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

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.

While divorce rates among UK couples who do marry have fallen lately, campaigners warn that the break-up rate among unwed couples is ‘alarmingly high’.

The think-tank’s chairman, former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, said family breakdown ‘causes much more personal misery and long-term poverty and costs the taxpayer an estimated £51billion a year – more than the defence budget – for picking up the pieces’.

He wants an end to the ‘couple penalty’ which results in benefit-claiming parents getting more money if they separate and said that said Britain’s £16billion a year child benefit budget should be more targeted so it helps families at high risk of breaking down.

He also called for the creation of an Office for Family Policy ‘to ensure that our best intentions for solving poverty are not undermined by our inability to get to grips with the scourge of family breakdown’.

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 (file photo)

He was backed by Andy Cook, chief executive of the Centre for Social Justice, who added: ‘Family breakdown is the crisis that particularly affects the poorest and most vulnerable communities.’

The report, called Why Family Matters, also says that one in four British children have ‘never been read a bedtime story’.

Half of those whose parents married before they were born and were still together now got a story more than three times a week, compared to one in three whose parents had parted.

Mr Cook said: ‘One bedtime story an evening can create a strong personal bond between parents and their children, reducing the likelihood of a range of problems further down the line.’