Marital Breakup and Children's Behavioural Responses

In contrast to most other studies focusing on children's cognitive outcomes and using cross sectional data, this paper exploits information from three waves of the Millennium Cohort Study to assess the impact of marital breakup on children's behaviour. Using fixed effect estimation throughout, the analysis shows that separation has an impact on some behavioural aspects, but not all, and that the impact may persist over time. On the contrary, we find negative anticipation effects, meaning that children of parents who are getting separated have fewer conduct problems. In terms of magnitude, the estimated effects, when significant, are all modest.