Yikes.
Did you know the gender of your children might have something to say when it comes to how happy your marriage will be?
Apparently, there is a growing body of research that says having a daughter makes you more likely to get divorced.
A while back, economists Gordon Dahl and Enrico Moretti published
a study that found that
parents with daughters are nearly 10 percent more likely to divorce than the parents with only sons.
As well as that, researchers discovered that unmarried couples who end up pregnant with a son are more likely to hold a shotgun wedding than remain unmarried, and couples with sons are more likely to stick together even if their marriage isn't going so well.
Strange? I know.
A lot of speculations as to why this is the case has been made, and many experts have weighed in.
Speaking to
Psychology Today, psychologist Anita E. Kelly Ph.D. explained that there is another interesting statistic about divorce and parenting that may help explain why couples with daughters divorce at higher rates. According to Kelly, as much as 73 percent of recent divorces involve wives leaving their husbands.
So maybe, she speculates, it could actually be that daughters provide mothers with the support and determination they need to walk away from stressful or abusive marriages.
On the flip side, mums with boys might feel more reluctant to leave as they worry about their sons growing up without a father figure in their lives.
Interestingly, y
a more recent study has theorized that it might be a case of the egg and the chicken with this, and that it seems mothers who are already in unstable or unhappy relationships are more likely to give birth to girls – as female fetuses are more likely to survive a stressful pregnancy than male fetuses.
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 lead 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.
