Tag Archives | Psychosocial Skills

Why Does Parental Divorce Lower Children’s Educational Attainment? A Causal Mediation Analysis

Jennie E. Brand, Ravaris Moore, Xi Song, Yu Xie

Sociological Science, April 16, 2019
10.15195/v6.a11


Mechanisms explaining the negative effects of parental divorce on children’s attainment have long been conjectured and assessed. Yet few studies of parental divorce have carefully attended to the assumptions and methods necessary to estimate causal mediation effects. Applying a causal framework to linked U.S. panel data, we assess the degree to which parental divorce limits children’s education among whites and nonwhites and whether observed lower levels of educational attainment are explained by postdivorce family conditions and children’s skills. Our analyses yield three key findings. First, the negative effect of divorce on educational attainment, particularly college, is substantial for white children; by contrast, divorce does not lower the educational attainment of nonwhite children. Second, declines in family income explain as much as one- to two-thirds of the negative effect of parental divorce on white children’s education. Family instability also helps explain the effect, particularly when divorce occurs in early childhood. Children’s psychosocial skills explain about one-fifth of the effect, whereas children’s cognitive skills play a minimal role. Third, among nonwhites, the minimal total effect on education is explained by the offsetting influence of postdivorce declines in family income and stability alongside increases in children’s psychosocial and cognitive skills.
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Jennie E. Brand: Departments of Sociology and Statistics, University of California, Los Angeles; California Center for Population Research; and Center for Social Statistics
E-mail: brand@soc.ucla.edu

Ravaris Moore: Department of Sociology, Loyola Marymount University
E-mail: ravaris.moore@lmu.edu

Xi Song: Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
E-mail: xisong@uchicago.edu

Yu Xie: Department of Sociology, Princeton University
E-mail: yuxie@princeton.edu

Acknowledgements: Versions of this article were presented at Yale University; the University of Michigan; Stanford University; the University of Pennsylvania; Princeton University; Harvard University; the University of California, Irvine; the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (RC28), and Population Association of America. We thank Elizabeth Thomson for useful comments on a prior version of this article. The National Institutes of Health (grant R01 HD07460301A1) provided financial support for this research. J. E. B. and R. M. benefited from facilities and resources provided by the California Center for Population Research at the University of California, Los Angeles, which receives core support (P2C-HD041022) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The ideas expressed herein are those of the authors.

  • Citation: Brand, Jennie E., Ravaris Moore, Xi Song, and Yu Xie. 2019. “Why Does Parental Divorce Lower Children’s Educational Attainment? A Causal Mediation Analysis.” Sociological Science 6: 264-292.
  • Received: January 25, 2019
  • Accepted: February 24, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v6.a11


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