The Reality of Being An Adult Child of Divorce

What are the average kind of divorce stats in Australia? Yeah.

Yeah, so these stats were pulled from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a study that they did in 2001 on marriages and divorce in Australia.

The median age of divorce has continued to increase for both men and women since the early 80s.

In 2024, the median age at divorce was 47.1 years for men.

and 44.1 years for women, and it was the same the previous year in 2023.

The increase in median age at divorce is largely attributed to trends in people marrying later, which makes sense.

We're all doing things a little bit later than we did, as well as more divorces involving longer marriages.

Over the last 20 years, about one in two divorces involved children under 18 years.

So half the divorce.

Oh, so

it's like half, half.

It is.

Half with younger kids, half with older kids.

Yeah.

This was what I found really interesting.

The proportion of divorces involving children under 18 years fell from 68% in 1975 to 50% in 2002.

The proportion has trended down again slightly and since 2014 has remained stable around 47%.

The long-term decline in the proportion of divorces involving children is partly due to the rise in divorces of long-term marriages where children are aged over 18 years.

There is actually a name for this late-in-life divorce.

It's called grey divorce.

So grey divorce is or late-life divorce is the demographic trend of an increasing divorce rate for older, quote-unquote, grey-haired couples in long-lasting marriages, a term typically used for people over 50.

And then there was this other trend of D-Day, which is basically parents waiting for their kids to finish school, go off to university or college, and that D-Day would be divorce day.

Oh, I do hear about this.

I hear about this a little bit, you know, people staying in marriages until their kids are kind of out of the home, I want to say out of the picture, that's not true, but out of the home, less kind of dependent on the family unit.

Yeah, I think we obviously have a lot of knowledge now about the impact divorce can have on young children.