Divorce in later life is becoming more common – and scientists are beginning to explore the surprisingly deep impact this can have on adult children and their relationships.
Divorce is greying.
The US has one of the highest divorce rates in the world, even though over the past four decades, it has fallen among younger couples. Instead, middle-aged and older adults have taken over. In fact, adults aged 65 and older are now the only age group in the US with a growing divorce rate. For the over-50s, the rate also rose for decades, but has now stabilised.
Today, roughly 36% of people getting divorced are 50 and older, compared to only 8.7% in 1990. This is known as a “grey divorce”.
Dads adrift?
Throughout our lives, our relationships evolve, including the relationships we have with our parents. As young children, our parents solely provide emotional and financial support. As we age, this relationship gradually becomes more mutual and eventually reverses, with grown children looking after their elderly parents. But a late-in-life divorce can upend that process – and cause a “drastic shift” in the relationship with each parent, says Jocelyn Elise Crowley, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University in the US, and author of Gray Divorce: What We Lose and Gain from Mid-life Splits.
In her research based on interviews with 40 men and 40 women going through a grey divorce, Crowley found that the women faced an “economic penalty” after divorce, having typically taken a break from employment to care for their children.
The men, in contrast, faced a “social penalty” after divorce, she says. This is because the wives were often the ‘kin-keepers‘ in the marriage, meaning, they invested time and energy into their relationships with family and friends, whereas the husbands had relied on their wives to build their social lives.
“Women are basically the social directors of family life still in 2025, and when that goes away men become like islands in the sea,” says Crowley.
After a divorce, those husbands lost their social networks, and had less contact with their children, who often sided with their mother. The men she interviewed went through “an experience of enormous grief” after the break-up, Crowley says. “[They] expressed a lot of sadness.”
This pattern of children turning towards the mother after a divorce is known as the matrifocal tilt. For younger children, it can be a consequence of custody arrangements that leave the children with the mother. But studies across different countries, and spanning several decades, have also found this matrifocal tilt away from the father in grey divorces with grown-up children…
However, bonds can be re-strengthened, Crowley says, and some fathers do reconnect with their children later, even after long periods of absence.
As researchers around the world continue to grapple with the rise of late-in-life divorce, and the often-painful transition, understanding how it affects families is crucial. For adult children struggling with their parents’ divorce, Hughes says joining support groups of others going through the same experience can help, and may reduce feelings of loneliness and isolation.
Of course, experts do point out that some parent-child relationships are not affected negatively at all. Indeed, some adult children will not be surprised or shocked when their parents’ divorce, and may even be supportive of it. It all depends on the circumstances for each family. Many of the adult children Greenwood interviewed were relieved that the parents were finally divorcing, often because there was conflict and fighting as they were growing up.
“Even for those relationships that were negatively strained, over time, the strained relationships mended,” she says.