PRACTICE & POLICY LECTURE: DECEMBER 2011

Dr. Paul Amato: Hello, everyone. I want to thank Howard Hendrick
and people here in the Department of Human Services 
for inviting me to speak with you today. It's an honor to be here.
I was asked today to speak on the topic of divorce and children.
As you can see, that's my title.
And I'd like to start off, just to get the ball rolling, to give you 
a quick demographic overview, because I am a demographer, 
so I like to look at numbers and figures.
So let's start off with something really basic.
That's the divorce rate in this country.
This is called the crude divorce rate.
It's the number of divorces for every 1,000 people in the population.
It's a simple but effective way of showing trends in divorce over time.
Now as you can see, the divorce rate in the U.S. rose from 1960 to the early 1980s, 
and then it reached a peak and began to decline.
So the good news is the divorce is going down in the U.S. That's good.
It hasn't gone down quite as far as it was in the 60s, 
and has stabilized at still a fairly high rate historically, but it is going down.
However... well, let me show you one more slide before I get to the "however."
Here we see recent trends. This is just from the last decade.
You can see the divorce rate here for the United States and we can see Oklahoma's divorce rate.
You'll notice that both trends are sloping downward.
You will see that Oklahoma has a relatively high divorce rate,
has one of the highest divorce rates of any state in the country.
Some people say it's the highest, but that depends upon the year.
Some year it's the highest, some year it's second highest, 
some year third highest, but it's fairly high.
But the point is that it has been gradually coming downward during the last several decades, 
just like it has in the U.S. overall.
Now, although divorce is going down, something else is happening.
Non-marital births in this country are going up dramatically.
Here you have a graph, which shows you the percentage of births in the U.S.
that were non-marital, that occurred outside of marriage.
Starting in 1960, when it was around 5% and continuing to the present day, 2010,
-this figure- when it's actually slightly over 40%... 
41%, in fact, is the latest information that we have.
So, if you look at that line, it's almost a straight upward-sloping line.
The percentage of non-marital births has been going up in this country relentlessly, 
year after year after year since 1960, to a point that over 40% of all births 
are occurring to unmarried mothers.
So, although divorces are going down, non-marital births are going up.
The end result for children has been an increase in the percentage of children 
living in single-parent families despite the decline in divorce.
And what you see in this figure here  are just some very recent data for the United States 
and for Oklahoma, and you can see that both of those lines slope upward. 
That is, the percentage of children living with single parents has been,
you know, notching up a percentage point or two every year for the last decade.
Oklahoma has a slightly higher rate than the U.S. overall, but not dramatically higher.
So when I talk to you today about divorce, I want you to also keep in mind 
that many of my comments are also directed at children who are born outside of marriage.
Because many of these children has got... most of them have gone through 
a process very similar to divorce.
We know that of all the children born in this country to single mothers, about half of those mothers 
are actually living with the father of the child at the time of the birth.
So that means that in half of those cases, half of that 40%, 
the child is being born into a two-parent family.
The child is living with the mother and the father at the time of birth.
The problem is these couples tend to be very unstable. 
And within a few years, the majority of them break up.
So most children born of single mothers go through a process very much akin to divorce.
That has implications for their well-being and for their life trajectories.
Now my particular research, at least the research I'm going to be talking about today, 
focuses on two main factors:
One of them is the long-term effects of experiencing a divorce, 
or a family disruption, on children. 
And the second, related, issue has to do with the long-term effects 
of being exposed to conflicts between parents as a child.
And when I mean "long-term effects", I'm talking about effects on children that persist into adulthood. 
Because it's one thing to look at the effects of divorce on say a young child, 
or the effects of growing up in a high-conflict family on a young child 
but just after a few year children adjust, they get over it, 
it gradually fades away, that's one thing. 
But if we can detect the effects of these early childhood family environments on children 
when they're fully grown once they've left the parental home,
once they're in their 20s or their 30s or they're even older, that's a different story.
That's a somewhat more sobering thing to think about.
So what I'm going to be doing here, first of all, 
is talking about some data from a particular study. 
It's called the Marital Instability Study... Marital Instability Over the Life Course Study.
This is a study that I helped to conduct. 
It began in the year 1980 and it started off as a study of 2,000 married people.
And these individuals were asked a huge number of questions about their marriages,
about their spouses, about their children, about their lives.
