Consequences of Marital Conflict and Divorce for Child Development in South Korea

Literature on effects of marital conflict and divorce on child development has long wondered 1) whether divorce followed by parents’ marital conflict exerts distinguishable impacts on children and 2) whether marital conflict is more detrimental to involved children than divorce per se. We address these questions using the Korea Youth Panel Study-Elementary School Students that traced students from 4th grade in 2003 to 8th grade in 2007. Our results indicate 1) that children suffered from parental divorce as well as marital conflict, 2) that the adverse effect seems larger for parental divorce than marital conflict, 3) that there was domain specificity for differential effect of parental divorce by preceding marital conflict, and 4) that children who were under parents’ marital conflict were further disadvantaged if their parents decided to end their marriage.