A new study from America has shown that children whose parents get divorced generally don’t experience detrimental setbacks in the pre-divorce period, but often fall behind their peers—and don’t catch up—when it comes to maths and interpersonal social skills after their parents begin the divorce process.
“People tend to think that couples go through intense marital conflict before they decide to divorce,” said study author Hyun Sik Kim, a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “My original prediction was that children of divorce would experience negative impacts even before formal divorce processes began. But, my study finds that this is not the case.”
Instead, Kim finds that children begin experiencing developmental problems after their parents commence the divorce process, and these issues continue to plague them even after the divorce is finalized. These problems neither worsen nor improve following the divorce.
