NEWS & INSIGHT
ARE CHILDREN OF DIVORCE BETTER ENTREPRENEURS? SCHOOL : School of Management, University of St Gallen COUNTRY : Switzerland
Experiencing parental divorce as a child can spur entrepreneurial success as an adult, depending on the level of your parents’ education, according to new research from St Gallen’s Swiss Research Institute of Small Business. Exploring the effects of divorce on a child’s subsequent entrepreneurial career, researchers found a mixed picture. While disadvantages predominated for people with highly educated parents, advantages tended to dominate for people with less educated guardians. The advantages centred on the idea that children of divorce become better equipped at fending for themselves. “Our results show that, on average, children who experience parental divorce develop an increased conviction that they can successfully overcome difficult situations and challenges on their own,” explained co-author Isabella Hatak. “Parental divorce appears to promote children’s independence and maturity, which means that their increased self‑efficacy will benefit them later in their entrepreneurial careers.” The downsides were found to be more prevalent among children from privileged family backgrounds. “A parental divorce can lead to these children losing their privileges, putting them in the same restricted situation that less
privileged children often experience even without a parental divorce,” reasoned lead author Mateja Andric. The privileges alluded to here include greater financial resources and support of a child’s learning. The implication is that divorce merely levels the playing field slightly in these cases, with the children of highly educated parents more likely to succeed as entrepreneurs in general terms. This makes supporting people from disadvantaged backgrounds essential to any programmes promoting entrepreneurship, the researchers say. There are also words of advice for parents going through a divorce, as relayed by Andric: “They should proactively invest in the child’s education, while at the same time taking care not to overprotect them after the divorce. This will allow the child to use the challenging post-divorce period as an opportunity to develop greater independence and self-reliance, which will increase their chances of success in entrepreneurship later on.” TBD
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Ambition | MAY 2024 | 11
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