And we followed up these people every two or three years, up to the year 2000.
So we have 20 years of information, detailed information, 
on these people's families, on their marriages.
And then, beginning in the year... let's see, when did we do this?
Beginning in the year in 1992, some of the children of these marriages 
began to reach adulthood, that is they reached the age of 18. Or... 19. 
So, what we did was once these children reached the age of 19, 
we brought them into the study and we interviewed them as well.
And we have up to three interviews with many of the children from these families.
Of course, they were adults by the time that we spoke with them.
The whole idea of the study was to see how these young adults, 
most of them were in their 20s and early 30s, how they were doing in early adulthood 
given the kind of family environment they grew up in when they were children.
And we have children's reports of their own lives, their own well-being, their own feelings,
their own emotions, and we have parents' reports of what was going on 
in their families ten, twenty years earlier.
Okay, so they're completely independent reports from offspring and from parents,
separated by a ten or twenty year period.
I should say, methodologically this makes it very hard to find anything.
We're kind of stacking the deck against us, to find anything.
Okay, so our final sample size, we have 691 young people. 
They're the ones that I'm going to be talking about today.
Now, for the sake of the next few slides I'm going to show you,
what I've done is to take all of the families, these 691 families 
that children were raised in, and I've put them into three groups.
Families where the parents, the biological parents, 
were continuously married up to the age of 19.
So these children grew up living with both biological parents continuously.
But we had a lot of information on these marriages.
We had questions about how happy they were in the marriage, 
we had questions about conflict, how often they fought, what they fought over, 
how often these conflicts escalated into pushing or shoving or hitting, 
information on the kind of problems that occurred in the family.
Were there problems with infidelity? 
Were there problems with alcohol or substance abuse?
And we took all this information and we put people into two groups. 
Families where there was a low level of discord - these were relatively harmonious families, 
parents by and large were happy, loved each other, didn't fight too often.
Now everybody fights a little bit, right? Everyone fights a little bit.
Some conflict is actually healthy in marriages. 
So they had a little bit of conflict, you know.
But nothing serious, no hitting, no punching.
The high discord group - these are people who had serious problems.
These were cases where parents didn't report being happily married, 
they didn't do things very often together with their spouses,
they reported a lot of conflict, a lot of problems in their marriages.
A lot of them thought that they were always on the verge of divorce.
Every time we interviewed them, they would say, 
"You know, I've been thinking about divorce. There's a good chance that we might get a divorce."
But they never did divorce. These are really troubled marriages. Troubled marriages.
And finally we have young people who experienced a divorce.
And this could be a divorce at any age.
It could have been when they were, you know, in elementary school or high school.
And what we see here in this figure is three bars that tell us something 
about young people's psychological well-being.
And we gave the young people, these young adults, a whole series of tests and instruments.
We measured their self-esteem, we measured their level of depression, 
we measured their overall satisfaction with life, and we put all of these measures 
and instruments together, all this information together, to give us an overall score 
that reflected how well they were functioning psychologically.
The way this graph is set up, zero means average. So, zero is the mean.
So if the blue bar, I think it's blue, I'm colorblind by the way.
Is it blue? (laughs)
Audience: Yes (laughter)
Dr. Amato: OK, good, thank you. It could be red for all I know.
Okay, so I should use this black and white, I don't know why.
I use color because I know people like it, even though I'm not sure what I'm doing.
(laughter)
Dr. Amato (continues): So, the blue bar here is above zero, so it means they're above average.
Okay, so kids who came from families where the parents were continuously married, 
and they had good marriages, or we'd say "healthy marriages" now, 
were above average in terms of psychological well-being.
Kids from high-discord families and from divorced families were below average.
And if you ask, "How big are these effects?",
for those of you who might be statisticians, these are standardized Z scores.
Basically what this means is, these effects would be considered to be moderate.
They're not huge, but they're not trivial, either.
Remember, we're measuring these outcomes many years after children left the parental home, 
so we're looking at the long-term effects of growing up in a high-conflict family, 
you know, down the line, on these kids' lives. Okay.
So, years of education.
What we see in this figure here, is there's not much difference between young people 
who grow up with discordant parents or harmonious parents. We do get an effect for divorce.
Kids from divorced families obtained about half a year of education less, on average, 
than other children, other offspring.
And half a year might not seem like that much, but it sort of is 
because you have to remember - this is an average. 
