Daughter=/= Husband

baconsmom

“Do Daughters Cause Divorce?” asks the headline of The New York Times latest Motherlode column. It’s a provocative question and nobody seems to agree on the answer.Just because parents of girls are 5 percentmore likely to divorce than parents of boys doesn’t necessarily mean that girls cause divorce, does it? Depends on whom you ask.“All over the world, boys hold marriages together, and girls break them up,” wrote Steven E. Landsburg in Slate in 2003. Landsburg concluded that “parents prefer boys—by enough that boys hold a lot of shaky marriages together.”It’s just one theory to explain the 2003 findings of the economists Gordon Dahl (at the University of Rochester) and Enrico Moretti (at UCLA), who also found that the more daughters a couple has, the greater the effect. For instance, the parents of three girls are close to 10 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of three boys. But at Psychology Today, Anita E. Kelly has a different hypothesis. She concludes that women who have daughters arewww.psychologytoday.com/blog/insight/201008/why-parents-girls-divorce-more"> less likely to stay in unhappy marriages because they know they’ll never be lonely with a daughter. “They may be less willing to tolerate any bad behaviors from their husbands (and less willing to stay married) because they don’t need their husbands as much,” writes Kelly.Amazingly, unmarried couples who are expecting a boy are more likely to get married than those who are find out they’re having a girl. Kelly explains this by saying that “a woman carrying a girl anticipates that she won’t need a husband.”Not only do parents of girls divorce more, but divorced women with daughters are substantially less likely to remarry than divorced women with sons. Is it because they already have a soul mate? That doesn’t entirely make sense to me since we all know that mothers and daughters don’t always get along.So what else can explain the statistical difference? Are girls so difficult to raise that it drives couples apart? Or do couples simply stay together for the sake of the boys?As the mother of two girls, I should be concerned, but mostly, I’m baffled. Can you think of any reasons parents of girls are more likely to divorce than parents of boys?-----------------------------------What? How do girls not need their fathers? How are daughters a substitute for husbands? None of that makes a damn bit of sense to me, the mother of a daughter. The hell, yo.

zsazsa-stl

WHAT?!?!  People really think these things?

nicoleg1982

I think my brain just turned into scrambled eggs, reading that bullsht.

Wonderw1fe

I can't believe someone took time to type this crap up.

mrsconn23

What a crock.  I can't believe they found more than one person who shared this opinion.

Heffalump

I like how they have a teeny little statistic they haven't found an explanation for, so the author throws out a bunch of crap.  Hell, if you pay me enough, I can put together a list of random guesses, too.

Bmom, obviously you don't count because you already married Baconsdad despite the fact that, according to this, you didn't need a husband b/c Bacon was your soulmate.

@ x 1000 

LnR70707

that is one of the dumbest things I've read in a long time.

[Deleted User]

Wow.

ReturnOfKuus

I think my mom really does think that way, as does her mother.