Family structure, co-parental relationship quality, post-separation paternal involvement and children’s emotional wellbeing

Abstract

It is well documented that children who experience parental divorce are more likely than those in intact families to experience a range of emotional and behavioural adjustment problems, and to perform less well academically. However, few studies of the impact of divorce have exclusively considered young children. This paper takes advantage of a recent Australian child cohort study to examine links between young children’s emotional wellbeing, the quality of the co-parental relationship, and post-separation paternal involvement. We found that while children aged 6–7 years living with both parents generally had better emotional wellbeing than similar aged children living with one parent, inter-parental hostility was an important factor in explainingyoung children’s emotional wellbeing. But regardless of family type, children whose parents had a hostile inter-parental relationship tended to have poorer emotional wellbeing than children whose parents did not have a non-hostile relationship, as reported by children and their parents.