A new study documents the enduring impact of divorce, showing that children raised by divorced parents have lower incomes and higher rates of incarceration, teen birth, and premature death.

Teen births nearly double, from seven per 1,000 teenage girls to 13. Most concerning, the authors also found a “sharp and persistent” rise in teenage deaths.

“Experiencing a divorce at an early age increases children’s risk of teen birth by roughly 60 percent, while also elevating risks of incarceration and mortality by approximately 40 and 45 percent, respectively,” concluded a new working paper titled “Divorce, Family Arrangements, and Children’s Adult Outcomes” by Andrew Johnston, Maggie Jones, and Nolan Pope. The researchers cross-correlated data from the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, and the U.S. Census Bureau for children born between 1988 and 1993 whose parents divorced, then studied divorce’s longitudinal effects. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) published the 69-page paper this month.

The working paper compared one million siblings whose parents split up, noting the amount of their childhood each spent in a separated household.

The authors make an observation about the life-giving importance of marriage that is especially significant given America’s decades-long debate over universal health care: An intact family does as much to save lives as health insurance coverage. “Mortality increases by 35 to 55 percent at divorce (from a base of 27 deaths per 100,000 annually) and persists at these elevated rates for at least 10 years, with no evidence of pre-trends. To put these results in perspective, the proportional effect of divorce on mortality is comparable to the cross-sectional mortality difference associated with having health insurance,” the authors wrote.

Average household income falls by more than half after a divorce, from an average of roughly $100,000 to just $42,000. “[E]arly childhood divorce reduces adult earnings by 9 to 13 percent, similar to the effect of obtaining one less year of education or moving to a one-standard-deviation lower quality neighborhood for all of childhood,” the authors write. “Given that divorce has negative effects on children’s outcomes and is more prevalent among low-income families, addressing its impacts may be crucial for reducing the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage.”

Worse yet, household incomes drop even though personal working hours rise. Divorced men spend 16% more time at work, while divorced mothers work an extra 8%. The difference may reflect the greater probability that mothers will have custody of their children and/or the additional time and care mothers invest in their children compared with fathers. (The study notes, “About 95 percent of children are claimed by, and thus live with, their mother” after their parents separate.) Dads’ work hours increase for two decades after the divorce. Extra work time means less time to spend with children — a more concerning consequence in a single home where no other parent can take up the difference. 

The study found muted economic impacts on children whose parents divorced in their 20s. But grown children also say their parents’ break-up impacted them deeply, often altering their ability to make commitments. “I really think my parents’ divorce made me put up these walls and treat relationships like they were rentals, temporary,” 54-year-old Brandon Hellan, whose parents’ divorce took place during his 20s, told the Associated Press. He said he could not commit to relationships until his mid-30s.

New family structures, and a divided heart, also sap the amount of time and attention available to children of a previous marriage. “Half of parents remarry within five years, introducing stepparents to children’s lives,” the authors state, as well as sometimes including step-siblings or half-siblings. These additions “create new family responsibilities that may diffuse parental attention and resources.”

“Changes in household income, neighborhood quality, and parent proximity account for 25 to 60 percent of these divorce effects,” conclude the authors, asking researchers to more thoroughly examine the role “parental time investment and family dynamics” after divorce play in harming children’s life outcomes. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2022 that the median net worth for married couples ($68,210) is nearly four times as high as that of couples who are cohabitating ($17,372). After divorce, when parents must buy separate homes and furnishings, there is simply less money left for children’s needs.

Experts told The Washington Stand the federal government’s policies have long undermined family formation and longevity. “The family pre-dates the State by thousands of years, and states which try to deform or replace the family are dooming their citizens to misery,” pro-family scholar Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D., of The Ruth Institute told The Washington Stand. Morse, the author of “The Sexual State,” specifically named several pending issues threatening to harm American children’s futures:

• “Demographic collapse across almost every continent, with whole nations headed toward extinction.
• “The global abortion epidemic, which has claimed more than 1.75 billion innocent lives since 1980.
• “The decline of marriage as an institution, with millions of adults accepting life without a spouse or children as normal, and whole generations suffering from the traumas that we now know come when parents casually divorce.”

