D-I-V-O-R-C-E
A recent Princeton study found that boys who grew up in an intact, married family were half as likely to end up in prison as young adults. Robert Sampson observed, “Family structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictor of variations in urban violence across cities in the United States.”
In the last half-century, suicide has more than tripled among teens and young adults; one recent Harvard study found the single “most important explanatory variable” was the “increased share of youth living in homes with a divorced parent.”
One study found that young adults whose parents were divorced were nearly twice as likely to report that they had a poor relationship with their mother compared to young adults who were raised in an intact, married family (30 versus 16 percent).
On the other hand, the best social-scientific evidence suggests that children do better when their parents part ways if their relationship is characterized by serious physical or emotional abuse.
But according to Paul Amato and Alan Booth two-thirds of divorces do not involve such abuse.