So, there are some kids who experience less than half a year 
but some who experience more than half a year, maybe a year or two years.
And you know, a half a year, a year of education can make the difference between graduating 
from high school or not or graduating from college or not.
So, it's again a moderate effect.
Okay, here's an interesting one.
We asked young people a whole series of questions about how much affection they had 
for their parents, their mothers and fathers, how close they felt to them, 
how much they liked their parents... (video skips) ...thus, means for these various groups.
Let's consider the mothers first.
This bar, the blue... blue?
(laughter)
Dr. Amato (continues): Low discord - They are above average. High discord - down a little bit. 
Divorced - still above this line. 
By the way, both parents are average, that's why all mothers are above average. (laughs)
(laughter)
Dr. Amato (continues): Most kids are close to their mothers 
regardless of what kind of family they grew up in.
We look at fathers we see a very different story.
We see that, we go from a high-discord to a low-discord family, affection for fathers drops.
Alright, so if you grew up in a family where your parents fought a lot 
it seems to negatively effect the long-term relationship with your father.
But, look what happens here with divorce. Again, these are Z scores.
This is like a difference of over a standard deviation, which is statistically a huge effect.
This is a huge, huge effect.
What we're basically saying here, what this data are telling us, is that in many cases, 
divorce effectively ends the relationship between children and their fathers.
They just have no relationship with the father. Zilch.
This is really very, very strong affect here. Very, very big difference.
We also asked young adults a series of questions about the stability of their own relationships.
So, this particular measure reflects the number of young people who had a cohabiting relationship 
but then broke up, or were married and then broke up. Alright? Got a divorce.
What you see is the number relationship disruptions is especially high 
when young people grow up in divorced families.
And although we don't have the data here in much detail, our own study and other studies have shown 
that when you follow these people for longer periods of time, many of the young people 
from divorced families have this pattern of having relationship after relationship.
They co-habit for a while, that breaks up. They get married. They get a divorce.
They co-habit again. That breaks up.
And so, some of these people accumulate large number of relationships, 
even before they've reached middle adulthood.
Alright, now let's bring in another consideration.
One of the nice things we were able to do, in this particular study, is to look at 
the relative effects of conflict and divorce and in particular, 
so going beyond those earlier slides, we were able to look at the level of conflict 
that parents experienced before the divorce.
Now, I'm going to kind of give something away here right now. 
They have this sort of image or stereotype that couples are married, 
they don't get along, they start to fight more, 
the relationship deteriorates, they fight even more.
Pretty soon things just get so horrible, the marriage is so intolerable, 
so aversive, they just decide to divorce because they can't take it any more.
Less true of some divorces but not most divorces.
As far as we can tell in our data, most divorces are not proceeded by a long period 
of escalating conflict and hatred.
Instead, a lot of divorces are proceeded by very low levels of conflict.
That is - parents very rarely fight, they still do things together.
They're not madly in love anymore, but they don't hate their spouse.
They're just kind of muddling along.
Anyway, we're going to see the consequences of this in a moment for children.
Here we have a graph that shows us the relationship between 
different levels of marital discord and children's psychological well-being.
I call them "kids" but they're in their 20s and 30s.
And this a regression line, which is why it's so straight, it's just the best fitting line. 
And this is simply telling us that as discord increases, 
children's psychological well-being in adulthood goes down for couples who stay married.
Now, here we have the regression line which shows us the best fitting line 
through this space for parents who divorced.
And here we have the level of marital conflict before the divorce occurred. 
Now, curiously, this line slopes upward.
Now it takes a little while to look at this figure and figure out what's going on.
So, let me try to walk you through this.
First of all, who's at the top?
Kids who grew up in married couple families, with a very low level of discord,
have really high levels of psychological well-being.
They're functioning really well, high self-esteem, very few symptoms of depression,
they feel great about their lives.
They grew up with married parents who had a healthy marriage, very high quality healthy marriage.
They're doing great in adulthood.
Kids over here, who were stuck in horrible two-parent families, whose entire childhoods 
have lots of conflict, hatred, yelling, maybe violence, are doing very poorly.
Now, the divorce. Okay.
Imagine that you are in a family, where there is very little conflict, 
but your parents got a divorce, which as I mentioned before, is not that uncommon.
Well, you're way down here. Okay? Well below average.
