Divorce is never easy. It causes numerous harms to the husband and wife getting divorced, plus children they might have, their extended family members, and friends. There are even far reaching societal costs that put strains on institutions like the court systems. Healthy marriages are so vital to the health of communities, and these are just a few of the reasons why it is so important to promote programs and policies that strengthen marriages.
This week on Family Policy Matters, host Traci DeVette Griggs welcomes Josh Wood, Executive Director of Them Before Us, to discuss the damage that divorce causes to children and society at large, and what policies can be put in place to mitigate these effects.
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Family Policy Matters
How Divorce Damages Society (with Josh Wood)
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. 5 million children and three decades. A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research followed for 30 years, 5 million Americans whose parents divorced. The results are a wake-up call for Americans. Today we’re joined by Josh wood, Executive Director of Them Before Us, the preeminent global organization working to put children before adults in every conversation about marriage and family. He’s here to discuss this study’s confirmation of what many families who have lived through divorce already know, divorce shatters children’s lives forever. But whoa, Josh Wood, that is a pretty hard statement. So especially for parents who might not have had a choice in the matter. So, are the findings actually that stark?
JOSH WOOD: First off, let me begin, my parents divorced. I have divorce all up and down my family tree. That is a tragic fact. Are the findings that stark? Yes. I mean at the end of the day, yes. Does that mean that your child is doomed to be a statistic? No. And exactly what you pointed out, there’s usually a parent who feels horrible about this, who’s done everything they can to reconcile, and they’ve been the hero standing by doing everything they can to piece things back together, and they deserve a lot of credit for that. And we should be applauding, again, that heroic person who’s usually the one trying to keep things together. But, again, this is the but here, we cannot afford to sacrifice the ideal or to pull our punches when talking about the harms, because a) the children deserve it. You can only recognize tragedy and provide compassion when you hold up an ideal. If we somehow try to explain to children that they don’t need a connection to both biological parents, that they don’t need their married mother and father to provide stability in the home. If we somehow try to for the sake of inclusion, pull that down, you lose the ability to say, Hey, what happened to you wasn’t right, and that’s not what you deserved. And so, our erasure of the ideal often pulls back down our ability to or prevents our ability to provide compassion. And so, I want to be careful not to do that, even though, I mean, yeah, you mentioned it. The study showed higher rates of teen pregnancy, jail time, higher risk of early death, lower adult wages. I mean, it’s significant.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: How big are those differences?
JOSH WOOD: We have to keep in mind, so with any study, the percent chance is higher, but the number of actual children impacted may vary, right? So, it may be a doubling, but that might go from one to two. So, you do need to dig into the study to see the actual number of children affected. But they did. They tracked this over a long period of time, and found, this was a million children across 50 years, 60% higher risk of teen pregnancy, 40% higher risk of jail time, 45% higher risk of early death, 13% lower adult wages, and a lower chance of going to college. What causes this? So, they tried to dig in. Why does this happen? Well, the chain reaction of a split involves parents moving to lower income neighborhoods, having worse schools, things like that. Parents living apart. Step parents entering the picture increases rates of abuse, violence, and neglect. And also, there is an emotional element that the kids have when they are losing contact with one of their parents, which, in 50% of cases of divorce, a child is going to lose a connection to a biological parent almost entirely. And so, they’re going to have some social reactions to that too, where maybe they don’t study as hard, or they’re not interested in things they used to be interested in. They’re not performing as well at school or with their friends or parents. So, you’re going to have some of that aspect too, that you have to take into consideration. This is a major loss for a kid.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, so let’s talk about the difference in attitudes. Is that what has brought about this difficulty for children through divorce? We think differently about divorce now?
JOSH WOOD: The data would show that about 60% of the harm over time can be explained by the loss of income when you split your parents up and the move to a worse neighborhood and worse being crime, education, etc.. Those factors alone, one parent having to do it by themselves, is going to explain a huge part of the harm. Now NBER’s study did show that every year the parents held off on getting a divorce, the impact was lessened on the child. So that’s a question we get often, is, well, is it better to just do it while they’re young? Is it living in a loveless marriage? Is that really the point? And what we actually found was every year the parents delayed, it actually increased the positive effects on them for the rest of their lives. So why does it affect them more now? Yeah, I think it affects them, because divorce affects them, and our opinion on divorce as a culture has become much more laissez faire. That’s what I would say. Culture has impacted how parents view it. It’s made it more socially acceptable in cases that don’t involve abuse and neglect, and that has trickled down, now, to parents jumping out of this relationship and the kids losing their connection, the resources, their mother and father, and that has a huge impact.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So, some of these justifications that we hear, then, are that children are resilient. They’re going to be happy as long as the parents are happy. Is that putting kind of an adult attitude on to children’s psyche?
JOSH WOOD: Well, I think you have to ask who is interested in coming up with slogans like that? Oftentimes it’s parents who want something really bad, and they’re willing to do whatever they have to do to justify it in their own mind. And so, I would say it’s probably the parents who are coming up with these. They’re putting them onto their children in hopes that they can justify their action after the fact.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Are there other reasons that children should be a bigger priority in marriage, in divorce law, than the adults in the relationship? Like, what kind of effect is this having, not only on those individuals, but on our culture as a whole?
