Last year, Matthew Yglesias argued that divorce is of little consequence for rich kids, based on his “anecdotal experience growing up in affluent circles in Manhattan.” As I argued in Family Studies at the time, he was clearly unaware of the evidence on this score, which shows that even privileged children of divorce are “markedly more likely to fail to graduate from college, to have a child outside of wedlock, and to lose the socioeconomic status of their childhood than their peers raised in an intact, married family.”
Now, we have more evidence that divorce hurts kids, including rich kids. A new Georgetown University study finds that children’s behavioral problems spike in the wake of divorce. What’s more: Children from upper-income families are especially likely to have more problems with behaviors like disobedience and aggression.
The report’s lead author had this to say to Newsweek:
The negative effects of parental divorce and separation seem to be the worst for the most advantaged. So being wealthy doesn’t seem to protect you from the disruption of divorce and separation,” said Rebecca M. Ryan, lead researcher of the study and an assistant professor of psychology at Georgetown University. “In fact, it’s the opposite.
All this may be because rich kids typically suffer a bigger (relative) material shock when their parents break up, or because divorce is much less common in affluent circles, and therefore more likely to be stigmatized. In any case, this study strongly suggests that Matthew Yglesias’s anecdotal experience growing up in Manhattan doesn’t tell us much about the fallout of divorce for children across the country.
— W. Bradford Wilcox is a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.