Do Girls Cause Divorce?

Word of a study claiming that girls lead to divorce has been circulating in the media for a few months now. We Have Brains recently discussed both the New York Times and Alternet articles about the study. Rather than rely on media reports, I looked at the study itself.

It's entitled "The Demand for Sons: Evidence from Divorce, Fertility, and Shotgun Marriages," by Dahl and Moretti. "Shotgun" refers to knowing the sex of the child before birth.

The researchers cited three factors they claim influences parents' decision to divorce, to have more children, to remarry, to marry (if child born out of wedlock), and to divorce after remarriage:

1. gender bias on part of the parents; i.e., they prefer having sons to having daughters.

2. role model hypothesis - believing that having a father in the household is more important for boys than for girls.

3. differential costs hypothesis - believing that the monetary, time, or psycholgical cost of raising girls is higher than the cost of raising boys.

I've chosen to focus on the conclusions about America.

The study raised some interesting questions, but I found some methodological problems due to assumptions about gender made by the researchers.

There are too many unknowns in the study. While we know the birth order of the children by sex, we don't know their ages nor do we know how many years exist between them. Of the remarried mothers, we don't know if the mothers' relationship with the father was good or hostile, or if there were continuous court battles. Those factors would affect the remarried family. We don't know income and wealth levels. We don't know if the remarried couple had children of their own. While the study noted that mothers of sons may be more likely to marry or remarry than mothers of daughters, it did not note that for several years marriage rates in general have been dropping. Men and women have been opting out of marriage altogether or delaying marriage until attending college and obtaining a good job.

Dahl/Moretti cite research that supposedly states that having a father in the household when children are growing up is more important for boys than for girls without noting that the claim is correlational, and also without noting that Michael Lamb (cited in the study) had pointed out in "The Role of Fathers in Child Development" that father absence literature has been criticized for focusing more on the effect on boys than on girls. The father absence literature itself is gender biased against girls -- it's sexist.

Father absence or presence does not ensure well-child outcomes. Quality matters. The presence of inadequate or abusive fathers negatively impact childhood development. High levels of conflict between married or divorced parents are harmful for children. Early father absence literature focused on father absence due to war. It was also greatly concerned over boys becoming "properly" masculine and girls becoming "properly" feminine, yet Lamb noted that no adequate assessment of masculinity or femininity had ever been made by researchers studying father absence. A fear expressed by researchers and parents (esp. fathers) in the early studies was that boys raised without the presence of their fathers would not be sufficiently masculine; i.e., they'd be "sissies." Lamb's "The Role of Fathers In Child Development" discussed a father who had returned from serving in the military. The man had actually called his son a "sissy." It's not true - the presence and influence of alternative masculine role models such as male teachers, brothers, and stepfathers also affect childhood development of boys. This bias exists to this day, yet it has no basis in fact.

There are too many nuances inherent in studies of family structure and gender to pinpoint girls leading to divorce in the way the researchers have done with their study.

The study doesn't take into account that researchers, including Lamb, have found that how the father treats the mother has an effect on the children. Studies cited by Lamb in "The Role of Fathers in Child Development" indicated the following:

"The father-mother interaction can have much impact on the child's personality development. Family stability and cohesiveness help to provide a positive atmosphere for the developing child. An inadequate father is often also an inadequate husband. The father may influence his daughter's personality development indirectly in terms of his relationship with his wife. If the father meets his wife's needs, she may, in turn, be able to interact more adequately with her children. Bartemeier (1953) emphasized that the wife's capacity for appropriately nurturing her children, and her general psychological adjustment, are much influenced by her relationship with her husband. A number of investigations have suggested that a warm and nurturant mother-daughter relationship is more important in positive feminine development (e.g., Hetherington, 1965; Hetherington & Rankie, 1967; Mussen & Parker, 1965; Mussen & Rutherford, 1963)."

What matters isn't dad's presence alone. What matters is the quality of his presence and how he treats the children's mother. The study doesn't note that American women file for the vast majority of divorces today. It's possible that mothers of daughters receive poorer treatment from fathers than mothers of sons. Such poor treatment builds up over time, and the end result may be the mother filing for divorce. But still -- it's correlative. Too many unknown factors lie behind the divorce to cite daughters as a cause.

The study errs in stating that American divorces with a girl are more expensive for fathers. Alimony and child support payments are not based on the gender of the children. Most women today are not awarded alimony, so that one is a moot point. Child support is based on income and the number of children, not whether those children are boys or girls. Children overall become more expensive to raise as they age. Whether or not girls are more expensive than boys seems to reflect the adults personal biases and ideosynracies, not a factual cost difference.

The link in this study between girl children and divorce is correlative, not causal. Not only that, the conclusions are hampered by the researchers own gender-biased assumptions and misrepresentations of research and family law.

That said, worldwide there is clearly a bias favoring boys over girls. Dahl/Moretti mention researchers who cite "missing" girls in Asian countries who have probably been murdered, neglected, or aborted. In her book "Mother Nature," Sarah Hrdy described cases in which girl children in third-world countries who had been bottle-fed formula mixed with contaminated local water, while their brothers had been breast-fed. The girls die from dysentery. The boys thrive. Mothers-in-law insist that mothers formula feed girls, resulting in their deaths.

There clearly is a gender bias favoring boys in father absence studies that has affected how the general public views the effects of divorce on boys versus girls. However, the research and literature do not bear out those assumptions. It is not true that boys "need" fathers to grow up to be sufficiently masculine: Tanfer and Mott wrote that " it appears from the research findings that children do not appear to imitate people of their own gender any more than the opposite gender, nor do they typically end up resembling the same-sex parent more than the other. It seems, therefore, that men are unlikely to construct their fatherhood identity on the basis of male role models, only." Father absence does not cause social pathology. The National Center for Fathers and Families noted the following:

"While public sentiment has been in favor of nonresident father's involvement in family life, there is limited research evidence of whether their involvement yields positive benefits for children (King, 1994) and for the functioning of the biological family unit. According to King, there are at least five potential ways in which father involvement impacts child development, either in-house or as nonresidents: fathers provide material resources; they instruct and train their children; their general behavior, attitudes and expectations influence their children; and they provide emotional and moral support; and indirectly, they influence their children by influencing their children's mothers. However, most studies, particularly those based on large national databases, have not been able to detect a significant connection between the nonresident father's contact with his child and the child's well-being (Furstenberg et al., 1987; King, 1994). In a study which did find an association between absent-father involvement and child well-being, it was found also that father contact was beneficial only to the degree that both parents got along fairly well (Hetherington et al., 1978). In any case, current knowledge regarding the impact of nonresident fathers on child development and family functioning is limited."

Some parents may prefer sons to daughters. Believing that having a father is more important for boys than for girls doesn't make that belief true (it isn't true). Believing that girls cost more than boys also doesn't make the belief true (it isn't true). It is too much of a leap to assume as this study does that daughters "cause" divorce. The results of this study are correlative. There are just too many assumptions and biases present for my taste. Too many other factors figure into the reasons people divorce to pinpoint daughters as a cause.