Most divorcing couples don't stop to think about the fact that their children may be related to the dissolution of their marriage. However, there's a growing body of research that says children, and specifically the gender of said children, may be splitting up families.
The Facts On Daughters And Divorce Rates
Over a decade ago, economists Gordon Dahl and Enrico Moretti published some earth-shattering statistics in the New York Times. According to Dahl and Moretti, parents with daughters are nearly 10 percent more likely to divorce than the parents with only sons. Additionally, researchers discovered that unmarried couples who end up pregnant with a son are more likely to hold a shotgun wedding, and couples with sons are more likely to stick together even if their marriage isn't going so well.
Although there's a lot of speculation about why this is the case, psychologist Anita E. Kelly, Ph.D. says that there is another interesting statistic about divorce and parenting that may help explain why couples with daughters divorce at higher rates. According to Dr. Kelly, as much as 73 percent of recent divorces involve wives leaving their husbands.
Given this information and what we know about the differences between sons and daughters in terms of offering support to mothers, it could actually be that daughters provide mothers with the support and determination they need to walk away from stressful or abusive marriages.
Inversely, mothers with sons may feel more reluctant to leave because they don't want their sons to grow up without a father figure in their lives. Also, mothers with sons could be more reluctant to leave because studies show that sons actually add to the daily workload of their parents and rarely help out to the extent that daughters do.
Divorce Predictability Before Childbirth
While all of the research presented makes a valid case to explain why parents with daughters are more likely to divorce, researchers at Duke University came to a completely different conclusion: Mothers who become pregnant in the midst of marital turmoil may just be more likely to birth daughters.
According to the study completed by Amar Hamoudi and Jenna Nobles, “Girls may well be surviving stressful pregnancies that boys can’t survive. Thus girls are more likely than boys to be born into marriages that were already strained.” In other words, it may actually be a couple's pre-established conflicts that leads them to have daughters, not that daughters actually cause divorce. This idea checks out with the so-called “female survival advantage” that most medical experts have known about for years.
When it's all said and done, the data on daughters and divorce almost appears to be a case of the chicken or the egg. We may never know which one causes the other since that would require some extensive lifespan studies, and those are difficult to do. However, what we can draw from these research studies is this: Daughters may ultimately be the ones suffering the most if they're being born into high-conflict families who ultimately end up splitting during the daughter's childhood.
Sources: New York Times, Psychology Today, Duke University