Divorce often gets blamed for a host of troubles faced by kids whose parents split; much past research has focused on the detrimental effects on child well-being.

But new research suggests that at least for one segment of overall well-being — bad behavior — divorce doesn't appear to be the reason for some kids' behavior problems.

"It really depends on the individual marriages and the family," says Allen Li, associate director of the Population Research Center at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif. "My conclusion is that divorce is neither bad nor good."

His findings, presented recently in Chicago at a meeting of the non-profit Council on Contemporary Families, contrast with a body of research about divorce's impact on children that some researchers say has overestimated the difficulty that parents' divorce causes for kids.

A review of marriage research released in a 2005 journal published by the Brookings Institution and Princeton University suggested that children from two-parent families are better off emotionally, socially and economically. Other research, released the same year in a book by Elizabeth Marquardt, a vice president at the conservative Institute for American Values in New York, found that an unhappy marriage without a lot of conflict is better for the kids than divorce.

Others, including Robert Emery of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, agree that much past research has been overly simplistic in assuming divorce causes the behavior problems. But he adds that he believes Li's conclusions "are too strong."

"Divorce still does have consequences for kids," he says.

Li's study of 6,332 children is significant for its large sample, as well as a new statistical model used in the analysis. Also, unlike many previous studies on the impact of divorce on children, Li doesn't compare the children of married parents to the children of divorced parents. Rather, he took a longitudinal approach, looking at children's behavior before and after their parents split.

His 28-item checklist measured behavior problems, such as crying, cheating or arguing frequently, between ages 4 and 15. He found a slight post-divorce increase in bad behavior that he says is so small it is not statistically significant. The trajectory of misbehavior that started prior to the divorce might well have continued, even if the parents had not divorced, he says.

By contrast, Marquardt compared the children of divorced families with those of married parents. She defends that approach as valid. "What he's doing is controlling for so many things he's making the effects of divorce disappear," she says. "People like me have some real qualms about that."

In the early 1990s, research by social demographer Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore looked at children before and after parents divorced and compared them with children with married parents. He found that some of the problems children showed after the divorce were apparent before the split.

"Some of the problems we attribute to divorce are present before a child's parents divorce. The implication is they might have happened anyway," he says. "Not all of the problems children of divorce show are due to divorce."

But he says that's not the whole story.

"My line on this is that most children are not seriously affected by divorce in the long-term, but divorce raises the risk that a child will have problems," Cherlin says.