Parent relationship quality, family instability and children’s school readiness

In the following we test the hypothesis that divorce may be a positive experience for children with parents in high-distress unions, while the dissolution of low-distress unions may have negative effects. Despite the importance of this subject, only nine studies have examined this hypothesis, and all suffer limitations and they are based on statistical method not properly tailored to enhance causal relationships. In this paper, we use the first three waves of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), a longitudinal and representative British survey, to explore parental divorce and parent relationship quality on several children’s outcomes at age 5: three measures of cognitive abilities and five psychological dimensions. By using the augmented inverse propensity weighted estimator we show that the dissolution of high-quality parental unions has the most harmful effects on children, especially on conduct problems. Among children whose parents have the highest-quality relationships, those that experience parental separation/divorce have higher conduct problems than children with an intact family. Our findings indicate that early childhood programs and interventions should particularly target children who did experience good relationship quality before parental separation since they are especially at risk.