Adult Children of Divorced, Unmarried Parents Face More Mental Health Issues

FRIDAY, Aug. 7, 2026 (HealthDay News) — The association between parental divorce and later mental health in adult offspring may be explained less by marital status and more by parental mental illness and substance use, according to a study recently published in Psychiatry Research.

Mary Kate Schilke, from Tyndale University in North York, Ontario, Canada, and colleagues used data from the 2021 to 2024 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (128,264 adults) to examine the association between adult mental illness and parental marital history.

The researchers found that adult children of divorced and unmarried parents were significantly more likely to report frequent mental distress in the past month (13.6 and 16.3 percent, respectively) compared with adults whose parents remained married (8.5 percent). Similarly, adult children of divorced and unmarried parents were significantly more likely to have a depression diagnosis at some point in their lives (19.2 and 18.7 percent, respectively) compared with those whose parents remained married (14.1 percent). Associations were attenuated when adjusting for parental mental illness — by 68 percent for the association between parental divorce and adult depression and by 52 percent for the association between unmarried parental status and adult depression. Associations were also attenuated when adjusting for parental substance use.

“This study suggests that children”s future mental health is influenced less by their parents” marital status than by the challenges they experience while growing up,” senior author Esme Fuller-Thomson, Ph.D., from the University of Toronto, said in a statement. “Efforts to reduce parental mental illness and substance use could have benefits that extend far beyond parents themselves and help improve mental health across generations.”

Abstract/Full Text