32 ms·

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

480 points by jkuria 6y ago

FriedrichN 6y ago
> parents of teenage daughters argue more about parenting than do the parents of sons This to me strikes me as the thing that might be the culprit. I can't count the amount of times I've heard men how much they would worry if they'd be getting a daughter. It seems as if many people think a girl has to be parented differently - probably more intensely - compared to a boy who can apparently be left to his own devices more often. I'm speculating here of course.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Do you have children? They most definitely need to be parented differently. With boys there’s a lot of effort into mitigating physical damage to themselves or physical and/or emotional damage they may cause to others. With daughters, there’s less effort with physical harm and much more effort into helping their emotional well-being. I would argue that social media and media in general has disproportionately affected the minds of our daughters compared to our sons.
  - TeaDrunk 6y ago
    > I would argue that social media and media in general has disproportionately affected the minds of our daughters compared to our sons. I would speculate it affects it in different ways. Social media puts young boys at risk of entering highly misogynistic spaces, the damage of which will be borne out on the bodies, careers, and wellbeing of women they meet later.
  - croissants 6y ago
    The Economist (relatively) recently featured a long article about the modern lives of adolescent girls: https://archive.is/OGxxk https://archive.is/OGxxk.
  - User23 6y ago
    I think people without sons may seriously underestimate the ingenuity, energy, and frequency with which boy toddlers attempt to kill, maim, or otherwise seriously injure themselves.
    - de_Selby 6y ago
      I have a son who is a toddler right now, very well put - "ingenuity" made me laugh.
    - da_big_ghey 6y ago
      Even moreso with multiple sons close in age. Thinking about the trouble my brothers and I caused on our own versus in groups versus all together, there seems to be a superlinear growth in the amount of trouble a group of boys can cause.
    - testfoobar 6y ago
      Ha! I tried to explain this to parents who have only daughters. They would offer advice like "you need to give them more projects to do or you need to listen more to them." They would look on with a judging attitude as my sons would tear around playgrounds looking for sticks and rocks to arm their fort. Or they would play on the "outside" of playground structures. Imagine a 15 foot tall covered slide. They would climb on the outside of the slide - risking a serious fall. I've already seen the tables turn. Parents with teenage daughters describe things that make me shudder. At least I now have the wisdom to not judge the parents. It seems to me that the worst bullying behaviour that I hear in my social circle is perpetuated by teenage girls towards other teenage girls.
      - cycomanic 6y ago
        I think there is a strong selection bias there as well, there's significant research showing how girls and boys are treated differently when getting into "dangerous" situations. It's been my experience as a father of 2 girls that they also love to climb on the outside of playground structures. However what I see with a lot of the parents of other girls (compared to boys) is that they caution the girls a lot more and then they say my girls are so self-confident and "brave". That is not to say that there is no difference between girls and boys, but you there are also huge variations between individuals as well, the way my two daughters are in their "wildness" is so different you would not guess they are siblings.
  - wongarsu 6y ago
    > With daughters, there’s less effort with physical harm and much more effort into helping their emotional well-being. Suicide rates for 10-14 year olds are twice as high for boys than for girls, and for 15-24 year olds four times as high. I'm sure you are describing how parenting is done in general, but not spending as much time on the emotional well-being of boys doesn't seem to be a good strategy. 1: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/suicide/rates_1999_2017.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/suicide/rates_1999_2017...
    - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
      I definitely didn’t mean to discount the emotional damage done to boys by social media and media. Also the damage done to them by caging them up in schools while demanding absolute obedience and attention in “lord of the flies” situations.
      - fastball 6y ago
        You did though. You said girls need emotional support and boys you need to worry about them damaging themselves (physically) or others (emotionally). I honestly can't come up with a reading of your comment that doesn't involve discounting the emotional needs of young boys.
    - ac29 6y ago
      Suicide attempts, however, are far higher in females: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml This is in part because males choose more effective suicide methods - they are approximately twice as likely to use firearms.
      - bitshiftfaced 6y ago
        But couldn't that be because some do it as a cry for help?
        throwaway3699 6y ago
  - robin21 6y ago
    I’d love to read something that explores why social media affects females more than males, and also a first person perspective of the social pressures of young females and how much wiggle room they actually have to remain socially accepted and active whilst avoiding pressures. I think a lot comes down to body image of females in society. Something as simple as the fact that females are expected to wear makeup and men do not I think can explain a lot. The vast number of activities that surround makeup create an unhealthy obsession with vanity. It’s the raw amount of time spent looking at one’s self and comparing against others. This then propagates throughout life and results in an unwinnable battle against ageing that only leads to unhappiness. A typical female social media stream contains a huge amount of beauty-related content of which a male’s does not. There are just certain interests you have to have to blend into social groups that are dramatically different for men and women. Although recently men are starting to become more vain and I hear a lot of marketing crap like “men should take more care looking after their skin/appearance” - the metrosexual thing - which I think is going down a bad path. We need less social pressures for young people...but of course there is a huge monetary incentive to get men hooked on skin care etc.
    - medium_burrito 6y ago
      I'll paraphrase something I read a while back. Men have physical competition, women have emotional/social competition. Men play sports, fight, kill each other and video games imitate life. Social media is the women's version of video games, refined to weapons-grade purity.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - gonzo41 6y ago
        Yeah, Instagram really should be considered a WMD for self esteem.
