More on the Longevity Project
Cheerful children, alas, turned out to be shorter-lived than their more sober classmates. The early death of a parent had no measurable effect on children’s life spans or mortality risk, but the long-term health effects of broken families were often devastating. Parental divorce during childhood emerged as the single strongest predictor of early death in adulthood. The grown children of divorced parents died almost five years earlier, on average, than children from intact families.
All things we can’t control as a child.
It doesn’t surprise me that kids from dysfunctional families have shorter life spans. There is probably some of the same interaction that income and education plays on longevity.
This is rather astounding. After all these years of experts telling us that divorce is better for the children than parents sticking it out in a miserable marriage, now they say divorce is the most devestating. Best to think longer and harder about getting married and having children. There are no guarantees in any relationship, but better to be as stable as possible before including kids.
What direction runs the causality?
There’s an old joke about a conversation between a social worker and a teacher about a kid:
Social Worker: You need to be kind to Johnny, he comes from a broken home.
Teacher: I’m not surprised, Johnny could break any home.
And, given this brief implicit description of Johnny, would you be surprised to hear that he died young?
Then there’s the normal tendency of children to be raised by their biological parents. We know that alcoholism for example has a genetic component, and it’s not exactly surprising for an alcoholic’s spouse to move out, or for an alcoholic to die young.
This isn’t to say that every divorce happens because at least one of the parents has a genetic default, I do know some cases where kind and nice people have gotten divorced from each other. All I’m suggesting is that it’s plausible that divorce will occur a bit more often amongst people with some personality traits that also are more likely to cause an early death, and that there might well be a genetic link.