Peer-reviewed article
Parental separation and children’s well-being: Does the quality of parent-child relationships moderate the effect?
Pauline Kleinschlömer, Sandra Krapf ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study examines how parental separation affects children's emotional and behavioral well-being in Germany, focusing on whether the quality of the relationship with the resident parent protects children from negative effects. Using longitudinal data from 2,057 children aged 7 to 15, researchers found that children who had high-conflict relationships with their resident parent experienced significantly more emotional problems after separation, while those with low-conflict relationships experienced fewer problems. Only children with low levels of intimate disclosure with their resident parent showed increased behavioral problems after separation.
Key points
- Children do not respond identically to parental separation; outcomes vary based on parent-child relationship quality
- High conflict with the resident parent significantly increased emotional problems after separation
- Low conflict with the resident parent was associated with fewer emotional problems after separation
- Low levels of intimate disclosure with the resident parent was linked to more behavioral problems after separation
- The quality of the parent-child relationship can moderate or buffer the effects of parental separation
Limitations
The study focuses only on Germany and may not generalize to other cultural or institutional contexts. The analysis covers a specific age range (7-15) and the relatively small number of children who experienced separation (99 out of 2,057) may limit the generalizability of findings.
Abstract
A considerable body of literature takes a deficit perspective and shows that children who experience a parental separation have more disadvantages than children who live in a two-biological-parent family. This article argues that not all children respond identically to their parents’ separation, and examines whether there are heterogeneous effects based on parent-child relationship quality. We expect that having a good relationship with the resident parent can buffer the potentially negative effects of parental separation on a child’s well-being. Using longitudinal data from waves 2 to 13 (2009/2010 – 2020/2021) of the German Family Panel pairfam, we estimate fixed-effects models based on a sample of 2,057 children aged 7 to 15, 99 of whom experienced the separation of their parents. We find that children who had a high level of conflict with the resident parent had significantly more emotional problems after parental separation, whereas children who had few conflicts with the resident parent had significantly fewer emotional problems after separation. Similarly, we find that only children in a parent-child dyad with a low level of intimate disclosure had more behavioral problems after parental separation than before.
Findings the Hub has extracted
Each claim below is labelled by its type of design and links back to this report.
- Intervention
- Examining whether good quality parent-child relationships (low conflict, high intimate disclosure) buffer negative effects of parental separation
- Population
- 2,057 German children aged 7-15, of whom 99 experienced parental separation
Key finding
Children with high conflict with resident parent had significantly more emotional problems after separation