New research shows that divorce has a bigger impact on child-parent relationships if it occurs in the first few years of the child’s life. Children who experience parental divorce early in their life tend to have less secure relationships with their parents as adults than those who experience divorce later.

From the press release:

In two studies published today in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,  R. Chris Fraley of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and graduate student Marie Heffernan examined the timing and effects of divorce on both parental and romantic relationships, as well as differences in how divorce affects relationships with mothers versus fathers. In the first study, they analyzed data from 7,735 people who participated in a survey about personality and close relationships through yourpersonality.net. More than one-third of the survey participants’ parents divorced and the average age of divorce was about 9 years old.

The researchers found that individuals from divorced families were less likely to view their current relationships with their parents as secure. And people who experienced parental divorce between birth and 3 to 5 years of age were more insecure in their current relationships with their parents compared to those whose parents divorced later in childhood.

“A person who has a secure relationship with a parent is more likely than someone who is insecure to feel that they can trust the parent,” Fraley says. “Such a person is more comfortable depending on the parent and is confident that the parent will be psychologically available when needed.”

Although there was a tendency for people to experience more anxiety about romantic relationships if they were from divorced families, the link between parental divorce and insecurity in romantic relationships was relatively weak. This finding was important, the researchers say, as it shows that divorce does not have a blanket effect on all close relationships in adulthood but rather is selective — affecting some relationships more than others. They also found that parental divorce tends to predict greater insecurity in people’s relationships with their fathers than with their mothers.

To help explain why divorce influences maternal relationships more than paternal ones, and to replicate the first study’s findings, Fraley and Heffernan repeated their analysis with a new set of 7,500 survey participants. Unlike in the first study, however, they asked the participants to indicate which of their parents had been awarded primary custody following their divorce. The researchers speculated that paternal relationships were more insecure following divorce because mothers are more likely than fathers to be awarded custody.

The majority of participants — 74 percent — indicated that they had lived with their mothers following divorce or separation, while 11 percent indicated living with their fathers; the remainder lived with grandparents or other caretakers. The researchers found that people were more likely to have an insecure relationship with their father if they lived with their mother and, conversely, were less likely to have an insecure relationship with their father if they lived with him. The results were similar with respect to mothers.

While it is premature to speculate on the implications of this work for decision-making regarding child custody, the work is valuable as it suggests that “something as basic as the amount of time that one spends with a parent or one’s living arrangements” can shape the quality of child-parent relationships, write Fraley and Heffernan.

Abstract from the research:

One of the assumptions of attachment theory is that disruptions in parental relationships are prospectively related to insecure attachment patterns in adulthood. The majority of research that has evaluated this hypothesis, however, has been based on retrospective reports of the quality of relationships with parents—research that is subject to retrospective biases. In the present research, the authors examined the impact of parental divorce—an event that can be assessed relatively objectively—on attachment patterns in adulthood across two samples. The data indicate that parental divorce has selective rather than diffuse implications for insecure attachment. Namely, parental divorce was more strongly related to insecure relationships with parents in adulthood than insecure relationships with romantic partners or friends. In addition, parental insecurity was most pronounced when parental divorce took place in early childhood. This finding is consistent with hypotheses about sensitive periods in attachment development.