A child affected by divorce at an early age will show effects later in life. They tend to make premature transitions to adulthood such as puberty and growth spurts. Recent authors have argued that a major cost to children comes long after: when they attempt to form stable marriages themselves. Parental divorce leads a child to have lower trust in future relationships and higher anxiety. Compared with children of always married parents, children of divorced parents have more positive attitudes towards divorce and less favorable attitudes towards marriage.
Children who experience the divorce of their parents also have higher rates of depression, lower self esteem, and emotional distress. Parental divorce is also associated with negative outcomes and earlier life transitions as offspring enter young adulthood and later life.
Contrary to some of the previous research, those with divorced parents were no more likely than those from intact families to regard divorce positively or to see it as an easy way of solving the problem of a failing marriage. Members of both groups felt that divorce should be avoided, but that it was also a necessary option when a relationship could not be rescued.
Linda Waite analyzed the relation between marriage, divorce and happiness using the National Survey of Family and Households and found that unhappily married families who had divorced were no happier than those who had stayed together. One broad-based study also shows that people have an easier time recovering after the death of a parent as opposed to a divorce. This study reported that children who lose a parent are usually able to attain the same level of happiness that they had before the death, whereas children of divorced parents often are not able to attain the same level of happiness that they had before the divorce.
Also, less parental supervision, less consistent discipline and more lower academic achievement are effects of divorce on kids and children.