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      I’d love to read something that explores why social media affects females more than males, and also a first person perspective of the social pressures of young females and how much wiggle room they actually have to remain socially accepted and active whilst avoiding pressures. I'm a woman. I didn't bend to social pressure until I actually had children. Once you have a child, the amount of crap society hangs on women and all the social pressure comes at you as a form of blackmail where the subtext is "And you and your child can both go die in a fire if you, little girlie, don't go along to get along." Society generally treats mothers and their children as a package deal. Mothers tend to get custody. A woman can end up pregnant from a one-night stand and have her life irrevocably changed and the father may never know a child existed. Men bitch about having to pay alimony and child support and how unfair that is if they are no longer getting to sleep with the woman and have her pick up after him and getting to enjoy the company of the children and it gets glossed over that both having kids and the threat of potentially having kids undermines female income on a regular basis. If nothing else, women tend to support their husband's career at the expense of their own career development, either without thinking about it (because it is just a social norm rooted in history) or because if you are woman and not an idiot, it is always at the back of your mind that an unintended pregnancy with unexpected health impacts (or resulting in a special-needs child) can derail your career in a way that it typically doesn't do to a male career. This is an actual biological difference between cis women and cis men: cis women can potentially get pregnant and cis men cannot. It has profound impacts on many social things in ways that most people either don't readily see or don't want to admit because it's scary, I guess.
- navait 6y ago
  I’m married to an Indian woman and while I don’t have a strong gender preference, she wants a boy a lot more than a girl.
  - nonamechicken 6y ago
    deleted
    - vmception 6y ago
      For anyone passing by, if you say quips like 'go find someone else' don’t be surprised when your partner does
      - nonamechicken 6y ago
        deleted
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - raunakdag 6y ago
      Are you guys first-gen immigrants? I’m 17 and nearly every single one of my Indian friends is part of a 2-child family (n>~50).
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - seanmcdirmid 6y ago
      My wife quips the same (wanted a girl, had a boy, wife is Chinese, I’m American), though I think it’s more about how much work is involved in having one kid let alone two.
  - ArkanExplorer 6y ago
    Son preference is an unfortunate cultural element of Asian migration. "Indian-born mothers living in Canada with two children had 138 boys for every 100 girls" https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/04/11/canadas-missing-indian-canadian-girls-linked-to-son-preference-abortion-study.html https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/04/11/canadas-missing-... These preferences are lasting into the second-generations, with no indication that even at the third and later generations these preferences are lost: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-study-suggests-prenatal-sex-selection-for-boys-remains-a-trend-among/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-study-suggest... Immigration to North America from India should restrict the number of males allowed, to balance the trend of sex-selective abortion in those communities, and to increase the 'value' of females - since they will have an easier chance of migrating.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  I think a large part of the thinking (at least subconciously) is that if a son gets in a stupid relationship and gets someone pregnant, it's not nearly as big of an impact on his life as it is to the daughter who got in a stupid relationship and got pregnant.
- freedomben 6y ago
  I have two sons, three daughters, and I was one of those who said I was terrified of having a daughter and how much I would worry. It has nothing to do with thinking girls have to be parented differently and everything to do with knowing that most teenage boys and men are pieces of shit when it comes to actually loving and caring about her (just like I was in some cases with flings and tempromances that were more about excitement than deep, long-term love and affection). I worried (and still worry) about having to watch my daughter make terrible choices in men, while being utterly powerless to do anything to protect her.
  - playcache 6y ago
    They said their standards for a mate based a lot on their father and he he treats the mother. So just be a good role model.
  - nullsense 6y ago
    If you have a boy then you only have to worry about one boy. If you have a girl then you have to worry about all the boys.
  - tomjakubowski 6y ago
    > most teenage boys and men are pieces of shit when it comes to actually loving and caring about her (just like I was in some cases with flings and tempromances that were more about excitement than deep, long-term love and affection). Do you worry about your teenage sons acting this way?
    - oblio 6y ago
      Presumably, but considering the fact that we're programmed to care more about our family than the rest of the world, it's unlikely he'll be as worried about the situation he's described than the opposite.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        There’s also probably some underlying worry caused by the fact that women can generally be physically overpowered by men.
- PrefixKitten 6y ago
  weird. I'd only be content with a daughter. A son would worry me
- HowTheStoryEnds 6y ago
  I believe that's because of (the scare of) pregnancy and the certainty that the baby ends up in the mother's hands wether or not there's a willing let alone capable father.
- watwut 6y ago
  My friend who have constant problems with his teen girl and no with boy is exactly that case. He constantly takes issues with her make up - but had her in dancing group from childhood where makeup is basically required. Constant issues with interpreting her cloth sexually - while she did not understood that yet. Taking issues with a lot of things that are clearly unfair. She does more sport then boy and have good grades, but somehow she is lazy because she did not went biking over weekend.
ThePadawan 6y ago
Not to get too autobiographical here, but isn't divorce a pretty healthy outcome to a marriage? So not 100% the most helpful thing to measure. My parents and the parents of some of my depressed friends are not divorced, simply because divorce requires communication and a willingness to reflect upon the state of your marriage openly. As I said, I might be biased, but I think the hidden outcome of "not legally, but emotionally divorced" makes up a significant portion of turbulent marriages.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  A single parent household leads to worse outcomes for children in pretty much every single metric you can think of.
