Why are the parents of girls more likely to divorce?

By MaritalMediation Staff on September 15, 2010

Does the durability of a marriage depend on whether the couple produces boys or girls? The answer is yes and is among the surprising results of an economic study from 2003 by Gordon Dahl and Enrico Moretti. Dahl and Moretti found that parents of daughters were much more likely to divorce. Why this is no one knows, but there are many theories. Along the lines of our previous articles on the financial influence of divorce, we’ve collected some commentary on this study.

Parents of a daughter were 5 percent more likely to divorce and the parents of three girls were 10 percent more likely to split up, compared with the parents of three boys. The conclusion reached at the time was that boys are an asset in a marriage and girls are not. Therefore, men might work harder at making a marriage work if they had sons. From the Baltimore Sun.

Parents of girls are 5 percent more likely to divorce than parents of boys. Economists first analyzed the data that way in 2003, when Gordon Dahl at the University of Rochester and Enrico Moretti at U.C.L.A., identified that gap, and noted that it widened as you added boys or girls to a family. Parents of three girls, for instance, are 10 percent more likely to split than are parents of three boys. And, they found, an unmarried couple is more likely to marry if they learn their unborn child will be a boy than a girl. From the NYT.

An influential article in Slate focused on the role of sons:

Dahl and Moretti make the extremely helpful observation that all theories fall into one of two categories: Either sons improve the quality of married life (say by being more available for an evening game of catch) or sons exacerbate the pain of divorce (say by falling apart emotionally when the father leaves). Theories of the first sort suggest that a boy child is a blessing; theories of the second sort suggest that the same boy child is a curse—or at least has the potential to become a curse if the marriage starts to crumble.

First, divorced women with girls are substantially less likely to remarry than divorced women with boys, suggesting that daughters are a liability in the market for a husband. Not only do daughters lower the probability of remarriage; they also lower the probability that a second marriage, if it does occur, will succeed.

Next, parents of girls are quite a bit more likely to try for another child than parents of boys, which suggests that there are more parents hoping for sons than for daughters.

Once again, the effect is strong in the United States but even stronger elsewhere. In the United States, Colombia, or Kenya, a couple with three girls is about 4 percent more likely to try for another child than a couple with three boys; in Mexico it’s closer to 9 percent, and in Vietnam it’s 18 percent. In China, before the one-child policy was imposed in 1982, the number was an astounding 90 percent!

One of Dahl and Moretti’s most striking bits of evidence comes from shotgun marriages. Take a typical unmarried couple who are expecting a child and have an ultrasound, which more often than not reveals the child’s sex. It turns out that such couples are more likely to get married if the child is a boy. Apparently, for unmarried fathers, the prospect of living with a wife and a son is more alluring than the prospect of living with a wife and a daughter.

A different view is taken by Anita E. Kelly, Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, in PsychologyToday:

Are daughters a curse for marriages? Why is that? Dahl and Moretti have summarized attempts to explain their facts as follows: Sons may either improve the quality of married life or worsen the pain of divorce (perhaps by becoming more distraught when the father leaves). Landsburg chooses the former explanation based on the fact that parents, on average, prefer having boys over having girls.

However, these explanations seem to have overlooked several important facts:

1. Recent statistics in the US show that 73% of divorces involve wives leaving their husbands. So, perhaps we should be wondering, “Why are mothers of daughters divorcing more than mothers of sons?”

2. When adult sons live at home, they add to the daily workload of their parents. When adult daughters live at home, they decrease the daily workload.

3. Females offer more and better social support than do men.

4. An enormous human motivation is avoiding being lonely.

When we add up these facts, a conclusion we might draw is that wives with daughters are less likely to stay with their husbands because they know that with a girl, they’ll never be lonely or without help. Thus, 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. This idea could even explain why couples expecting a girl are less likely to marry: A woman carrying a girl anticipates that she won’t need a husband.

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