Economic factors as Mclanahan et al. demonstrates or other variables such as mother's separation from community or maternal depression may also effect children causing the impact that the researchers saw rather than the divorce / separation factor being the determining variable.

In effect, what the authors demonstrate is that both gender are negatively influenced by divorce and separation, although they had been negatively affected by adverse conditions before divorce / separation had occurred.

To Amato et al. (1995), the situation is not so simple. Reviewing cross-sectional studies between children who remain in conflict-ridden two-parent homes and products of divorced parents who experienced conflict prior to divorce, he discovers that all children are adversely impacted by parental conflict, but that children who remain in the conflict-ridden environment are apt to suffer more than those whose parents are divorced. Much also, however, depended on the intensity of the conflict. In other words,...
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