Divorce Makes Kids More Vulnerable to Getting Hurt Online

The “good divorce” is back. In the last two years, the mainstream media have published article after article — from the Atlantic (“How I Demolished My Life: A Home Improvement Story”) to the New York Times (“Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love”) — celebrating divorce in particular and family diversity in general. Echoing the ’70s view that “children were resilient in the face of divorce . . . and that children would be happier if their parents were able to leave unhappy marriages,” the new apostles for family diversity tell us that family instability is no big deal in 21st-century America. In her aforementioned piece for the Times, for instance, Lara Bazelon assured us that divorce can “be liberating, pointing the way toward a different life that leaves everyone better off, including the children.”

There is only one problem with the new conventional wisdom on the liberatory power of divorce and family diversity for the kids. It’s completely wrong. The social science on family and children tells us that children are markedly more likely to suffer emotional, social, and financial distress if raised apart from their own married parents. In fact, a new study released this week reveals one more arena where family breakdown is taking a toll on children: the virtual world.

The study, Teens and Tech: What Difference Does Family Structure Make?, headed up by psychologist Jean Twenge and co-authored by one of us (Wilcox), indicates that adolescents from non-intact homes are markedly more likely to spend time on screens — from social media to gaming to texting. In fact, teens ages 11–18 from non-intact families spend almost two hours more on digital media than do their peers from intact, married families.

This is important because excessive screen time stimulates stress(cortisol) and limits sleep (melatonin), two of the reasons increased tech use appears to be implicated in the burgeoning mental-health crisis unfolding among adolescents and young adults today. Indeed, this new study from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) and the Wheatley Institute shows that high technology use among adolescents is associated with markedly higher risks of depression, loneliness, and sleep deprivation.

Continue reading at National Review  . . . .