There's lot of doom and gloom out there about the effect of divorce on kids. You don’t have to look far to find another study claiming kids whose parents divorced had a rougher time than kids whose parents stayed married (they never seem to study the effects of being raised with two desperately unhappy parents locked in a dysfunctional marriage "for the sake of the kids," but I digress).
A French study would suggest, though, one thing that divorced parents don’t need to worry about is their kid's drug use. The study looked at 16,000 French students ages 12-18 and their use of alcohol, tobacco or pot within the last 30 days.
Parental control was the deciding factor in whether or not kids used drugs. The study didn't define what constituted control, whether it was fairly benign things like curfews or more strict measures. Emotional support from their parents also had an impact, especially for girls. Family structure, whether an intact family, single parent or "reconstituted family" (just add water!) didn’t have near as much of an influence as those two factors.
Not especially surprising -- most people I know raised in fairly strict homes, whether they had their original two parents or just the one or stepparents, toed the line pretty well during their adolescent years (and then we lost our damn minds in college, but that's another study). But for parents already dealing with the sadness and stress of a dissolving marriage, I'd think it would be good to know there is one less thing they can worry about.
