Parents Split, Junior Flunks

• Post by: Bryce J. Christensen
• June 7, 2018

For all of their effusive pro-child rhetoric, progressives remain astonishingly blind to the real consequences for children of their marriage-subverting principles. But those consequences come into sobering focus in a new Spanish study concluding that children who experience a parental separation are disturbingly likely to fail in school.   In sketching out the context for their investigation into the association between parental separation and academic failure, the researchers cite collective statistics for the 28 countries that constitute the European Union. Such statistics reveal that 65% of the EU’s adults live in couples, with about half of all couple relationships (marriages and consensual unions) ending in separation; the annual total number of EU separations and divorces involving children comes in at nearly one million.   Affiliated with three Spanish universities (the University of A Coruña, the University of Vigo, and the University of Santiago de Compostela), the authors of the new study well understand that these parental divorces and separations mean trouble for the children affected.  Previous studies, cited by these authors, indicate that “parental separation is linked to negative effects on children in terms of psychological adjustment, academic performance, behavioral disorders, self-concept, and social adjustment.” Not only do the researchers adduce evidence from these studies that children whose parents separate prove distinctively likely to develop disruptive and aggressive behaviors, emotional problems, and poor family self-concepts, but they also point to research finding that such children all too often “convert psychological problems into physical symptoms, increasing the probability of developing gastrointestinal, genitourinary, dermatological, and neurological disorders.” Even more disheartening are the conclusions that the authors of this study glean from earlier investigations of juvenile delinquency su