Parental separation impacts on children: a focus on cognitive, non-cognitive abilities and labor outcomes

Abstract

Early childhood is one of the most crucial stages of development. With individuals often facing disruption through their life, the ones experienced at this stage are specially relevant in several disciplines. In this context, changes to the family structure become significant and can affect children through-out their life, with parental separation a crucial change in composition. Now, divorce has traditionally been the focus of economic research, however, recent demographic trends highlight the need to also consider the separation of cohabiting couples. We integrate all this facts and study parental separation effects on children’s cognitive and non-cognitive development, then we link our results to later in life outcomes found in the literature. Using Chilean panel data and at knowledge-frontier (Callaway and Sant’Anna, 2021) method, we present effects depending on when separation is observed. Results show weak evidence for aggregated effects in terms of cognitive abilities and no effects in non-cognitive ones. While this is in line with previous studies, we expand on the result and find a negative effect for the 2017 cohort on cognitive abilities, which are a strong predictor of labor outcomes. This effect is persistent to sensitivity analysis, which shows a stronger effect when comparing the cohort to children whose parent’s remain married. Lastly, in relation to other disruptive events on early childhood we find separation has stronger effects than violence by the mother, giving importance to family structure in early childhood policy discussion.