  - mistersquid 6y ago
    > A single parent household leads to worse outcomes for children in pretty much every single metric you can think of. Divorce does not always result in single-parent households. Divorced parents can and do remarry.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      While true — in addition to your point about remarriage, I’ve met a couple who legally split because same sex marriage didn’t exist at the time and one of them was trans — you should probably show the frequency rather than existence of such groups.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - DC1350 6y ago
    There’s a huge difference between single mom with a baby daddy that ran away, and a shared custody agreement between two people who are both in the picture. “Single mom” stories and statistics are usually about the former. I’m not sure how much worse the latter is compared to a two parent household
softwaredoug 6y ago
“Daughters provoke parental strife” implies causality not present in TFA. Also, as a survival of an abusive home, “daughters provoke...” sounds like blaming children for their parents dysfunction. Maybe that wasn’t the intent of the OP. However kids blaming themselves for their parents problems is a pathology many kids that went through these situations have to work to overcome. Any culpability belongs to the grown ups who couldn’t resolve their issues and put the kids first.
- karmakaze 6y ago
  I did know a family that fit this profile. The daughter challenged the parents and the parents, specifically the mother couldn't deal with it well. Rather than divorce, the daughter went to a private school, then to live with relatives in another country.
- fogof 6y ago
  This seems to me like a rare "natural experiment" where correlation implies causality. Because whether a child is a son or daughter is essentially random, it's hard to imagine a confounding factor causing both daughters and divorce.
  - drjasonharrison 6y ago
    I think that the remaining factors will be the "difficulty" of parenting the behaviour of sons vs daughters in contrast to the difficulty a daughter or son experiences being parented. That is while you can use the sex of the child as an independent variable, you still need to explain why it has this effect.
username90 6y ago
> 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 Ok, so 0.36% of couples divorce over having a girl, and it only happens when the girl reaches puberty. This could just be the cases where the dad sexually assaults the girl and the mom finds out and divorces him, the numbers are small enough for me to believe that is possible at least.
- vmception 6y ago
  What? Where did that come from aside from your own personal experience!? Your insight was so good and the conclusion was so radical! Why wasn't your conclusion: Or the numbers are small enough that its a rounding error of which no conclusion can be derived.
  - username90 6y ago
    I'm not sure why you react so strongly, do you have any reason at all? A couple of percent of girls gets sexually harassed by their biological dads, that is more than enough to believably explain the discrepancy in divorce. The fact that it only happens when the girls reaches puberty reinforces my interpretation. The researchers in this study didn't research why the difference exists, so my interpretation is as good as theirs.
    - vmception 6y ago
      > I'm not sure why you react so strongly, do you have any reason at all? Because your comment and others are grasping at demonizing one thing in a fairly sexually prejudiced ways, prejudiced because the assumptions don't factor in any counterbalancing force, such as boys being sexually harassed by either parent or outside the family unit. Or creating a laser focus so quickly to there being a perpetrator and victim of sex assault at all! Plenty of other strife, such as with the boys, is also more than enough to counteract the discrepancy in divorce here. The reaction is about how this topic reflects a lot more about you, and the additional negative affects on society that are centered around pre-judicial judgement on males, and a society that ignores where males are victims. In this thread, and this current point in time, I completely understand how this might seem like a completely left field reaction to you and many people. But it shouldn't be and I can do my part by pointing that out. Regardless, it is shocking to me that people would gravitate toward "aha this must be what happened" out of the universe of possibilities in what could just as easily be a rounding error. I can simultaneously acknowledge that maybe during the time of this study, that population did do exactly what you imagine. Its just has to factor in so much more for that to even be the first thing one thinks about.
klyrs 6y ago
> 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. Sounds kinda like sexism is the wedge driven between the father, and his wife and daughter. One effective way to reduce bigotry is through compassionate exposure: knowing, and sympathizing with a member of a population different from yourself. > 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. I have friction with my stepchild. He doesn't want me to be a part of his life. Sometimes, I wish that he was older and we could try MDMA therapy to build a compassionate bond... he's not even in elementary school yet; that's a great way to get your child taken away. But I wonder if one-sided interpersonal problems like this can be addressed by giving the adult MDMA and the child a placebo...
- kareemm 6y ago
  > Sounds kinda like sexism is the wedge driven between the father, and his wife and daughter. That's a bit of a stretch. N of 1 but I (male) can easily see myself being more open about my daughters' personal choices than my wife. (Yes I read the article and saw the point about strife between fathers and daughters. If I had to guess my sense is that a dad's intent is not to be sexist, but to keep their daughters safe. Whether that's an effective approach is another question.)
  - klyrs 6y ago
    > If I had to guess my sense is that a dad's intent is not to be sexist, but to keep their daughters safe. It can be both. Infantilizing, being overprotective, on the basis of gender is an expression of sexism. I'm sure that it's well intentioned, but if one only examines their intentions and not impact, then they're not actually reducing harm
    - da_big_ghey 6y ago
      The world is more dangerous in many ways for women. Is a father seeking to therefore protect a daughter differently than a son sexist? There are certainly things that a father would do only with a son for the same reasons.
vmception 6y ago
any link to full article or paper? paywalled and on mobile
- justnotworthit 6y ago
  https://academic.oup.com/ej/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/ej/ueaa140/6055681 https://academic.oup.com/ej/advance-article-abstract/doi/10....
irrational 6y ago
Anecdotal, but I have three sons and four daughters. In my experience boys are harder when they are younger (wild, causing mayhem and physical destruction in their wake, solving problems using fighting, etc.) but in their teenage years prefer to hang out quietly in their rooms. Girls on the other hand tend to be calmer in their younger years, but then in their teenage years become argumentative, moody, causing lots of emotional and psychological strife. It takes until they are in their early 20s for things to calm down. Though by then the damage has already been done. In an ideal world I'd like to raise girls when they are young and boys when they are older.
