How Does Divorce Impact Children?

Rancho Palos Verdes Patch invites you and your circle of friends to help build a community of support for mothers and their families right here in Rancho Palos Verdes.

Each week in Moms Talk, our Moms Council of experts and smart moms take your questions, give advice and share solutions.

So grab a cup of coffee and settle in as we start the conversation today with this topic:

According to a paper by researchers at Montclair State University, in certain cases, a parent's divorce does not raise the risk that their children's marriages or cohabitations will break up, Pew Research Center reports.

There is research that shows children are at risk for problems both in the immediate aftermath of the split and later on in life.

The paper's authors wrote: "Our key findings are that children who had high conflict parents are less likely to have experienced a cohabiting or marital dissolution if their parents divorced compared to children from high conflict families whose parents remained together."

A 2007 Pew Research Center report found that most Americans (58 percent) think divorce is preferable to staying in an unhappy marriage. A larger majority (67 percent) says that in a marriage where the parents are very unhappy with each other, the children are better off if their parents get divorced; 19 percent say the children are better off if their parents stay together; and 9 percent say it depends.

What do you think? Are children of divorced parents more likely to experience splits of their own later in life?