JOSH WOOD: It’s an interesting question, I can actually recall, there was a study done in Jacksonville. They call it the Jacksonville Miracle. Interesting study that they proactively invested funds into marriage counseling, into date nights, into a bunch of different things that were essentially aimed at those marriages who may be on the brink, trying to pull them back, giving them resources to enjoy, connect, and stay married. They found out that this proactive investment saved the taxpayers lots of money. We’re talking millions of dollars, because of all the legal fees, the tied up in courts, the facilitation of child support payments. I mean, it was all these different social effects downstream, and so I don’t think we quite have a grasp of just how much this family breakdown is costing us, outside of how harmful it is to children. It’s a huge economic issue. But again, we don’t really have to go past what it’s costing the children. That should be our primary focus. It’s really hard on them. And again, outside of abuse or neglect, I think we should be looking at the parents and saying, you created this life, you made a promise before God. And again, even if you’re not a Christian, you made a covenant, you signed a contract, you acknowledged it before the state to say you would stay together, and that was a societal good. You need to show us why you can’t fulfill that obligation anymore, because there’s lives now that you’re impacting and will impact for now a generation if you make this choice.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: You know we’ve seen in the last decade or two, the suicide rate among young people, and I’m not just talking about children, but even young adults, has really skyrocketed. We see a lot of violence coming from young people. Can this be tied back to these homes that have been torn apart?
JOSH WOOD: In short, yes. I would say there’s probably not a societal ill that you can point out that is not lessened by having that child grow up with a married mother and father. And this is regardless, Traci, of race, zip code, I mean everything from propensity to commit a violent act to how well you do in school to how you earn the rest of your life, to your marriage rate. I mean, all of these things, through your lifetime earnings, all of this can be tied back to your married mother and father. I mean, that’s why I think we have to question, if we’re sitting back as policymakers or leaders, nonprofits, even heads of homes, we have to question anybody that walks into the public square to offer solutions for these things that don’t include family structure. Anytime someone says, we need to fix, you know, poverty through x, we need to fix gun violence through y, if it does not include a plan to keep mothers and fathers together, to get people getting married before they have children, to get them to stay together, it’s a disingenuous solution. Family structure is the keystone for so much of our social policy, and for those of us who want the government to be as small as possible, don’t want government overreaching into all of our lives, the best way to have a small government is to have a big emphasis on marriage.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So, you did mention how a divorce can affect that child’s ability, maybe, to have a successful marriage. So, have you seen that, then, in your statistics?
JOSH WOOD: In short, again, yes. One that sticks out to me actually is your chances of divorce as a child, later in life, go up exponentially if you’re so if your parents get divorced, that’s kind of step one. But if your parent gets remarried, your chances of divorce actually skyrocket too. Again, it’s like a second step. And we would think this is that providing like a new level of stability, don’t we talk all the time about two parent privilege, it’s just about getting two parents in there who love their kids. And look, there are some step parents, if you’re listening and you’re a step parent, that do a heroic job. They are also, an unrelated step parent in the home, an unrelated male in the home is the most dangerous person in a child’s life, and not to mention, they do not invest at the same level that a biological parent does. And further, there’s a psychological phenomenon that kids experience when they see their parent connecting emotionally or romantically with a step parent, they feel competition. It stirs in them even a social and emotional response versus a reflective response. When they see their parent romantic with their other biological parent, they don’t feel competition. It’s a crazy intuitive response where, when they see their two biological parents reconnecting romantically, emotionally, they actually feel more loved as a result. And so, it’s so complicated, right? But again, that’s why we have to advocate for the ideal, because when we get that right, so many other things go right for the child.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: What are some realistic policy changes in some specific policy changes that you think states in particular could take to begin to assist the family to stay together.
JOSH WOOD: I mean, first, I think we should be on the proactive side, right? The Jacksonville Miracle is a good example of that. How are we as policymakers, proactively investing in biological mothers and fathers raising their children? If we know that to be an institution that reduces the need for government intervention period, later in life, why are we not pouring money into and naming the one relationship that advantages children above all others, which is their married mothers and fathers raising them. That’s first. I would point to the state. How are we proactively investing in that one keystone relationship? Second is when two adults enter into marriage and there is an agreement. If someone breaks that agreement, it should be material. There should be an ability to bring to the court the spouse that is breaking the contract. Then again, this is in situations where there has been no abuse, there’s been no neglect. In my mind, there needs to be justice and accountability for the one parent who is seeking to exit and break the contract and the promise that they made. And I think when we erase all those things, when we aren’t allowed to bring infidelity into court proceedings, when we aren’t allowed to consider who is trying to get out, and is there a reason, when we take all of that out, what you do is you create a lopsided playing field where now you’ve got someone who has put so much time and energy into keeping their word and their promise and providing the environment that their children need, but they’re being penalized to facilitate the desires of the adult, even though that adult’s desires are costing everybody else something significant, and it’s against the word that they had in the beginning. So, I think that’s the second thing is, how are we adding accountability and justice back into the process for all parties?
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Could you end with a little bit more about your story? Obviously, the statistics bear out it is better for parents to stay together whenever possible. But were there some keys that you found coming from a home where your parents divorced that really helped you to become a successful adult?
JOSH WOOD: My faith in Jesus Christ, first and foremost, you have to have a standard that lives outside yourself. The head of your home has to be submitted to someone that doesn’t change with the wind. And I think that provides a universal morality for you and your spouse that calls things in and out of bounds. I think that far and away is the number one thing each couple needs.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Well, amen to that. Well, we’re just about out of time for this week before we go, Josh Wood, where can our listeners find the research we discussed today and follow all of your good work at Them Before Us?
JOSH WOOD: Go to ThemBeforeUs.com. We would love your support. Sign up for our newsletter. We release reports and studies like this all the time. We would love for you to join the movement there.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: All right. Sounds good. Josh Wood, Executive Director of Them Before Us. Thank you so much for being with us today on Family Policy Matters.
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