Sociological research has shown that couples with daughters are more likely to divorce than couples with sons. However, there are a number of competing (and complementary) theoretical explanations for this observed relationship, and it has been difficult to disentangle the different mechanisms that might be at work. In a recent article published in The Economic Journal (sorry I don't see an ungated version online, but there is this conference presentation), Jan Kabatek (University of Melbourne) and David Ribar (Georgia State University) use comprehensive data from the Netherlands to investigate. Specifically, they use:
...administrative data that cover the near universe of marriages and registered partnerships that began in the country between October 1971 and December 2015. The data include nearly 3 million marriages and partnerships, allowing us to estimate effects precisely and consider how effects vary with children’s ages, parities, and conditional on parents’ backgrounds. The data are highly accurate with the exact dates of weddings, births, and divorces.
This is the sort of research that can only be done with population register data like this, because the sample size is enormous and sample selection is less of an issue. However, first let's take a step back. Kabatek and Ribar outline the various competing theories for why couples with daughters may be more at risk of divorce:
Consider an overarching preference for boys over girls. Such a preference would raise the value of the marriage-specific capital for couples with sons, thereby lowering their incentives to divorce... Similar effects would occur if fathers prefer spending time with sons more than spending time with daughters...
The constraint-based explanations posit that daughters are more costly to raise than sons... Another possibility is that boys are more susceptible to developmental problems if parents divorce, which would lower the value of parents’ alternatives to marriage... It is also possible that parenting interactions are more strained with girls than boys and that these strains lower the match-specific quality.
...it is also possible that the association is not causal. Hamoudi and Nobles (2014) described how girls in utero have survival advantages under conditions of stress relative to boys. They found that mothers who reported high levels of relationship conflict prior to their children’s births were more likely to give birth to girls. This means that the gender-related divorce disparities may result from sex-selection into live birth.
Kabatek and Ribar use what is referred to as a complementary log-log (cloglog) discrete-time hazard model. When what you are modelling is really a type of survival analysis, cloglog provides a better fit than a logistic regression, and it deals with low-probability events better. Anyway, enough of that. In the headline results, they find that:
...having a daughter increases the risks of divorce among Dutch couples - the first robust finding of this association for a European country. An even more novel and intriguing result is that the increased risks of divorce only appear when daughters are teenagers (aged 13-18) - there is no detectable gender difference at earlier or later ages. We observe this pattern among both firstborn and subsequent children. We also find the same age pattern in analyses of the 1980, 1985, 1990, and 1995 US Current Population Survey Marriage and Fertility Supplements (CPS-MFS).
The divorce risks for couples with firstborn daughters aged between 13 and 18 are about 5.5% higher, on average, than the risks for couples with firstborn sons. However, because there are no differences at younger or older ages, the cumulative effect of the child’s gender on parental divorce is modest. For instance, the cumulative divorce rates of couples with firstborn sons and daughters aged 19 only differ by 1.8% (0.36 percentage points).
So far, so consistent with the sociological literature, except for the fact that the result is largest for teenage daughters. Kabatek and Ribar then go further:
The ‘teenage daughter effect’ is at odds with many possible explanations, including: (i) overarching, time-invariant preferences for sons, (ii) sex-selection into live birth, and (iii) rational forward-looking behaviours based on age-specific differences in preferences for or costs of raising sons and daughters. This is because each of these explanations predicts that gender disparities would also appear earlier in the child’s life. Instead, the precisely-estimated pattern of zero effects during childhood and non-zero effects during the teenage years leads us to consider explanations based on unexpected changes in parents’ valuation of marriage during children’s adolescence. We give special consideration to family conflicts that might arise from differences in family members’ gender-role attitudes. These differences can become a more salient source of conflict as girls mature, and conflict in this dimension of family life may spill over to the parents’ marital relationship.
Additional analyses of Dutch administrative data support this explanation. We find that the excess divorce risks associated with having teenage daughters are higher for couples whose gender-role attitudes are likely to differ from those of their daughters (for example, for less-educated couples and immigrant couples), and that the risks are exacerbated further for couples in which the two spouses are likely to hold different gender-role attitudes (for example, for parents with different immigration backgrounds or different levels of education). In a further analysis, we examine the gender composition of the parents’ siblings and find that the teenage daughter effect only appears among fathers who grew up without sisters. In contrast, we find no differences with regard to the gender composition of the mother’s siblings, which suggests that the father’s experiences are critical.
It appears that the effect of daughters on divorce arises from conflict between parents in terms of their beliefs in gender roles. This only becomes problematic when the daughter is older and presumably better able to assert themselves. It is particularly interesting that there is a difference here between fathers with sisters and fathers without sisters, suggesting that having sisters may affect fathers' beliefs about gender roles, and reduce conflict with their daughters. Kabatek and Ribar use additional survey data to support these explanations.
Some would not doubt argue that these results fall short of a definitive causal explanation. The gender of children is mostly distributed randomly, but there may be some concerns about sex selection, especially for more recent children. Kabatek and Ribar test for differences between couples with first-born sons and couples with first-born daughters, and there are few statistically significant differences. However, couples who are both immigrants are more likely to have a first-born son, and parents wait slightly longer before having a second child after a first-born son. The number of siblings is also higher for couples with a first-born son, but the difference is tiny (0.003 children, on average). Those variables are all controlled for in the analysis, but there might still be unobservable differences between those couples that are correlated with the chance of divorce.
However, despite that caveat, this is the best analysis we have to date on why couples with daughters are more likely to divorce than couples with sons.
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