The Long-Term Effects of Parental Separation on Childhood Multidimensional Deprivation: A Lifecourse Approach

Abstract

A large literature has documented the impact of parental separation on children’s financial poverty. However, income has been increasingly criticized as an indicator of childhood living conditions and deprivation. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework and adapt existing measures of adult multi-domain deprivation to produce childhood deprivation indicators that are age-specific and child-centred. These new indicators allow within-individual, longitudinal analyses to measure the impact of a shock on childrens living conditions. We apply this method to explore the long term effects of parental separation on childhood deprivation, considering four dimensions of children’s lives: leisure; material conditions; parenting behaviours and routines; and basic material goods. We track children over the first decade of life by using a nationally representative UK cohort of over 18,000 children. Using a fixed-effects framework, we find that, while the increase in income poverty after parental separation is large, the impact on childhood deprivation was more mixed. Our results suggest that, while facing strong financial constraints, separated parents cut back on normative but costly activities such as holidays and outings, but attempt to maintain children’s basic material circumstances and their day-to-day parenting and routines, at least around separation. However, heterogeneous effects exist, suggesting that parents’ pre-separation social and economic capital may play an important role. This approach therefore adds more precision and nuance to our understanding of the processes around parental separation and its impacts on children.