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".

This tilt towards later-in-life divorce is happening for a mix of reasons, studies suggest. Lives are longer than they used to be, for a start, and older couples may be less willing to put up with unfulfilling marriages than before. Meanwhile, young people are getting married later and have become more selective when choosing a partner. As one researcher puts it, "the United States is progressing toward a system in which marriage is rarer and more stable than it was in the past".

The rise in grey divorce isn't exclusive to the US – it's also happening in ageing populations around the world. One Korean expression says that a marriage should last "until black hair becomes the roots of green onions" – meaning that it is a lifelong commitment. But since the 2000s, more older adults in Korea have been going through hwang-hon divorce, or twilight divorces, to end unfulfilling marriages. Given an average life expectancy of over 80 years for Korean men and women, "those in their 50s and 60s can anticipate another 30 or 40 years of life, and grey divorce can offer a chance at a new chapter in life," the study says. Japan has also seen a rise in "mature" divorces since 1990, and today, grey divorces account for 22% of all divorces there.

Amid this trend, one aspect of grey divorce is beginning to receive more attention: the surprisingly deep and wide-ranging impact the split can have on adult children – and on their relationships with their parents, especially, their fathers.

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'Like an earthquake'

While researchers have widely studied how young children are affected by divorce, the impact on adult children was long neglected, perhaps because they were assumed to be more mature and better able to cope. However, already in the late 1980s, emerging research found that just like young children, adults reacted to parental divorce with anger, shock and "lingering sadness".

"Many times I've heard adult children say, 'it felt like the rock that was my family […] my support network system that I grew up with […] was sucked into an earthquake fault'", says Carol Hughes, a marriage and family therapist based in southern California and the co-author of Home Will Never Be the Same Again: A Guide for Adult Children of Grey Divorce. "All of a sudden, their parents are divorcing, and they feel like the bottom has fallen out of their lives," she adds.

Reflecting on the memories shared with their family, adult children may wonder: "Was it all smoke and mirrors? Were they ever really happy?", Hughes says. Some of her clients have ended relationships and engagements because of their parents' divorce, or questioned their identity and self-esteem, she says. 

"A parental divorce can be a difficult experience for any individual […] no matter the age, no matter the marriage duration. The experience [or] transition is simply different," says Joleen Greenwood, a professor of sociology at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, in the US. 

Adult children may for example feel obliged to help the parent they see as having "wronged" – for example siding with them, providing emotional and social support, or even supporting them with legal advice, she says. 

When Greenwood interviewed 40 adult children of divorce (ACD), a common theme that emerged was the feeling of being stuck between two sides: "Parents may see [their children] as peers, equals, or confidants and 'put them in the middle'," she says. "This is not saying that some parents do not do this with children under the age of 18, but it's more likely when the adult children are 18 or older." Daughters, in particular, are more likely to provide emotional support than sons, research shows. 

Hughes also notes that adult children may struggle with a loss of boundaries with their parents following a divorce, for example, if the parents turn to them for dating advice or sexual advice – something they would not do with younger children.

"Not all parents do that, of course, but these adult children have no idea how to handle it," Hughes says, of being drawn into a parents' dating dilemmas. 

Greenwood says that a grey divorce can also potentially affect parents' relationships with siblings and extended family members, holidays or family rituals, as well as the grown children's own romantic relationships. "Some [adult children of divorce] take a parental divorce very hard and personally... to the point that it interferes with their own personal relationships [or] life," she says. "They may begin to worry about the longevity of their own current or future romantic relationships."

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 Grey Divorce: What We Lose and Gain from Midlife 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."

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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.

For example, a longitudinal study in Germany of adult children aged 18-49, published in 2024, found that grey divorce brought the grown children closer to their mothers, in terms of contact and emotional closeness, while weakening the bond with the fathers. "Adult-child solidarity intensified for mothers but eroded for fathers" following the divorce, the study found. The impact was strongest for changes in the frequency of contact between the grown children and each parent, and moderate for changes in emotional closeness. Ultimately, a grey divorce "tilts adult-child solidarity toward mothers and puts fathers at a higher risk of social isolation", the study concluded.

Other papers have also suggested that parental divorce in later life results in less contact between fathers and their children, decreasing even further when a father re-partners. By contrast, when a mother re-partners, it does not seem to change the mother-child contact.

(Interestingly, women are more likely to file for divorce, and are less likely to remarry after a grey divorce.)

The post-divorce tilt away from the father may happen even if the father is generally supportive of the grown children: one study found that following a divorce, "fathers' frequent contact with their adult children decreased" even as the dads' "financial support to their adult children increased", for example.

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Such ruptured family dynamics may affect the parents' as well as the children's wellbeing, with one study finding that having no contact with at least one adult child "aggravated the negative effect of divorce on parents' mental health".

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.