When Growing Up Without a Parent Does Not Hurt: Parental Separation and the Compensatory Effect of Social Origin

This article investigates how the negative impact of parental separation on children’s educational out-comes varies with social origin. In particular, I test the compensatory class hypothesis which postulates that higher class families compensate the negative effects of disadvantageous life events, such as par-ental separation. I apply family-fixed effects models to control for unmeasured confounding character-istics of families and use data on siblings from Germany. I do find indication of substantial negative effects of parental separation on the probability of attending the upper track in secondary school (Gymnasium) and on school grades in German and Mathematics. These negative consequences of par-ental separation are limited to children with low-educated parents. Children in families with highly edu-cated parents are not negatively affected by their parents ’ separation in their educational outcomes. This finding supports the compensatory class hypothesis and demonstrates that research on the con-sequences of parental separation has to take into account the heterogeneity of separation effects