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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDivorce Harder on Rich Kids, Study Finds
http://www.alternet.org/divorce-harder-rich-kids-study-findsA new Georgetown University study shows that children from high-income homes face more behavioral challenges after divorce than children from low-income households.
The study, published in Child Development and led by Georgetown professor Rebecca Ryan, examined how changes in family structure correlate with behavioral problems in children between the ages of 3 and 12. Using research from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, researchers analyzed data of nearly 4,000 children.
The data demonstrates that fathers from high-income homes typically contribute the lion's share of financial resources to the household. In a marital separation, that leaves fewer resources for the children, which can negatively impact their behavior. However, these same children, especially those older than 6 years old, can benefit from their parent guardian finding a new live-in partner. A step-parent who moves into the home after a divorce can positively affect the child's behavior, especially if he or she brings in economic resources that absorb the initial financial strain of the divorce.
Because children from low-income homes may perceive changes in family structure as "more normative, more predictable," a separation or divorce may be less stressful for them than for high-income chidren, the study found.
NightWatcher
(39,343 posts)This article doesn't make any sense. It hurts lower income families just as much if not more if you suddenly take away one of the incomes.
Igel
(35,197 posts)If you have two poor working parents and two kids each parent has about the same effect on income. Lost one parent and you lose 1/2 the income. You have to downsize the household, and 1/2 the income is now supporting 3 people.
If you have a fairly high-income parent with a mostly stay-at-home parent, then the income isn't close to being equal. Lose one parent and you lose perhaps 75% or 80% of the income. The household downsizes from house to apt., and you have 25% of the income supporting 3 people.
The different in lifestyle is likely to be significant. It's one thing to go from ground beef 3 times a week to ground beef 1x/week. It's another to go from having much higher quality food, etc., down to ground beef 3x/week. For poor families the effect is nutritionally greater--but it's psychologically harder for more well-off families.
Where I live, when a family splits up the neighborhood barely notices. Of course families fail. They fail all the time. A parent or kid arrested? Shrug. Custody problems? "Yeah, Ramon was taken by his father." And the kids shrug again. Teenager runs away from home at 17? Shrug. It happens. It's a bit of gossip.
Where my kid goes to school (out of district) a teenager vanished on a Saturday night. Monday there were signs posted in the neighborhood, ribbons showing support for the family. That kind of thing doesn't happen. Families fail--infrequently. And when they do, it's humiliating. When that teenager showed up again a couple of days later, signs appeared welcoming the kid back.
This isn't about the $. It's about the psychology.
In the same way, poor kids and well-off kids actually experience about the same levels of stress because it's all about the psychology, not the # of $. This undermines a lot of the stress-related education research that relied on income levels as a proxy for stress and was widely reported a year ago. The kids feel stress over different things, but no research says the cause of stress matters: You feel stress or you don't. You have elevated levels of cortisol in your bloodstream or you don't. That entire line of research was well-founded--indigent kids in food-deprived households in violent neighborhoods, truly impoverished kids--have more stress than other groups. But we've moved to "food insecure" (which doesn't mean "hungry" or "food deprived" and assumed that the stress response to poverty was linearly correlated to earned income levels expressed in dollars to blur the picture and spread the fact-based findings of *that* research and tried to extend them to all minority or poor kids. The results don't scale up.
Yeah, it means that other groups experience pain and some groups' pain isn't special any more. That's okay--there are groups with pain that really is special, it's just that those groups tend to be small and the pain extreme.
FLPanhandle
(7,107 posts)Isn't that the finding in a nutshell?
Rex
(65,616 posts)Not that they want to lose their parent, but just another horrible event in a long string of bad days and bad nights. Rich kids don't go home to dirt floors every day or one bowl of beans for lunch/dinner.