How social class influences family breakdown

Children of separated parents are more likely to see their own marriage or long-term relationship break up, which suggests that patterns and behaviours in one generation can affect those of the next.

These children are also more likely to experience inadequate education as well as worse overall health and wellbeing. We wanted to find out whether higher parental class protects children from the intergenerational transmission of parental separation. Parents with more resources can offer children better living conditions, and better educational opportunities, making them less likely to leave home early, cohabit early and start a family early – which all increase the risk of later separation.

Intergenerational transmission

There are four main theories of the ‘intergenerational transmission of union dissolution’:

Genes: when parents and their children share genetic traits that increase the risk of partnership problems such as neuroticism or depression.
Socialisation: when children witness their parents’ conflicts, lack of communication, or unhealthy coping strategies, they may unknowingly replicate these patterns in their own relationships.
Resources: family disruption also reduces the socio-economic resources that parents can pass on to their offspring, and children typically experience a drop in their standard of living after parental divorce.
Life-course choices: the idea that people from divorced families are more likely to leave homes, cohabit and become parents early – all linked to higher risks of family dissolution.

Using the data

We used both Understanding Society data and the British Household Panel Survey, allowing us to compare several generations born between 1925 and 1979. We observed over 38,000 people from when they became a parent until they separated from their partner, died, stopped responding to the survey, or marked 30 years with the same partner.

We focused on childbearing unions, whether marital or cohabiting, and looked at:

whether respondents lived in the same household with both parents until the age of 16, giving us three groups: those from intact families who lived at home until 16; those from non-intact families where one of their parents moved out before they were 16; and people who had at least one parent die during their childhood.
social class. Divorce literature usually looks at education as a measure of social class, but an individual’s position within the labour market is a better indication of the opportunities and constraints he or she faces in terms of life chances. We distinguished four classes: upper middle class, lower middle class, skilled working class, and low skilled working class.

We also took into account factors such as year of birth, gender, ethnicity, partnership status (cohabiting or married), the age the offspring were when they married or started living together, and education.

Overall results

People whose parents separated when they were growing up are much more likely to also see their own childbearing relationship break-up than people who grew up in intact families. Each year, the separation rate is about 1.2% for offspring from non-intact families, compared to 0.7% for offspring from intact families. In our sample, 29 per cent among the offspring of non-intact families experienced the dissolution of their child-bearing union as compared to 16 per cent among those of intact families

Social class

Regardless of whether social origin is measured by class or socio-economic status, we found that children from upper-middle-class families face a lower risk of seeing their own relationship break up than children from working-class parents. We also observe this if parents’ social position is measured with education. Children of parents with a degree are less likely to separate from their partners than the children of parents who left school without any qualification.

Birth cohorts

We then compared the outcomes for three birth cohorts: the ‘silent generation’ – born 1925-45, ‘baby boomers’ – born 1945-65, and Generation X (1965-80). In all three, children from non-intact families were at greater risk of their own break-up than those from intact families. The effect was smaller for the ‘silent generation’, but our sample size here was smaller, so we have to interpret these results with caution.

Contrary to what we expected, socio-economic background seems to have a similar effect on children from intact and non-intact families across cohorts. So there appears to be no interaction effect between parental separation and their social class on children’s own childbearing relationship for any of the three generations.

Interestingly, the association between social class and family dissolution changes over time. Among members of the silent generation, having parents with a lower socio-economic status was not linked with a higher risk of family dissolution. By contrast, for subsequent cohorts of baby boomers and especially Generation X, a less advantaged paternal class has become associated with a higher likelihood of experiencing family dissolution.

Summing up

In sum, our study shows a powerful influence of parents’ family dissolution on children’s family dissolution. However, it provides no evidence for a compensatory class effect that moderates this influence. Offspring from more advantaged class backgrounds are not any less affected by their parents’ separation than offspring from less advantaged backgrounds. The link between parents’ family dissolution and offspring’s family dissolution is strong regardless of parents’ socio-economic status.

For many children, parental separation is a critical life event with oftenadverse consequences that extend into adulthood. The more we can understand about it, and how to mitigate its effects, the better.

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