Do Kids See It Coming? Analyzing Children’s Cognitive Abilities in the Years before Parental Separation in Norway.

Pauline Kleinschlömer , University of Mannheim

A considerable body of literature has shown that children and adolescents with separated parents do on average less well in school than children who grow up with nondivorced parents. Most previous studies have treated separation as a single event, comparing educational outcomes prior and after parental separation. However, treating parental separation as a discrete event neglects that parental separation is often preceded by a continuous process of family decline. Hence, the negative effects of children’s educational outcomes may unfold even before the formal separation. Therefore, I adopt a process-oriented approach and analyze whether children’s cognitive abilities already decline in the period before separation. In addition, I examine heterogeneous effects based on children’s socioeconomic background and gender. To answer my research question, I rely on Norwegian register data (2011 – 2017) and analyze children’s math and reading scores in grades 5, 8, and 9 using a fixed effects regression. The children in my sample aged 9 to 15 years. In 5th grade, all children in my sample live with their biological parents (n = 22,461). Of these, 1,096 experience a parental separation. I find that children’s cognitive abilities decline slightly even before their parents separate. The analysis of heterogeneous effects reveals that the effect is mainly driven by boys, while the pattern regarding children’s socioeconomic background is mixed. The results highlight the importance of considering separation as a continuous process rather than a discrete event in future research and of accounting for heterogeneous effects.

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 Presented in Session 37. Union Dissolution and Children