- astura 6y ago
  Exactly the opposite for my family.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - benjohnson 6y ago
    Any reason why? If you can tell us, it may be illuminating!
- nirav72 6y ago
  I have one son and one daughter. This has been my experience as well. Both of them are teenagers now. Dealing with my son is a lot easier now compared to my daughter. Just a few years ago, it was the opposite.
- rubiquity 6y ago
  Mom? Dad? Is that you? Joking aside, I’m the youngest in a family of 3 boys and 4 girls and your comment lines up with my upbringing. Being the youngest I got to see the teenager year insanity of my sisters all unfold. Another anecdote is that when one of my brothers did get in trouble it was always something significantly worse than my sisters.
  - stevetodd 6y ago
acrump 6y ago
"‘Uproar’ offers a distressing but effective solution to the sexual problems that arise between fathers and teen-age daughters in certain households. Often they can only live in the same house together if they are angry at each other, and the slamming doors emphasize for each of them the fact that they have separate bedrooms." http://www.ericberne.com/games-people-play/uproar/ http://www.ericberne.com/games-people-play/uproar/
- angry_octet 6y ago
  Eww.
- trianglem 6y ago
  This is disgusting and a terrible state for the status quo to be in. I much prefer an overbearing patriarchal normal over this cancerous middle ground.
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    Games People Play was big about 50 years ago
    - underwater 6y ago
      Sounds like it should have been called Turning complex issues into Strawmen arguments.
- slovette 6y ago
  What in the hell are you talking about? How did you get to a place for this comment from the parent article and the conversations here? This seems like a deranged place to go...
  - acrump 6y ago
    I guess, when I read the article I was reminded of this 'Game' from Eric Berne's book (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49176.Games_People_Play https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49176.Games_People_Play). Could be a reason why (more divorce) if this tension / game was to highlight problems in the relationship.
orange_tee 6y ago
The other findings are telling: Fathers who had sisters growing up, were less likely to face divorce. Families with immigrant background were more likely to face divorce.
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  What does it tell you? That it's actually the fathers causing strife because they do not treat their daughters correctly? Or that fathers who understand their daughters behavior are not as negatively emotionally affected by it?
  - orange_tee 6y ago
    It could also be that fathers who had no sisters were more emotionally attached to their daughters, whereas fathers who grew up with sisters has less emotional attachment to their daughters and consequently were less affected by their horrible teenage years.
  - itronitron 6y ago
    There is considerably less drama with my three teenagers (combined) than I witnessed growing up with my one sister.
  - runsWphotons 6y ago
    Or that the sisters help?
asebold 6y ago
This just seems all sorts of misguided. To the point where it’s blaming the daughters for parents divorce. Anyways, I tried to read the article and got hit with a paywall, so I can’t go much deeper than the headline.
croissants 6y ago
The full paper is here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3043527 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3043527.
guerrilla 6y ago
The title here on HN isn't right. There's no indication that daughters provoke this in the title or article itself, only that having daughters does, which is not the same. The actual cause is barely touched.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  The title has changed.
drjasonharrison 6y ago
Is there a free way to access the article? What are the citations?
- taurex 6y ago
  The easiest way is to use a browser plugin, I use this one that works well: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome That one's for chrome but I'm sure you can find similar for other browsers too.
x0f1a 6y ago
My anecdotal experience as a father of 3 daughters: my relationship definitely got worse and I believe the root cause is the diminished empathy from my wife, on the other hand my sister got 2 boys and our relationship became incredibly close, she became more empathetic to me and my father!
- blub 6y ago
  Would you mind detailing the "diminished empathy"? Is this related to the daughters somehow and would things have been different if they were boys?
  - x0f1a 6y ago
    For instance the movies they like to watch, also they are annoyed with the mess of my working table, full with arduinos, eletrônics, computers - the same with my guitars or even the kind of art and decoration I appreciate. Before my daughters, the situation was more simetrical between me and my wife - now I feel more isolated, without my own space at home, furthermore without partner to Discuss books or watch tv shows, my wife is more and more focused in the girls world - during our 10 year dating, we were close friends with lot in common, I would never have predicted this change.
    - blub 6y ago
      I think I understand, if I may phrase it like this: your life before had a balance between masculine and feminine and now you feel that it is skewing heavily toward feminine.
drfuchs 6y ago
At least this is an improvement over the King Henry VIII technique for gaining a male heir (flawed though it was).
