Effects of divorce on children's education, and whether they are accounted for by moving house

Two recent projects for FaCS - on "Effects of family and community on well-being" and "Neighbourhood and family effects on employment" both discovered different negative consequences of divorce for children, even after they had grown to adulthood. The latter report found negative effects on employment, and that those mostly could be to attributed to the educational deficit associated with divorce. This project examines whether the deleterious effect of divorce on children's education is declining as social institutions have adapted to the huge rise in divorce since the Family Law Act of 1976. Moreover, the availability of benefits to single parents and improvements to the collection child support should have ameliorated the financial stress associated with divorce. On the other hand, it is possible that emerging parenting styles involving more persuasion and shaping of preferences rather than older authoritarian styles are more dependent on the "conspiracy of adults" of a marital pair, so that the deleterious effects of divorce may be increasing over time. An important line of research in the US has suggested that the negative consequences of divorce are mainly attributable to the fact that families frequently move house in the wake of divorce and that moving house is disruptive to children's education.

Working paper arising from the project: Parental Divorce in Australia, Cohorts Born 1900 - 1975 (pdf 254kb)