The Impact of Parental Divorce on Children’s Well-Being by Parental Resources

Jornt Mandemakers, Tilburg University
Matthijs Kalmijn, Tilburg University

We use the British Cohort Study to investigate to what extent parental resources influence the association between parental divorce and lowered child and adolescent well-being. We investigate the following: 1) children of mothers with more years of education suffer less when their parents split up. Higher educated mothers may be better able to provide a safe and stable environment for their children after divorce. 2) The father’s resources may be lost to the child after divorce because most often the child remains with the mother and father-child contact is reduced. Therefore, having a higher educated father need not be beneficial. Preliminary results indicate that the effect of divorce is reduced in early childhood for those with better educated mothers, but only after adjusting for the father’s education. In adolescence, we see a different picture: children of divorce suffer less if their parents are better educated, either the mother or father.