Markoff 6y ago
i find it odd how article doesn't discuss at all possibility of sexual abuse (or suspicion) of teenage daughter by father as reason for elevated risk during puberty suddenly disappearing when daughter moves out around age 20
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  Because it's extremely uncommon, so it wouldn't affect the findings at the level they see here.
mrcartmenez 6y ago
> parents of teenage daughters argue more about parenting than do the parents of sons From my own experience. When my daughter hit 12 it was a fucking nightmare. The hormones hit girls hard and they can become incredibly difficult. That said, now she’s 13 things are much easier and look to be getting easier by the week. Although my wife and I both have to be very understanding and on the same team to deal with difficult behaviour — we have a lot of strategy meetings. Lacking empathy, and wanting independence without responsibility are part of being a teenager. But 12-year old girls can sometimes be super charged griefers. On the flip side, teenagers are actually awesome to hang out with and total joys full of creativity and fun — if you work through the refusal to clean their room, general lack of hygiene and the drama.
- lifeplusplus 6y ago
  I feel western culture defines teen culture in a certain way and then 'teens' act in that way. Even now and in the past, you were see as an adult by 15. https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/02/23/the-invention-of-adolescence/ https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/02/23/the-inventi... Often by age 12 girls would be fully contributing household member doing all work done by adult women and by age 14-15 so would be boys doing everything an adult men would be doing. Even now that's the case in many places in developing countries, teenagers act like complete adults in mannerism, thoughtfulness and responsibilities. Teenager is a phase that is a luxury, where despite being capable you use more than you bring/produce. In west, it gets you to be an adult without any consequences.
- dgb23 6y ago
  Stay strong! It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
  - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
    Nice sentiment, but I'd liken it so a 26.2 mile sprint.
- ars 6y ago
  > and look to be getting easier by the week. Good luck :) From my understanding the worst age is actually closer to 14/15, and only by 17 or so do things get better.
supergirl 6y ago
even though article rejects this, it’s because fathers don’t want daughters. that hits the hardest when daughters hit puberty and dads realize things are different
- dimgl 6y ago
  Wait what? This is a massive generalization. I’m hoping to have a daughter soon.
  - supergirl 6y ago
    i remember there was some study. men prefer sons while women have no preference. i don’t remember the percentage. btw once your baby is born you might not feel the same way. reality kicks in. and it kicks in even harder at puberty.
LatteLazy 6y ago
For all the bad press, I've found teenage boys easy to deal with. They get loud or break things but only by accident, they rarely mean any harm and are rapidly ready to apologise and mean it when they do. Put the breakables away, stick to a few simple rules, interact with them and ignore tactically and they'll be happy, productive and social. Some rough housing helps a lot when they're younger too. 10 minutes of wrestling will buy you an hour of helping clean up or playing nicely with others.
- mrcartmenez 6y ago
  This is very true. It also helps with their ability to regulate emotions. I’d like to the study but, on mobile...
fukmbas 6y ago
Too many tampons
gnicholas 6y ago
> 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. Can anyone with grown daughters and a sister speculate as to why this may be the case?
- 1123581321 6y ago
  He has seen his parents go through the same process.
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    I'm wondering if men who have gone through this can suggest some of the ways in which having a sister changed how they interacted with their daughters or wives. It isn't entirely clear from the brief mention in the article whether having had a sister changes how a man interacts with his wife or how he interacts with his daughter.
    - 1123581321 6y ago
      Sorry, I meant to respond as one of those men. Observing my parents' experience informed my approach.
      - gnicholas 6y ago
        Can you elaborate? Did it change how you wanted to raise your daughter, or how you interacted with your wife in relation to raising your daughter?
        1123581321 6y ago
        In my case, I was generally happy with how my parents raised us, looking back as an adult, and with the differences in how they approached my adolescent years and my sister's. I saw that my parents' relationship was challenged and ultimately strengthened by the challenge of raising both boys and girls. That strengthened my confidence in my ability to raise children with my wife while preserving and strengthening our marriage, and some small challenges have been eased by observing some of my parents' specific successes and failures. I don't know if I would have divorced had I been an only child, of course.
fallingfrog 6y ago
We seem to be a self selecting group of mostly men here.. I would be interested in hearing from someone who had been a teenaged girl to hear the other side of this. It’s at the very least plausible that much of the conflict comes from the expectations that society places on young women.
- hycaria 6y ago
  I am a girl. My parents are still happily married. But no siblings so no drama. They were (and kinda still are actually even though I’m nearly 30) hostile to boys though. Because of getting pregnant or falling madlessly in love with an idiot. Which always sounded ridiculous to me since I’ve disliked children from a very young age and was academically ambitious. And actually not very much versed in romantic activities either.
asimjalis 6y ago
If parents are getting divorced because they are arguing about the upbringing of girls, why is this risk only materializing when the girl is the first child? Why would the dynamics be different if the girl was not the first child? Ergo, the conclusion is not thought through and likely to be false.
sideshowb 6y ago
It cites a relative risk of only around 0.5-1% in the background literature, and only in the US. Although an interesting aggregate finding, for anyone considering their own relationship here it's likely to be lost in the noise of individual variation.
novia 6y ago
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/12/why-women-s-bodies-abort-males-during-tough-times https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/12/why-women-s-bodies-a... Male fetuses are more likely to die in the womb if the mother is stressed. Marriages are more likely to end if the marriage is stressful. Therefore, marriages with first born daughters are more likely to end with divorce, by no fault of the daughter. Disclosure: I was once a first-born teenage daughter. Yes, my parents divorced.
- micouay 6y ago
  They explicitly say it in the article (in the second paragraph, visible even to non-subscribers) that there is no correlation in the first years of life of the son/daughter. Interesting hypothesis but seems false from what I read in the article. > 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.