In other words, if your parents had a very good marriage, you're much worse off 
if a divorce occurs than if your parents stayed together.
Moving on to this side, on the other hand, if your parents had a really terrible, hostile, 
aversive marriage, you're better off if your parents divorced than if they stayed married.
In other words, you come up to about average, about zero on here.
Okay, you don't get higher than that, but it appears that, for at least some kids,
escaping from a really hostile, aversive family environment through divorce is good.
Divorce is an escape for kids from really dysfunctional family environments.
So what you can do is imagine two regions in this figure.
Kids who fall in this range here are harmed by divorced 
and kids who fall in this range here are helped by divorce.
Now the question is, how many kids fall in each of those two groups?
Our research shows that about 2/3 of kids fall in this group, about 1/3 fall in this group.
So this is telling us that for some children, yes, divorce is probably a good thing.
Advocates of divorce often say this.
Divorce allows people to escape from unhappy marriages.
It also allows children to escape from really aversive, harmful family environments.
But, that's not true for most kids.
Most parents, when they divorce, have levels of conflict or discord that are so low, 
that the kids are adversely affected by that. You think about it for a second.
You're a child, maybe 12 years old or whatever, and you're living in a household 
where your parents fight very rarely.
Your parents do things together, in fact they do things together as a family fairly often.
Everything seems to be going along pretty smoothly.
You don't know it, but your parents are kind of dissatisfied.
They don't hate each other, but one of them or perhaps both of them
are thinking, "You know, this marriage... it's just not working out for me anymore.
I expected more. I sort of thought that I would grow and develop as a person and I feel stuck.
I feel that life is passing me by. I think I might have married the wrong person.
I think I have a soul mate out there who will truly fulfill me.
My spouse, not a bad person but, maybe it was not really that good of a match."
And so out of a sense of boredom, or a sense of lost opportunities, 
or a sense that things could just be better, one or the other spouse decides to get a divorce.
So one day our child comes home from school and the parents say "Well, we're getting a divorce."
Okay, how do you think the child reacts to that?
This child didn't have a clue anything was wrong. Thought everything was fine.
Grew up in a stable home, happy home, had ready access to both parents 
and did things as a family.
Suddenly they're breaking up, the child does not know why, 
the child doesn't know what's going on. 
And think about... that the child has a chance to think about this and process this, 
what sense does a child make of that?
A child begings to think, "Well, can't trust adults, can't trust marriage, can't trust love,
love is here today gone tomorrow. You know?"
And they enter adulthood with a lot of emotional instability about relationships, 
lot of mistrust of relationships.
That's why we see so much instability in their own relationships when they reach adulthood.
The kids who come from these kind of families, when we interview them, they say things like, 
"You know, when my parents finally divorced, it was a relief. 
I just couldn't stand all the screaming, all the yelling, I was happier when they got a divorce." 
And they saw it coming. There's no surprise.
So the kids, you know, emotionally and cognitively react to divorce in very different ways 
depending upon what's happening in the family before the divorce occurs.
So when you ask, "What are the effects of divorce on children?",
there's no answer to that question, no simple answer.
You have to say, "Well, tell me about the family, the quality of the family 
before the divorced occurred. Then I might be able to answer that question."
What about children born outside of marriage?
We have less data on these kids, but I do have some information here from one study.
This is an analysis that I conducted using the National Survey of Families in Households 
a few years ago.
And what we have in this figure, there's actually four groups represented here.
We have young adults, who grew up with two continuously married parents, 
and then we have young adults whose parents divorced, 
whose parents died or whose parents were never married.
And the figure shows us the difference between young adults 
who grew up in these three different kinds of families compared with those 
who grew up in continuously married two-parent families.
And the variable here we're looking at is depression.
It's a clinical measure of how many depressive symptoms young people are exhibiting.
So, what you see is... so think of this zero as being where the kids are 
who grew up with two parents, two continuously married parents.
You see that, and it's for whites and African Americans, too.
For white kids, you see that divorce elevates depression.
Experiencing the death of a parent elevates depression, but very, very little bit.
Growing up without two parents because you were born outside of marriage elevates it.
For African Americans, again, we see all three causes of growing up with a single parent 
elevate depression in later life. So, it's not just divorce.
We see that parental death, especially among African Americans, 
and growing up without two parents because your parents were never married 
is also a risk factor for depression in adulthood.
