What Divorce Can Do to a Child’s Development

A divorce is seldom easy—not for the couple that divorces, but also not for their children (if they have any). However, past psychological research on how divorce affects children’s development was often conducted in small cohorts of volunteers and showed conflicting results. Moreover, it typically focused on older children. Therefore, large studies in younger children are needed to get robust and trustworthy insights on how divorce affects early child development.

A Large Study on Parents’ Divorce and Early Child Development

To fill this gap in the psychological literature, a large study, published in the scientific journal BMJ Pediatrics Open, analyzed data from more than 62,000 young children aged 3 to 5 years and their caregivers (Kang et al., 2025). The study, entitled “Parents’ divorce and early child development: a population-based study in China,” looked at three markers to scientifically assess children’s development:

• The overall score of the so-called Human Capability Index, a number that quantifies overall human development by combining data from nine different domains (see next point).
• The scores of the nine domains of the Human Capability Index, including reading, speaking, writing, learning, perseverance, number knowledge, cultural knowledge, social and emotional abilities, and physical health.
• A yes/no variable to indicate whether a child was developmentally on track by comparing it to the development of other children in its age group.

What Did the Researchers Find About Divorce and Development?

Overall, 2,409 of the parents of the children included in the study had divorced (3.83 percent of the overall sample). The results were clear:

Children from families in which the parents had divorced had statistically lower overall scores for the Human Capability Index. They were also statistically less likely to be developmentally on track than children whose parents were still married.

The in-depth analysis of the scores of the nine domains of the Human Capability Index showed lower values in children whose parents were divorced than in children from intact families in almost all domains. The effects were particularly strong for social and emotional skills, physical health, and reading. They were medium for verbal communication, perseverance, number knowledge, and cultural knowledge, and less strong for writing and learning.

Take-Away

Taken together, young children from divorced families tended to show slower psychological, social, and physical development than children from intact families. This suggests that more psychological research is needed to find out how parents, extended families, society in general, and the healthcare system can better support this very vulnerable group to stay developmentally on track.

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