Worse yet, U.S. policy may be deepening all of these problems. “Elon Musk’s DOGE exposed the use of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to promote abortion, contraception, and the trans agenda aimed at children in poor countries — all this in the name of ‘development,’” Morse told TWS.

The number of U.S. divorces skyrocketed during the Sexual Revolution, with their effects cascading through society over multiple generations. Society made lifelong wedding vows easier to break in 1969, thanks to the first no-fault divorce law, signed by then-California Governor Ronald Reagan in 1969. The NBER paper notes, “The prevalence of divorce in the United States has more than tripled, with a steep increase starting in the late 1960s.” Reagan, who believed the bill would only apply to a small number of extreme cases overlooked by the old law, told his son, conservative commentator Michael Reagan, that signing the bill was “one of the worst mistakes of his political career.”

Divorce became easier to obtain just as America’s sexual mores loosened, and a permissive culture, more informed by Freudian psychology than Christian ethics, encouraged people to cast off “Victorian” moral strictures and indulge their fantasies. No-fault divorce and hedonistic morality, coupled with the first widespread availability of contraception and abortion (both due to Supreme Court activism), prioritized the parents’ self-actualization over family commitments. It also created the first generation of children largely raised outside of intact homes.

The U.S. divorce rate more than quintupled, from 4.1 per 1,000 married women in 1900 to its high of 22.6 in 1980, according to a 2024 study by Jaden Loo of Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family & Marriage Research. Since that record level in the Carter era, divorces have steadily decreased to 14.6 per 1,000 married women in 2022. The U.S. Census Bureau, which compares divorces per 1,000 of women over the age of 15, also noted a significant and sustained decrease in divorce, from just over 10.0 in 2008 to about 7.0 in 2022. “In contrast, the national marriage rate has generally remained between 16.0 and 18.0 since 2008, with the exception of 2021 when the rate fell below 15.0,” according to census data released last October.

The paper tackles a long-simmering question: Are children better off in a happy single home than with a couple who are unhappily married? “People may object that is it better for children if the parents are fighting a lot and they go their separate ways, but most marriages that end in divorce and separation are what they call ‘low conflict’, that is, there is little fighting that is obvious to the children,” wrote Angelo Bottone at the Iona Institute for Religion and Society, based in Ireland. The NBER paper helps plug holes in existing research, proving the impacts of family dissolution inflict generational wounds.

“Far from being a mere change in legal status, Johnston, Jones, and Pope demonstrate that divorce has a tangible negative impact on factors relevant to child outcomes. These effects, for the most part, are felt immediately and continue to be felt year-after-year,” wrote Grant Bailey, a research associate at the Institute for Family Studies. “Johnston and his coauthors give strong evidence that exposure to divorce is at least a partial cause of the negative outcomes for children following parental divorce.”

Despite the undeniable, generational harms caused by divorce, the legacy media seem intent on glorifying family breakdown. On May 16, The New York Times ran an article titled “Divorce Is a Gift” in its style section. “I didn’t have a real reason. Just a calling, a signal only I could hear. And I knew I had to listen to that,” wrote the author, Souvankham Thammavongsa. “I did it because I love him. I know that seems strange to say. But that’s the truth.”

In 2021, the newspaper printed an op-ed titled “Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love.”

Yet a panoply of studies show one key to happiness is a stable marriage, particularly one coupled with a strong religious faith and regular church attendance. A poll released earlier this year found conservative women are three times happier than liberal women, due primarily to marriage and church attendance. A 2024 Gallup poll found married people are more likely to describe themselves as “thriving” than their unmarried neighbors.

The second Trump administration has made family formation a pivotal policy goal, largely driven by Vice President J.D. Vance. D.C. has taken notice, focusing more attention on policies that will help people marry and have babies. Some pro-family experts tout provisions of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” now pending before Congress, including expanded child and adoption tax credits and the newly created “TRUMP accounts” which let parents invest for their children’s future tax-free.

The problem they may encounter is that young people no longer value marriage — or relationships in general — as much as previous generations did. A 2020 Pew Research Poll found 54% of Americans said marriage is “important but not essential” for a fulfilling life. Some 30% of young people do not want to have children, a 2024 poll from The Independent Center discovered.

“This new research forces us to address the consequences of divorce for children honestly,” wrote Bottone. “We can’t keep avoiding the conversation.”