So, it seems to be generally any sort of thing that removes children 
from a two-parent family household increases the risk for things like depression.
Especially if that two-parent family is a harmonious one.
Why is divorce harmful?
Here, these are the standard explanations that, you know,
researchers have come up with that, you know, we've done dozens and dozens 
and dozens and dozens of studies, these are the big ones that keep coming up.
Now, why is divorce harmful for at least some children?
Decline in standard of living. 
We know that divorce splits one household into two, so you lose economies of scale.
Right away you're poor.
Diminished parenting from the primary resident parent- usually the mother, 
although not always these days.
You know, when the custodial parent or the primary resident parent 
is going through a divorce, it's stressful.
You know, people are upset, they're angry, they're focused upon their own pain,
and that interferes with the quality of parenting.
So it's not unusual to see, you know, single parents experience a decline 
in their parenting skills, in the year or two following divorce.
They seem to be harsher with their children, less affectionate to their children, 
spend less time with their children, monitor and supervise their children less often.
Loss of contact with non-resident parent- usually the father, not always.
As we saw before, divorce often effectively ends relationship 
between the child and his father or her father.
Continuing conflict between parents- you know, sometimes when you have these high discord families, 
the divorce does end the conflict but often it doesn't.
Sometimes these parents will go on and fight for years afterwards over custody 
and visitation arrangements and child support and property division and anything. Right?
And often these kids feel caught in the middle.
Often the parents adopt a strategy of trying to get the child to be on their side.
So parents will, you know, badmouth one another in front of a child. Right?
The father will say bad things about the mother when he has the child in his residence.
The mother will say bad things about the father when she has the child in her residence.
And the kids just feel caught in the middle because most kids 
want to be close to both parents, basically. 
And so when the kids are kind of caught in the middle, in these really weird, 
unhealthy dynamics, it's not good for them.
Moving residences, changing schools, often common after divorce. Not good.
Not good for kids, generally not good for kids under the best of circumstances.
Moving a lot is not good for kids.
But especially when kids are going through a divorce, moving is even more stressful.
When you move neighborhoods, kids lose contact with their friends living on the block 
in the neighborhood, we would change schools, they get out of sync with the curriculum.
And last but not least, the addition and subtraction of parents' new partners.
Most parents re-partner following divorce. Most parents remarry.
Sometimes they'll cohabit first before they marry.
A lot of young adults tell us in these interviews that the divorce was rough, 
but when the stepfather moved in that was even worse.
In some cases it's the addition of the new parent figure into the household 
that's even more disruptive, even more stressful for kids, right?
And let me just go back here for a second.
Often one divorce is followed by a second divorce.
It's not uncommon for example, let's take... it could be the father or the mother, 
let's just take the mother. 
So, she gets a divorce, the couple gets a divorce three months later her new boyfriend moves in.
That lasts for six months, he moves out.  Year and a half later she gets remarried.
That marriage lasts for two years. Second divorce. So she cohabits again.
All this coming and going of parent figures in the household is not good for kids. They hate it. 
Each of these changes is stressful and cumulatively, they become even more stressful.
So, what I want to show you now, this is from our data, children's psychological well-being, 
by the number of family transitions they experienced before reaching adulthood.
So, zero or none means they grew up with two continuously married parents. One means a divorce. 
Two means, actually I think these are these are, we'll back track for a second.
These are all separations or divorces.
The two means either the parents cohabited and there's a second break up 
or there's a second divorce, three or four, even go up to five plus.
Some of these kids grew up in really unstable families.
They've experienced five or more parents coming in and out of the household.
And you can see what happens.
Each time a child is exposed to one more change in the household composition, 
psychological well-being goes down. Not then but in adulthood, years later.
They're not functioning as well.
You know, for most kids -we'll come back to this in a moment- most kids thrive on stability.
They want predictability. 
And when the household is, you know, changing all the time, not good. So what helps?
Well, again, these are the things  that have been shown to be useful 
for children who've experienced a parental divorce or the break up of the parental union.
We know child support is good for kids, right?
When non-resident parents are paying the full amount of child support and paying it regularly, 
the kids do better, especially academically, we find.
If the resident parent, you know, gets her act together or gets his act together 
and becomes an authoritative parent, "authoritative parenting."
Do you know what I mean by that?
