Past studies have shown that children of divorced parents are usually more likely to become divorced in adulthood, but why is that? Experts have speculated that this association is due to psychological and social factors, but a new study that included nearly 20,000 adoptees found that these individuals had a similar divorce rate as their biological parents but not their adoptive parents. Study author Dr. Jessica Salvatore notes her team’s findings suggest that “[the] reason that the offspring of divorced parents are more likely to get divorced has to do with the genes that parents and children share, rather than the experience of seeing [their] parents split up.”
Psychological Science, October 2017