  - yellowbeard 6y ago
    Childless parents as a result of self aborting male fetuses would not show up in the study.
    - moonchild 6y ago
      Yes, exactly. That means that (assuming there are no other gender-dependent birth factors; this is not true but serves to make the point), we should expect to see slightly more females born than males. The 'surplus' females being born to mothers who were stressed enough that, had they conceived a male, the child would have self-aborted. Thus, assuming stress is correlated with divorce, those families are more likely to divorce.
      - micouay 6y ago
        Then how can you explain no correlation before the daughter has become a teenager? If I understood you correctly, you suggest that parents of daughters divorce more often because the daughter was born to a couple of stressed parents (which is more likely to happen than a boy born to that family). If that would be the only cause of the divorce (I'm oversimplyfying, of course), then there would be no difference whether the daughter is a teenager or not. Perhaps parents think of taking care of a child in their first years of life as a moral obligation, which would reduce the divorce rate. However, it's still suspicious that the divorce occurs around the time the daughter reaches puberty, not some time earlier (after she's 5 or something).
musicale 6y ago
I wonder how much of bad teenage behavior is exacerbated by mandatory school attendance combined with the way secondary schools typically operate, which I seem to recall as being somewhere between day care, a factory, and a prison. Girls were often disciplined for "socializing" which I thought was one of the things you were supposed to learn in school. Moreover, secondary school students live in a supposed democracy yet few actually have the right to vote on policies that affect them (not to mention taxes such as sales/use tax which are "taxation without representation.") Student "governments" typically have little to no actual power over school policies or the curriculum. On the other hand, I have heard media pundits suggest that the current wave of youth crime is due in part to schools being closed. I'm not sure whether that supports or refutes the first paragraph. p.s. Instead of downvotes on my speculation I'd prefer logical arguments and/or evidence one way or another. Then again this seems kind of off-topic for HN so it may not work well with the HN format anyway.
gumby 6y ago
The thing about teens is what makes them so infuriating is also what makes them so interesting. Otis not possible to have the one without the other.
notacoward 6y ago
I've seen many possible explanations mentioned. Most common seems to be that raising daughters is more stressful than raising sons (for various reasons) leading to more arguments etc. Most intriguing might be that sons conceived into tenuous marriages don't even make it out of the womb. I'll add one more: mother/daughter friction. I can't even count the number of families I've seen in which a mother feels betrayed when her daughter doesn't follow her example in everything, and lets those feelings show. I've seen the same with father/son, though less so perhaps because mothers tend to be more active parents. It would also be foolish to ignore the issue of daughters growing into their adult bodies and becoming sexually active right when many mothers are feeling insecure about their own attractiveness. We can argue about causes, but the effect is real. When mothers and daughters fight, it always puts fathers in a difficult position. A dad who consistently sides the mother might get credit for being a good co-parent (usually not) but be alienated from their own child. A dad who consistently sides with the daughter is likely to lose all contact with either due to divorce. All this, regardless of who's right or wrong between the two. Again, a bit of this happens when fathers and sons are in conflict, but it doesn't seem quite as severe and has different potential outcomes because of how "family" court works. That's just one possible factor, affecting some cases, but it seems worth mentioning along with all the others.
- vannevar 6y ago
  That difference seems small enough that child abuse (and specifically sexual abuse) could conceivably account for all of it. Girls are 4x more likely to experience childhood sexual abuse than boys.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- javajosh 6y ago
  Yes, it's shocking how our "family" court system works. It seems designed to generate maximum pain, maximum billable hours, even if the parents start out being reasonable, if an attorney whispers enough poison, and the parents listen, then the fight will go on and on, at least until you can't afford the retainer. I'm not sure how real the risk of losing all contact with your kids is, however that threat is the only weapon some attorneys know how to use, and it can be incredibly difficult to a) keep your head, remember her attorney has no authority over you and every motivation to put you on tilt, and b) endure the injustices. especially with young children, even week-long absences are painful, and it will put you on tilt. A month, or 3 months, is a lifetime, and it will reduce you to a puddle of tears, and you'll have to learn how to reconstitute yourself, like Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen. This is why I strongly recommend against marriage until the divorce industry is reformed to provide harsh penalties to any actors (attorneys or parents) that use time-sharing as a tool of torture to extract legal agreements. I would also harshly penalize shunning, and "pile on" behavior that parents friends and family might indulge in, but that's a little harder to control.
usrusr 6y ago
Conservative assumptions explanation: mothers might be less confident about being able to raise a boy well without a father than a girl without a father so they are less invested in the marriage if it's a girl, fathers tend to feel threatened by a female majority so they are also less invested in the marriage if it's a girl. I feel kind of relieved that this explanation doesn't even survive the subheading "But the difference only emerges when the children are teenagers"
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >"But the difference only emerges when the children are teenagers" I don't see how that disproves what you said. The extra stress of dealing with 1.5 women in the household causes more marriages to get to the possible divorce threshold at which point everything you've stated subconsciously kicks in.
haltingproblem 6y ago
https://archive.is/BsXXr https://archive.is/BsXXr There has to be an Evo Psych explanation. I am not an evolutionary psychologist, wish @primalpoly or @sentientist were on HN for their take. An obvious (and obviously naive take), is that one of parents would initiate breakup in search of a son because having a son offers some evolutionary advantage. It happens around the girls hitting puberty because it now signals that their care taking period is over.
djbelieny 6y ago
I would argue that this is because the mother projects her dreams, aspirations and rejections of her own childhood on the daughter and that, could lead into the mother creating resentment towards the father due to projecting her experiences with her own father upon her spouse. This undoubtedly will lead to more arguments, more stress and ultimately to a failed relationship.
