Search Results
Title: The Kids Are OK: Divorce and Children's Behavior Problems
Resulting in 1 citation.
| 1. |
Li, Jui-Chung Allen |
|
The Kids Are OK: Divorce and Children's Behavior Problems Working Paper WR-489, RAND Corporation, May 2007. Also: http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/2007/RAND_WR489.pdf Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: RAND Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Children, Well-Being; Divorce; Gender Differences; Marital Disruption; Marital Status; Racial Differences Although social scientists and commentators agree that parents should be responsible for their children's well-being and keep their children's interest in mind when they consider the possibility of ending a marriage, they disagree on how much the association between parental divorce and child well-being is causal. This paper reexamines the causal claim that parental divorce is detrimental to children's emotional well-being, measured in terms of behavior problems. I analyze panel data from the 1986-2002 waves of Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. As in previous research, I find that parental divorce is associated with a higher level of behavior problems in children in the ordinary least squares regressions that adjust for observed factors. However, once I control for selection on unobserved factors that are either constant over time or change at a constant rate over time by using generalizations of the child fixed-effects model, the effect of divorce substantially declines and is no longer statistically significant. I conclude that children of divorce would have fared equally well/poor in terms of their emotional well-being if their parents had remained married. |
|
|
Bibliography Citation
Li, Jui-Chung Allen. "The Kids Are OK: Divorce and Children's Behavior Problems." Working Paper WR-489, RAND Corporation, May 2007. |