Academic performance in children of divorce: psychological resilience and vulnerability

Parental divorce can be conceptualized as a stressful event for all children, but one must recognize that reactions to divorce can vary widely among children. This investigation was based on two basic ideas: 1) children of divorce as a group would show deficits in academic performance compared to children from intact families, even several years after their parents' separation, and 2) because factors that promote psychological resilience and vulnerability, we expected to find normal heterogeneity within the divorce sample. Among 96 middle-school adolescents from a suburban school district near Denver, children of divorce showed significant performance deficits in academic achievement, as reflected in grade-point average and scholastic motivation in middle school, but not in nationally normed tests of scholastic aptitude and other less direct measures of behavioral conformity. An analysis of GPA over time revealed strikingly disparate patterns of achievement between divorce and control groups. Corresponding patterns of scholastic aptitude scores, absence from school and comportment revealed no systematic differences over time. These results suggest strongly that parental divorce can be a critical event in the academic development of children. Large differences in academic achievement between our divorce group as a whole and the controls cannot be attributed, at least at the time of sampling, to differences in social class or intellectual ability. Despite a similar family background, i.e., marital dissolution, a minority of the children of divorce showed vulnerability in the pattern of academic achievement over time while the majority demonstrated academic careers not unlike that of the controls.