_qulr 6y ago
This is much ado over almost nothing: "between the ages 13 and 18, parents of first-born girls divorce more than parents of first-born boys. The odds of divorce within this period are 10.7% for parents of boys, and 11.3% for parents of girls." https://theconversation.com/parents-of-teenage-daughters-more-likely-to-divorce-study-84704 https://theconversation.com/parents-of-teenage-daughters-mor... 10.7% vs. 11.3%. Not much difference. What little difference there is could be explained by, for example, the father sexually abusing the teenage daughter, not by trouble caused by the daughter.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  I've learned well that when popular news not come with actual numbers, one can assume that the numbers aren't spectacular. It tends to print then whenever they be spectacular.
- elefanten 6y ago
  That’s quite a leap at the end. You’re saying 0.6% of fathers sexually abuse a daughter?
  - awillen 6y ago
    Yeah... what? Wow. Just really took a turn there all of a sudden.
  - _qulr 6y ago
    I don't know. Does anyone know? Accurate stats are hard to come by, as this is of course underreported by the victims. We do know the number is greater than 0.0% though. The Conversation article has a link to the original paper https://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/2494524/wp2017n26.pdf?platform=hootsuite https://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_... which does not even mention this possibility at all as a factor. I find this to be a curious omission. Non-sexual physical abuse could also be a factor. The teenage years are when boys and girls start to "grow apart" in terms of height and strength, which makes teenage girls on average less able to defend against physical abuse than teenage boys. Also, our society is "more accepting" of violence against males than violence against females. Is this a factor in the divorce rate? I don't know, but the possibility should not be ignored.
MichaelMoser123 6y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20210207003003if_/https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/02/06/parents-of-daughters-are-more-likely-to-divorce-than-those-with-sons http://web.archive.org/web/20210207003003if_/https://www.eco... link without paywall. didn't get one thing: is it only the father who is doing all the fighting with his daughter? also interesting: "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. "
sethc2 6y ago
I grew up with no sisters and have my fourth daughter on the way (first born girl too). Wonder what the differences are for those of us with more kids than the average.
- mrcartmenez 6y ago
  The first one will be a nightmare at 12, the others will witness their behaviour and likely decide not to repeat it. Here’s some advice from the NHS: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/coping-with-your-teenager/ https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/copi...
xyst 6y ago
the article is behind a paywall
proxygeek 6y ago
... in the US. Also, the difference in divorce rates between parents of male child and female child is not something which necessarily indicates a deeper cause. Far too often we accept such headlines at the face value and start looking for reasons than first critically examining the data itself (sample size, localisation, sampling, statistical significance, design)
chemmail 6y ago
I think these dumb headlines can just be chocked down to godincidences in numbers. Nothing really to coax out of them.
xyzelement 6y ago
I hit the paywall so couldn't read the whole thing but the last visible sentence about deeper quarrels about how to raise a teenage son vs daughter make sense. One easiest stressor I can imagine is teenage pregnancy, or the threat thereof. If my son is going to be a rebellious teenage idiot, that's hard. If my daughter, then so much more stressful. Both because the consequences (pregnancy) are harsher and because there are way more people preying on women. It's probably much harder on the marriage to have this kind of stress.
mrtweetyhack 6y ago
"A 2015 study by the American Sociological Association found that women initiate two-thirds of all divorces, a staggering 69% to be exact." "College-educated women initiate divorce at an even higher rate: 90%" https://www.divorcemag.com/blog/why-do-women-initiate-divorce-more-than-men https://www.divorcemag.com/blog/why-do-women-initiate-divorc...
mmwelt 6y ago
http://archive.today/BsXXr http://archive.today/BsXXr
stosto88 6y ago
Population control.
throwawayco801 6y ago
Dude with two sons under the age of 3 here. God a divorce sounds like heaven to a man boiling in hell but I cannot bare to think of making those two kids sad/not being there for something.
- mrcartmenez 6y ago
  It gets easier every day. Once they hit 6 you’ll be riding high. Until they hit 13
andi999 6y ago
Anybody has a reference to a scientific article? Or knows the numbers of these stats?
pookieinc 6y ago
There seems to be a paywall, can anyone provide the text or a mirror to keep up with the interesting discussion?
throwfifi 6y ago
Crudely, think reason is that the father subconsciously becomes sexually attracted to daughter after a while and only option is to search for a replacement. Understand this will get banned, but think it's closer to the truth. (not due to daughters more difficult to handle etc)
- sethammons 6y ago
  How would this strange view be supported by this being about having a girl as firstborn rather than having any daughters?
baxtr 6y ago
I’ve read many explanations here based on different family dynamics. But what if this was just a correlation? I have read that richer parents tend to get more sons and also read that divorce rates are higher in poorer families. So maybe it’s simply related to the wealth of families?
thegabriele 6y ago
To me, a Mother and a daughter together form a stronger bond to face the perils of a post divorce life. I feel like, in unsubconsious way, the mother with a daughter would find more courage in leaving the husband
lldbg 6y ago
>"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." Maybe parts of the article I could not access goes more into detail, but this is an odd perspective when it is known that women initiate 70% of divorces (see fig. 1 in [0]). [0]: https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_Who_wants_the_Breakup.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_Who_wants_the_B...
