This article uses data from the National Survey of Families and Households to examine whether parental conflict prior to divorce can explain why children with divorced parents exhibit more academic and adjustment difficulties than children with parents who stay together. Children whose parents divorce are exposed to more conflict and acrimony than children who grow up in stable marriages, and this may explain why the former do less well than the latter. The results indicate that parental conflict is partly but by no means completely responsible for the association between divorce and child welfare. The results also suggest that, for four of the sixteen measures of child well-being examined, children exposed to high levels of parental conflict are neither better off nor worse off, on average, when their parents divorce, while those exposed to low levels of parental conflict appear to suffer severe disadvantages when their parents separate. This suggests that, in some areas, marital relations prior to divorce help determine when the consequences of divorce are particularly harmful for children and when the consequences of divorce are relatively benign.
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