The parent is both warm and supportive, but is also firm, 
has rules, that's good for kids.
Maintaining a positive relationship with the non-resident parent, 
usually the father, good for kids.
Cooperative co-parenting, when the two parents, the two divorced parents are able to talk 
to each other, communicate, establish common rules in both households, keep the other parent 
informed about what the child is doing, what's happening in the child's life, avoid fighting,
cooperatively work with the dropping off children and picking up children, 
to change households, this is good for kids, it's good.
Stability, residential and school stability, good for kids. 
And since we know that most parents re-partner or remarry once their union breaks up,
it's very important how parents introduce new partners into their children's lives.
It has to be done in a gradual way, a sensitive way, a tactful way, you know?
You don't want to have a situation with a child just comes home one day 
and mom's boyfriend has moved in, you know? 
It has to be gradual, slow introduction, let the child know what's happening, lots of discussion.
And there are good ways of doing it and there are bad ways of doing it.
We can talk about that more later, if you like.
Now, one more important factor that I want to throw in because I haven't talked about it yet.
This is something that we're sort of becoming aware of more recently,
and that's just the child's temperament.
And in saying temperament, I'm really talking about the kind of traits the child is born with, 
things that are genetically-based.
It appears to be the case, were finding out, that some children 
are just born with this kind of resiliency.
That is, in the sense that they can cope with change very well.
Change doesn't bother them. If it bothers them, they adjust to it very quickly.
They're adaptable, they're flexible, they're resilient.
Other kids just hate change. They hate anything that's different from day to day.
They want things to be the same all all the time, 
and if things change, they get frustrated and upset.
Well, these kids, kids who can adjust well to change, tend to adjust well to divorce.
Reasonably well, at least they get over it in time.
It's the kids who adapt poorly to change, who appear to be even more at risk 
of negative outcomes when the parents get a divorce.
We don't exactly understand this process very well, but we're actually beginning, 
now in the last few years, to pinpoint the actual genes that determine this resiliency. 
And we've been able to show in a few published studies, 
that if kids have a particular genetic variation, 
it affects the amount of dopamine in the central nervous system.
Dopamine is something that kind of makes you feel good.
And when kids have a particular variation of this gene that produces a lot of dopamine 
in their central nervous system, they seem to be able to adapt to change well, including divorce.
But if they don't have that gene, they adapt more poorly to divorce.
They see more behavior problems, they see more delinquency, they see more depression, and so on.
This is all very new, we don't really understand it very well. 
But there seems to be some sort of inborn temperamental thing that is going on.
Finally, some policies and interventions.
These are the sort of tried and true ones. 
You know, child support enforcement is good for kids. 
Mediation- you know most court systems in the U.S. now have mediation services 
for divorcing parents, especially those who cannot agree upon custody and visitation arrangements 
or can't, you know, negotiate a parenting plan on their own. Mediation appears to work.
Number of random assignments studies now has shown that parents that go through mediation 
come up with better parenting plans, plans they'll stick to, plans they're happier with.
Most court systems in the U.S. now have education classes for divorcing parents... 
or at least can refer parents to these classes. These classes seem to work.
The evidence is a bit thinner here.
But most parents who go through these classes say that they found it helpful, 
they feel like it's made them a better co-parent.
They feel like they understand how divorce affects children better. So that's helpful.
We have, there's several thousand school-based programs, or I should say schools 
that have programs for children from divorced families.
The basic idea of these classes is that, you take the kids in the school,
who've been through a divorce recently, and you bring them together, 
and, you know, provide sweet talk to the them, you might show them a video, 
let them talk among themselves.
But what seems to really help these kids is the social support from their peers.
Being able to talk to other kids, whose parents are divorced, 
or other kids who had a divorce recently, appears to really help these kids.
And we have some random assignment studies that have shown that these kinds of programs
really do help kids to adjust to divorce. So these are good.
And of course, this being Oklahoma, I would have to mention 
the program to support healthy marriage.
Why not adopt a preventive approach, you know?
If we can provide people with marriage and relationship education,
in ways that helps them to make good choices about marital partners, 
to communicate more effectively in marriage, to de-escalate conflict, 
hopefully have healthy marriages, hopefully avoid divorce,
then, ultimately, that stands to reason, that should be a good thing for children.
So, let's not forget that's an important point.
And I believe that's all I wanted to say, so thank you very much for your time.