The harmful effects of divorce on children is something we are extremely reluctant to discuss probably because it is too close to the bone for many people, especially the adults involved. But if it affects children, then we should discuss it or we are only burying away the problem. A major new study from the US tracking the lives over time of five million young American confirms that the divorce of your parents can indeed causes problems in later life, and immediately.

The paper is from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and is titled Divorce, Family Arrangements, and Children’s Adult Outcomes. It offers a compelling and methodologically robust examination of how parental divorce impacts children’s long-term outcomes.

Using detailed records from over five million children born in the U.S. between 1988 and 1993, the researchers compared siblings within the same families who were different ages when their parents divorced.

Why is that so important? Because by looking at brothers and sisters, the researchers are controlling for all the factors that make families different from one another: social background, values, income, even parenting style. They are isolating the one variable that matters here: how old the child was when the parents split up.

And the results are striking. Children whose parents divorced before they turned five earned, on average, 13pc less by their late twenties than their older siblings. This means the younger you were when your parents divorced, the more of an impact it had on you. This drop in earnings is roughly equivalent to the economic impact of losing an entire year of education.

But income is only part of the story. These children were also 73pc more likely to become pregnant as teenagers, 43pc more likely to be incarcerated, and 35pc more likely to die by the age of 25. These are not small effects. They are deep and lasting.

So, what drives this damage? The study points to three main factors: a significant fall in household income (typically due to the loss or reduction of a parent’s financial support), relocation to lower-income neighbourhoods, which often means changing schools and social environments, and reduced parental involvement, especially as the custodial parent juggles more responsibilities alone. These factors explain between 25pc and 60pc of the negative effects seen in the data, according to the study.

The researchers warn that the consequences of divorce may be even more severe for families already under financial strain. As they put it, “because divorce has negative effects on children’s outcomes and is more common among low-income families, marital instability likely perpetuates disadvantage across generations.” (p. 6)

Of course, many parents do their best to protect their children through divorce but what this study shows is that divorce, especially early in a child’s life, can inflict real and lasting harm. It doesn’t just change the structure of a family, it reshapes the trajectory of a life, sometimes in lasting ways.

We may not have large-scale longitudinal studies in Ireland to match this level of evidence, but the warning signs are clear. Divorce is not merely a private decision, but it carries serious public consequences, for the next generation and beyond.

People may object that is it better for children if the parents are fighting a lot and they go their separate ways, but most marriages that end in divorce and separation are what they call ‘low conflict’, that is, there is little fighting that is obvious to the children, never mind violence and therefore the break-up can come as a complete surprise.

Also, there is no getting away from the fact that divorce or separation will almost certainly mean less available income, the children possibly having to move into a poorer area, moving schools, having to go back and forth between the two parents, plus the emotional pain of witnessing your family breakup. None of this is good and any sensible person will want the amount of divorce and separation reasonably minimised. Certainly, we should care about rising marital breakdown. As at Census 2022, about 320,000 adults living in Ireland had been through a divorce or separation, plus all the children involved. In 1986 (when we had legal separation, but not divorce), the figure was 40,000.

This new research forces us to address the consequences of divorce for children honestly. We can’t keep avoiding the conversation.