Happiness over the Life CourseThe next issue is how the parents relate to each other. There
is clear evidence that parental conflict produces badly be-
haved and unhappy children. So what about family break- up,
which the British Cohort Study identified as important? The
answer is that the measured effect of family break- up is largely
a proxy for family conflict, which is highly correlated with
it. But, where there is already conflict, does family break- up
make things even worse for the children? As we show in
Chapter 13, it depends how bad the conflict is. If the conflict
is terrible, break- up helps; if the conflict is mild, break- up
adds to the damage.
Finally how are children affected by the psychological
make- up of the parents, and especially their mother? The
mother’s mental health matters relatively little for children’s
academic performance, but it matters greatly for their be-
havior and their emotional health. Their father’s mental
health generally matters less.
So parents matter. But what about schools? Many people
think schools only affect academic performance and be-
havior, but probably not the emotional health of the child,
since this depends so heavily on the family. This view is
totally wrong. In the Avon study we know which primary
school and which secondary school each child went to. So
we can see in Figure 1.5 (b) what difference these schools
made.^15 The effect of schools is huge, holding constant the
child’s family background. Even at the age of 16 the pri-
mary school still had an enduring influence— and for be-
havior and emotional health it had as great an influence as
the secondary school.
It might be interesting to compare the importance of
schools with that of parents. But we cannot do this because,
while each school has many children in the sample, making