The disruption manifests itself in declining school test results, Ohio State University researchers say in a new study. And those academic deficits can continue to worsen after the divorce.

"While the differences are not large, the overall pattern, an almost linear increase in the difference in the scores, is significant," says Yongmin Sun, a sociology professor at Ohio State and lead author of the study, which appears in the May issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Using an analysis of data from the National Education Longitudinal Study, the research is the first to assess the emotional and academic effects of divorce on children at four different points surrounding the event.

For the study, Sun and his colleague Yuanzhang Li, a statistician from Allied Technology Group in Rockville, Md., looked at test results for 9,542 eighth grade students from 1988 to 1992, during which time approximately 1,000 children experienced a divorce in their families.

The researchers took four time points -- three years before the divorce, one year before the divorce, one year after, and three years after -- and compared the test results of children whose parents divorced to the scores of children whose parents did not divorce.

"That's a definite strength of the study. While there are an increasing number of studies following children after divorce, picking kids up before their parents' divorce is pretty unusual," says Nadine Koslow, chief psychologist from the Emory University School of Medicine.

Sun and his colleague analyzed tests the children were given to assess their self-esteem and to record their academic progress in science, math, and reading. They compared the scores from the children who experienced divorce to those scores of children who did not.

They found that three years prior to divorce, children of parents who split reported the same sense of self-esteem as did other children, but slightly less control over their own lives. As the time of the divorce neared and occurred, the children's emotions became more troubled compared to their peers. Three years later, though, their emotional level returned to what it had been three years before the divorce.

"It was kind of a U-shape," Sun says.

Academic achievements, however, steadily declined for children of divorce, in comparison to their peers, and did not bounce back. By three years after the divorce, they had lower scores in all three areas of math, science and reading.

Reading scores dropped from an average 2.38 point difference from their peers to 4.21, and science scores dropped from an average of 1.58 difference to 3.04.

"These are not huge differences, but they shouldn't be ignored," says Sun, because the scores could affect college attendance and future earnings potential.

Sun says the main reason for the difference in the scores is that parental resources are often lower during and after a divorce -- there is less time spent talking to children, and often, after a divorce, there are financial hardships. "Children of divorce are often at a financial disadvantage," he says.

Kaslow says it's hard to generalize about how and why children deal with divorce.

"Understanding how children adjust to divorce is very complicated, depending on many things -- like their relationship to their parents, how many problems there are in the home before the divorce, and whether a parent remarries," she says.

But she adds, resources, or the lack of them, play an important role.

"There is less parenting to go around after a divorce, and with all the homework children get, they need help from their parents," she says.

What To Do

Some practical tips on helping your kids through a divorce can be found at the University of Minnesota and at the National Parent Information Network.