Why Are Couples with Daughters More Likely to Divorce?
"Do Daughters Cause Divorce?" asks the headline of The New York Times latest Motherlode column. It's a provocative question and nobody seems to agree on the answer.
Just because parents of girls are 5 percent more likely to divorce than parents of boys doesn't necessarily mean that girls cause divorce, does it? Depends on whom you ask.
"All over the world, boys hold marriages together , and girls break them up," wrote Steven E. Landsburg in Slate in 2003. Landsburg concluded that "parents prefer boys-by enough that boys hold a lot of shaky marriages together."
It's just one theory to explain the 2003 findings of the economists Gordon Dahl (at the University of Rochester) and Enrico Moretti (at UCLA), who also found that the more daughters a couple has, the greater the effect. For instance, the parents of three girls are close to 10 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of three boys.
But at Psychology Today, Anita E. Kelly has a different hypothesis. She concludes that women who have daughters are less likely to stay in unhappy marriages because they know they'll never be lonely with a daughter. "They may be less willing to tolerate any bad behaviors from their husbands (and less willing to stay married) because they don't need their husbands as much," writes Kelly.
I'm not sure I buy her argument, but what else can explain the statistical difference? Are girls so difficult to raise that it drives couples apart? Or do couples simply stay together for the sake of the boys?
As the mother of two girls, I should be concerned, but mostly, I'm baffled. Can you think of any reasons parents of girls are more likely to divorce than parents of boys?
Meanwhile, take this quiz and find out if you need divorce insurance .
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Photo: flickr/martintoy
