https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/02/06/daughters-provoke-parental-strife

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[20210206_stp501]

Daughters and divorce
Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons

But the difference only emerges when the children are teenagers

Science & technologyFeb 6th 2021 edition
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Feb 6th 2021

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DAUGHTERS HAVE long been linked with divorce. Several studies
conducted in America since the 1980s provide strong evidence that a
couple's first-born being a girl increases the likelihood of their
subsequently splitting up. At the time, the researchers involved
speculated that this was an expression of "son preference", a
phenomenon which, in its most extreme form, manifests itself as the
selective abortion or infanticide of female offspring.

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Work published in the Economic Journal, however, debunks that
particular idea. In "Daughters and Divorce", Jan Kabatek of the
University of Melbourne and David Ribar of Georgia State University,
in Atlanta, confirm that having a female first-born does indeed
increase the risk of that child's parents divorcing, in both America
and the Netherlands. But, unlike previous work, their study also
looked at the effect of the girl's age. It found that
"daughter-divorce" risk emerges only in a first-born girl's teenage
years (see chart). Before they reach the age of 12, daughters are no
more linked to couples splitting up than sons are. "If fathers were
really more likely to take off because they preferred sons, surely
they wouldn't wait 13 years to do so," reasons Dr Kabatek. Instead,
he argues, the fact that the risk is so age-specific requires a
different explanation, namely that parents quarrel more over the
upbringing of teenage daughters than of teenage sons.

[20210206_S]

Taken over the years, the daughter effect, though real, is small. In
the Netherlands, by the time their first-born is 18, 20.12% of
couples will have divorced if that child is a son, compared with
20.48% if she is a daughter--an increase in probability of 1.8%. But
in the five years when the first-born is between the ages of 13 and
18, that increase goes up to 5%. And it peaks, at 9%, when the child
is 15. In America, for which the data the researchers collected were
sparser than those in the Netherlands, the numbers are roughly double
this.

Anyone who has--or has been--a teenager knows how turbulent those years
can be. Surveys confirm that teenage daughters and fathers, in
particular, get on each other's nerves. They also show that parents
of teenage daughters argue more about parenting than do the parents
of sons, and that mothers of teenage daughters report significantly
more disagreements with their partners over money, and become more
open to the idea of divorce. Earlier research has also shown that one
of the most common things parents fight over is how much they should
control their teenagers' personal choices, such as how they dress,
whom they date and where they work.

In light of all this, it is intriguing to note that Dr Kabatek and Dr
Ribar found one type of couple who seem immune to the daughter
effect: those in which the father grew up with a sister. Having seen
things somewhat from a sister's point of view may act as a sort of
social inoculation. #

This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the
print edition under the headline "Teenage rampage"

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