Divorce

Divorces not only break up marriages, they cause severe stress on children. Wikipedia says this about divorce.

Divorce (or the dissolution of marriage) is the final termination of a marital union, canceling the legal duties and responsibilities of marriage and dissolving the bonds of matrimony between the parties (unlike annulment, which declares the marriage null and void). Divorce laws vary considerably around the world, but in most countries it requires the sanction of a court or other authority in a legal process. The legal process of divorce may also involve issues of alimony (spousal support), child custody, child support, distribution of property, and division of debt. Where monogamy is law, divorce allows each former partner to marry another; where polygyny is legal but polyandry is not, divorce allows the woman to marry another.
Between 1971 and 2011, several countries legalized divorce, the last one being Malta in 2011. The majority Catholic Philippines is the last officially secular country that does not have civil divorce for the whole population; Muslims, however, are granted divorce rights as per their religion. Vatican City, a ecclesiastical sovereign city-state, also has no procedure for divorce.

Here are links to scientific research about divorce.

Divorce has a bigger impact on child-parent relationships if it occurs in the first few years of the child's life, according to new research. Those who experience parental divorce early in their childhood tend to have more insecure relationships with their parents as adults than those who experience divorce later, researchers say.

"Finding this link between parental divorce and smoking is very disturbing," says lead author Esme Fuller-Thomson, Sandra Rotman Chair at University of Toronto's Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work. "We had anticipated that the association between parental divorce and smoking would have been explained by one or more of three plausible factors, such as lower levels of education or adult income among the children of divorce; adult mental health issues, such as depression or anxiety among the children of divorce, or other co-occurring early childhood traumas, such as parental addictions or childhood physical, sexual or emotional abuse.

As audiences chuckle at films such as new romantic comedy "I Give It A Year," researchers at The Open University have been looking at what keeps couples together after the flurry of Valentine's Day romance is over.

High levels of drinking have repeatedly been shown to predict divorce. The most cited explanation for this is that excessive alcohol use disrupts daily tasks and functioning, and increases spousal conflicts. A study of the effects of drinking among husbands versus wives, and of similar versus dissimilar drinking in couples, has found that both level of drinking and compatibility in drinking can have an influence on divorce.

The study, to be published this month in the International Journal of Stroke, shows that adult men who had experienced parental divorce before they turned 18 are three times more likely to suffer a stroke than men whose parents did not divorce. Women from divorced families did not have a higher risk of stroke than women from intact families.

The link between divorce and suicidal ideation was particularly strong in families where childhood stressors like parental addiction, physical abuse, and parental unemployment also occurred. For women who had not experienced these adverse childhood experiences, the association between parental divorce and suicidal ideation was no longer significant. However, even in the absence of these childhood stressors, men who had experienced parental divorce had twice the odds of having seriously considered suicide at some point in their life compared to men from intact families.