New Study Shows Kids of Divorce are Unlikely to Have Teen Pregnancy, Incarceration or Early Mortality

EDITED 8-14-2025 If you have the older yellow graph, please delete it and use this blue graph. I expanded the graph to show college and income figures, and used figures from Table 1 (page 50).

You’ve probably heard about this study. Marriage-at-any-cost groups are thrilled about it because they are betting you won’t read it. It’s easy for them to omit the key facts and spin the story as doom and gloom for children of divorce. It’s not. It actually shows the opposite.

Here’s the truth: the study shows that serious problems for kids of divorce are rare. Things like teen pregnancy, ending up in jail, or dying young happen to fewer than 2 out of 100 kids. But these groups hype up the percentages — saying things like “20% higher risk” or “60% higher risk.” Sounds huge, right? In reality, the numbers are tiny in both groups. It just makes for scarier headlines.

They know people trust them — and they count on that trust to go unchallenged.

LET’S LOOK AT THE RESULTS from the working paper “Divorce, Family Arrangements, and Children’s Adult Outcomes”. The study looked at kids born between 1988 and 1993 to married parents and to parents who were married and later divorced (according to their IRS tax forms).

Likelihood of TEEN BIRTH by parents’ marital status

All figures come directly from Table 1 (page 50) in the “Divorce, Family Arrangements, and Children’s Adult Outcomes” study

Less than 1 in 100 daughters of continuously married parents had a TEEN BIRTH
Less than 2 in 100 daughters of divorce had a TEEN BIRTH

Here are the numbers they found:

• • 0.6 in 100 daughters whose parents were continuously married (or you can say 6.1 in 1000 daughters)
  • 1.5 in 100 daughters whose parents divorced during their childhood (or you can say 15 in 1000 daughters)

Likelihood of INCARCERATION by parents’ marital status

Less than 1 in 100 kids of continuously married parents were INCARCERATED
Less than 1 in 100 kids of divorce were INCARCERATED

Here are the numbers they found:

• • 0.15 in 100 kids under age 20 whose parents were continuously married (or you can say 1.5 in 1000 children)
  • 0.46 in 100 kids under age 20 whose parents divorced during their childhood, specifically between age 5-20 (or you can say 4.6 in 1000 children)

Likelihood of EARLY DEATH (MORTALITY) by parents’ marital status

Less than 1 in 100 kids of continuously married parents DIED YOUNG
Less than 2 in 100 kids of divorce DIED YOUNG

Here are the numbers they found:

• • 0.83 in 100 kids under age 25 whose parents were continuously married (or you can say 8.3 in 1000 children)
  • 1.2 in 100 kids under age 25 whose parents divorced during their childhood (or you can say 12 in 1000 children)

Child Attending COLLEGE and living in a college residence

• 12.9 in 100 kids under age 25 whose parents were continuously married ATTENDED COLLEGE and lived in college housing
• 7.6 in 100 kids under age 25 whose parents divorced during their childhood (it’s likely that these numbers might be higher if they had a way to factor in commuter students, but they didn’t interview people or use a longitudinal study, they used the Census and IRS tax returns. which wouldn’t show this.)

Child’s Family INCOME difference

• The study found that roughly 25 years after the parents divorced (when the child was age 0–5), the child’s family income at age 27, on average, was about 9%–13% less than that of 27-year-olds whose parents were married during their childhood. Table 1 shows these figures as $33,460 versus $27,520.

Conclusion: Hardly any kids from any type of family experience these outcomes

Table 1 from page 50 is shown below. And if you want to see the full study, click the link in the next paragraph. You can see for yourself that the likelihood of any of these negative outcomes happening is incredibly low. And some of the negative outcomes were due to lower income, living in bad neighborhoods, and the parents’ lack of proximity. (The maximum distance they documented in their Figure 6 graph was 10 miles.)

Citation: Pope, Nolan G., Andrew C. Johnston, and Maggie R. Jones. “Divorce, Family Arrangements, and Children’s Adult Outcomes.” Center for Economic Studies Working Paper Series, CES-WP-25-28, U.S. Census Bureau, May 2025. https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2025/adrm/ces/CES-WP-25-28.pdf, accessed August 6, 2025.

Where are the figures mentioned in the study?
Data from Table 1 on page 50 of the May 2025 working paper (study): Divorce, family arrangements, and children’s adult outcomes (CES Working Paper No. 25-28). U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies. This study must have been difficult to do because the Census no longer collects data on divorce and children, but it does show names, locations, and whether a teen or adult child was incarcerated in a prison on Census Day in 2010 or if they were residential students at a college on Census Day in 2010. Apparently this study doesn’t factor in people who commuted to college. The researchers used IRS data to figure out who was married, no longer married, remarried, their income, and the ages of their children. See Table 1 (p. 50)

Also here are specific quotes about their findings:
—p. 21 “Relative to the baseline teen birth rate of 1.2 percent, early divorce exposure increases teen births by roughly 60 percent.”
—p. 22 “Given the baseline mortality rate of 1.1 percent, experiencing a divorce before the age of 5 increases the risk of mortality by approximately 45 percent, similar to our event study estimates on mortality.”
—p. 22 “Experiencing a divorce between the ages of 5 and 20 raises incarceration probability by 0.15 to 0.28 percentage points. Given the baseline incarceration rate of 0.46 percent in the 2010 Census, these effects represent a 33 to 60 percent increase in incarceration likelihood…”  And page 25 states: “Comparing this to our finding that childhood divorce increases incarceration by 0.28 percentage points suggests that neighborhood changes account for roughly 29 percent of the total impact on incarceration.” Graphic designed by Gretchen Baskerville.