Study reports childhood family breakups harder on girls' health

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-12/uoic-src121415.php

Public Release: 14-Dec-2015
Study reports childhood family breakups harder on girls' health
University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences

A childhood family breakup can have long-term negative consequences for the children. Recent University of Illinois research looks at overall health, depression, and smoking as a health-related behavior and finds that, for girls, all three are worse.

"Girls' health is more sensitive to family structure," says Andrea Beller, a U of I economist who studies educational attainment and the effects of single-parent family living. "Prior research shows that family breakups affect boys more than girls through cognitive, educational, and emotional channels. We find that, if you grow up in a non-traditional family structure--single parent or step-parent or a cohabiting relationship, girls are more likely than boys to be depressed and report worse overall health."

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The study points out that a girl's age at the time of the family breakup matters.

"Between ages 6 and 10 is an important life period when girls are particularly vulnerable," says Beller. "Early father absence is adversely associated with smoking behavior, overall health, and depression well into adulthood. And the pattern of findings for depression over the time periods suggests that family structure has a more complex role in girls' mental than physical health."

The researchers chose to add smoking to the mix because other research shows that children from single-parent homes are more likely to engage in risky behaviors. They controlled for maternal smoking because, although single mothers are more likely to smoke than mothers in two-parent families, children are more likely to smoke if the mother smokes even in homes with two biological parents.

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"We find that if the biological father was never present, smoking, physical, and mental health are all worse," Beller adds. "And if they leave when girls are in very early childhood (0 to 5 years old), we find a significant association with worse physical health, regardless of the presence of other males."

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"The men may or may not have acted as a dad to the child. We don't know how they interacted, but we do know that the presence of such father-substitutes tends to be associated with much worse outcomes for girls, while the absence of father-substitutes leads to some of the worst family structure associations for boys."

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