Children from broken homes have twice the risk of suffering mental illness

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Children whose parents break up have twice the risk of facing mental illness, poverty or getting into trouble with the police, a major report warns today.

The Centre for Social Justice think-tank found that people whose parents parted before they were 18 were twice as likely to fail at school, end up homeless or go to prison compared to children from families that had stayed together.

In a survey of 5,000 adults, those from broken homes were more than one and a half times as likely to suffer alcoholism, mental health problems or to get into serious debt.

Only two thirds of under-15s in the UK live with both their parents, compared to an average of more than 80 per cent in the world’s developed countries. In Finland the figure is more than 95 per cent.