when it comes to a child’s focus on their education, deeming it hard to measure the simple fact of divorce.

Family psychologists suggest that in order to help kids cope with the divorce, parents should not only talk to their children, but also maintain a normal routine and not involve the children directly in the conflict. If you notice that a peer is feeling overwhelmed or having difficulty coping with a divorce situation at home, encourage them to seek professional help from a teacher, a school counselor, social worker or psychologist.