Autism Doesn't Necessarily Lead to Divorce, But What Does?

Marriage, as everyone knows, is hard work. And couples who face undue stress—a lost job, a foreclosed home, the death of a child—have an even harder time staying together. That's what make the results a new study of parents with autistic children so interesting. There's long been a statistic that's floated around the autistic community: parents whose children are diagnosed are 80 percent more likely to get divorced. "You can imagine the impact of getting a diagnosis of autism, and immediately following that getting a diagnosis of divorce," says Brian Freedman, Ph.D.,  who wanted to find out if such a dire prognosis was true.

Turns out, it's not. Freedman's research, which he presented today at the International Meeting for Autism Research, found that the rate of two-parent "traditional" families remained practically unchanged, whether or not the children in that family had autism. Sixty-four percent of all families with autistic children remain married, compared to 65 percent of nonautistic families. (The remaining 30-some percent is made up of single parents, parents who are separated or divorced, and parents who have remarried or have another partner living at home.)

"These families are incredibly resilient," Freedman says. "We hope to understand that makes them able to sustain their marriage and the impact on these families when they do make the decisions to separate." He notes that the families he's seen in his work, as clinical director at Center for Autism and Related Disorders at Kennedy Krieger Institute, demonstrate this trend.

His study also showed that families who have children with co‐occurring psychiatric diagnoses in the child, like ADHD, tended to have a higher divorce rate, whether or not autism was also present, which is similar to what other researchers have found.

How does this stack up to other divorce rates in couples with significant stressors?

 Couples who suffered the loss of a child: 12 percent divorced, but many couples attributed the divorce to other factors. 

Couples whose children were diagnosed with cancer: negligible effect on the divorce rate, but higher if the child was diagnosed with Wilms tumor or if the mother was highly educated. 

A spouse who has suffered a spinal-cord injury: divorce rates increase by more than two thirds, and Hispanic couples in this situation are more likely to divorce.

If your husband gets cancer: separation and divorce rates plummet to 2.9 percent of couples.

If your wife gets cancer: separation and divorce rates skyrocket to 20.8 percent.

Couples who fight about money every day, compared to couples who fight only a few times a month, have a 30 percent increased chance of divorce. 

And what about the rest of us? On Monday, Time magazine examined the old trope that "fifty percent of marriages end in divorce," a number also parsed in Tara Parker-Pope's new book, For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage:

She contends that the 50% stat is a myth that persists because it's something of a political Swiss Army knife, handy for any number of agendas. Social conservatives use it to call for more marriage-friendly policies, while liberals find it handy to press for funding for programs that help single moms.

Moreover, Parker-Pope argues, all the talk about grim marriage stats becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. "It makes us ambivalent and more vulnerable to giving up when problems occur," she writes.

A 2009 report on the state of marriage from the University of Virgina's marriage project notes that for people getting married today, "the lifetime probability of divorce or separation remains between 40 and 50 percent." Still, it's worth noting that the "50 percent" stat ignores a lot of other factors, factors that change one's odds tremendously: going to college, making more than $50,000 per year, or having parents who are still married can all up the odds of a successful marriage dramatically. They note that:

Also, it should be realized that the “close to 50%” divorce rate refers to the percentage of marriages entered into during a particular year that are projected to end in divorce or separation before one spouse dies. Such projections assume that the divorce and death rates occurring that year will continue indefinitely into the future—an assumption that is useful more as an indicator of the instability of marriages in the recent past than as a predictor of future events.

So if you were to get married tomorrow, that 50 percent number may not apply—especially since this study also found that the divorce rate is dropping: the divorce rate hit a high in the 1980s, when 22.6 women per every 1,000 married women got divorced; in 2009 that number went down to 16.9. That might have to do with the down economy, when couples find the prospect of splitting assets, hiring lawyers, and starting over too expensive.

But considering all the other factors that go into influencing the success of a marriage, all the unknowns and variables that occur during the life as a couple, these stats don't say much about whether an individual marriage will be successful. But for the families of children with autism, it's good to know that there's one less factor working against them.