Understanding Heterogeneity in the Effects of Parental Separation on Educational Attainment in Britain: Do Children from Lower Educational Backgrounds Have Less to Lose?

Abstract

We use the British Cohort Study 1970 to show that the proportion of children achieving a tertiary education degree is 8 percentage points lower for the offspring of separated parents than for children from intact families. Moreover, the children of highly educated parents experience a two times larger 'separation penalty' than the children of less educated parents. We find a similar pattern of heterogeneity in effects for the likelihood of participation in academic education (A-Levels) beyond school leaving age but not for school grades at age 16. We test three different explanations for heterogeneity in the parental separation penalty: changes in family relations, changes in income, and negative selection into separation based on unobserved characteristics. We address the potential endogeneity of parental separation by including pre-separation observable characteristics, individual fixed effects models, and a placebo test. Our key finding is that changes in family income, but not those in family relations or selection, explain a large part of heterogeneity in the effects of parental separation. Children with more highly educated parents face a larger decline in family income if parents separate and, in addition, declines in family income of equal amounts entail more negative consequences for their educational attainment.In recent years, an interesting finding has surfaced in the literature addressing the effects of parental separation on child outcomes. Several studies have found that parental separation has a greater impact on the educational and occupational attainment of children from socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds than on the attainment of their counterparts from more disadvantaged backgrounds (Biblarz and Raferty, 1993;McLanahan and Sandefur, 1994;Martin, 2012). 1 This seems a surprising result. Studies in social stratification have shown that children from advantaged socio-economic backgrounds are less affected by previous negative outcomes and disadvantageous life events that might hinder their future prospect of educational attainment (cf. Bernardi 2014). These 'compensatory effects' in education are often held responsible for the lack of downward mobility of children from higher socio-economic backgrounds (Boudon, 1998). Understanding why such 'compensatory effects' are absent in the case of parental separation could enhance our understanding of the processes that

Unequal Families, Unequal Effects: How Parental Divorce Differentially Impacts Children's Educational Attainment

“…That is, there is no a priori reason to expect that children respond uniformly to disruptive family events. Prior research suggests that children with more educated parents experience larger effects of parental divorce than children of less educated parents (Bernardi and Boertien 2016;Bernardi and Radl 2014;Martin 2012), and that parental divorce has stronger effects on white children than on non-white children (Lee and McLanahan 2015;Wu and Thomson 2001). Children's responses to parental divorce also vary by the degree of family well-being: children of married parents with high levels of conflict are no better off, and in fact may fare worse in some respects, than children of single parents (Amato 2000;Jaffee et al 2003;Musick and Meier 2009;Thomson and McLanahan 2012).…”

“…The mediating effect of family economic resources may also vary across families. While more advantaged families are likely to have higher levels of economic resources than disadvantaged families, resource loss as a result of divorce may be more pronounced in the former than in the latter (Bernardi and Boertien 2016). For disadvantaged families, income may have already been below the threshold of investment in higher education prior to resource decline due to divorce.…”

Unequal Family Lives

“…Several researchers have argued that marked increases in the prevalence of single motherhood among the low-educated together with the welldocumented negative effects of parental divorce and growing up in a singlemother family on child outcomes have exacerbated the inequality between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds and different family structures (Augustine 2014;Cherlin 2005;Härkö nen 2017;Härkö nen 2018;McLanahan and Percheski 2008). However, Bernardi and Boertien (2016) and Bernardi, Boertien, and Popova (2014) have argued that this conclusion is only true if a third premise is also true; namely that the consequences of parental divorce and family structure are greater among children of lower socioeconomic background, or that the consequences are the same regardless…”

“…Whereas in some studies associations of family structure with child outcomes disappear, they persist, at least to some extent, in most studies (McLanahan, Tach, and Schneider 2013). Associations were more often found to be spurious once looking at cognitive ability, whereas they often appeared of a more causal nature once studying educational attainment (Bernardi and Boertien 2016;McLanahan, Tach, and Schneider 2013). The actual role of family structure in affecting inequality of opportunity is therefore likely to depend on the outcome variable considered.…”

“…According to Bernardi and his colleagues, the rise of nontraditional family forms will only increase inequality if single motherhood has a negative effect regardless of maternal education, or if these effects are greater among children with less-educated mothers (Bernardi and Boertien 2016;Bernardi, Boertien, and Popova 2014). One of these two possibilities is the case for all three outcomes in eleven of the twentyone countries analyzed.…”