A new report in the Journal of Child Psychology suggests that genetics, rather than divorce, is the root of depression in children of divorce. MSNBC reports the study says “that the increased risk of emotional problems in the offspring of divorced parents is due to genetic risk shared by parents and their offspring.” The author of the study, Brain D’Onofrio, says this is contrary to the common assumption in the fields of sociology and psychology.

D’Onofrio does not, however, let divorce off the hook. He said increased alcohol abuse and problem behaviors such as such as skipping school, getting into fights, and stealing could be traced to divorce.

The researchers used twin studies to discover how children react to divorce. They studied the offspring of twins who got divorced. The hypothesis was that, if genetics has a greater effect on depression in children of divorce, the offspring of identical twins would react more similarly when their parents were divorced than the offspring of fraternal twins. They looked at 4,800 children of twins. The average age of the offspring was 35 years, but the subjects ranged from 16 to 79 years old.

When the researchers looked at fraternal twins, the results showed that the offspring of divorced twins were more likely to be depressed or to have problems with anxiety than their cousins whose parents stayed married. The offspring of identical twins, however, had similar levels of depression whether or not their parents were divorced. D’onofrio concludes that children of parents prone to depression are going to be more prone to depression regardless of their parent’s marriage status.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Divorce News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.