Cyberthal 6y ago
Two key phrases: "But the difference only emerges when the children are teenagers" "in both America and the Netherlands" A third, unstated assumption: Data is post-1960s and reflects the feminist revolution. Since contradicting feminist orthodoxy is heresy against the West's religion of Progressivism, no Hacker News reader is allowed to state the obvious reason for this phenomenon. I find this amusing, living in China, where I suspect the average person on the street could work it out from stereotypes in a matter of seconds, and would certainly have no qualms about baldly stating it. Perhaps the US thalassocracy will be the first empire to successfully dispense with the need for female chastity ensuring paternal certainty as an incentive for men to invest in future generations. In which case, there is no reason the same speech code cannot remain in effect in the Anglosphere indefinitely. It is certainly not the case that its adherents are unprincipled self-interested self-deceiving conformists!

480 points by jkuria 6y ago

> parents of teenage daughters argue more about parenting than do the parents of sons This to me strikes me as the thing that might be the culprit. I can't count the amount of times I've heard men how much they would worry if they'd be getting a daughter. It seems as if many people think a girl has to be parented differently - probably more intensely - compared to a boy who can apparently be left to his own devices more often. I'm speculating here of course.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Do you have children? They most definitely need to be parented differently. With boys there’s a lot of effort into mitigating physical damage to themselves or physical and/or emotional damage they may cause to others. With daughters, there’s less effort with physical harm and much more effort into helping their emotional well-being. I would argue that social media and media in general has disproportionately affected the minds of our daughters compared to our sons.
- TeaDrunk 6y ago
  > I would argue that social media and media in general has disproportionately affected the minds of our daughters compared to our sons. I would speculate it affects it in different ways. Social media puts young boys at risk of entering highly misogynistic spaces, the damage of which will be borne out on the bodies, careers, and wellbeing of women they meet later.
- croissants 6y ago
  The Economist (relatively) recently featured a long article about the modern lives of adolescent girls: https://archive.is/OGxxk https://archive.is/OGxxk.
- User23 6y ago
  I think people without sons may seriously underestimate the ingenuity, energy, and frequency with which boy toddlers attempt to kill, maim, or otherwise seriously injure themselves.
  - de_Selby 6y ago
    I have a son who is a toddler right now, very well put - "ingenuity" made me laugh.
  - da_big_ghey 6y ago
    Even moreso with multiple sons close in age. Thinking about the trouble my brothers and I caused on our own versus in groups versus all together, there seems to be a superlinear growth in the amount of trouble a group of boys can cause.
  - testfoobar 6y ago
    Ha! I tried to explain this to parents who have only daughters. They would offer advice like "you need to give them more projects to do or you need to listen more to them." They would look on with a judging attitude as my sons would tear around playgrounds looking for sticks and rocks to arm their fort. Or they would play on the "outside" of playground structures. Imagine a 15 foot tall covered slide. They would climb on the outside of the slide - risking a serious fall. I've already seen the tables turn. Parents with teenage daughters describe things that make me shudder. At least I now have the wisdom to not judge the parents. It seems to me that the worst bullying behaviour that I hear in my social circle is perpetuated by teenage girls towards other teenage girls.
    - cycomanic 6y ago
      I think there is a strong selection bias there as well, there's significant research showing how girls and boys are treated differently when getting into "dangerous" situations. It's been my experience as a father of 2 girls that they also love to climb on the outside of playground structures. However what I see with a lot of the parents of other girls (compared to boys) is that they caution the girls a lot more and then they say my girls are so self-confident and "brave". That is not to say that there is no difference between girls and boys, but you there are also huge variations between individuals as well, the way my two daughters are in their "wildness" is so different you would not guess they are siblings.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  > With daughters, there’s less effort with physical harm and much more effort into helping their emotional well-being. Suicide rates for 10-14 year olds are twice as high for boys than for girls, and for 15-24 year olds four times as high. I'm sure you are describing how parenting is done in general, but not spending as much time on the emotional well-being of boys doesn't seem to be a good strategy. 1: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/suicide/rates_1999_2017.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/suicide/rates_1999_2017...
  - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    I definitely didn’t mean to discount the emotional damage done to boys by social media and media. Also the damage done to them by caging them up in schools while demanding absolute obedience and attention in “lord of the flies” situations.
    - fastball 6y ago
      You did though. You said girls need emotional support and boys you need to worry about them damaging themselves (physically) or others (emotionally). I honestly can't come up with a reading of your comment that doesn't involve discounting the emotional needs of young boys.
  - ac29 6y ago
    Suicide attempts, however, are far higher in females: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml This is in part because males choose more effective suicide methods - they are approximately twice as likely to use firearms.
    - bitshiftfaced 6y ago
      But couldn't that be because some do it as a cry for help?
      - throwaway3699 6y ago
- robin21 6y ago
  I’d love to read something that explores why social media affects females more than males, and also a first person perspective of the social pressures of young females and how much wiggle room they actually have to remain socially accepted and active whilst avoiding pressures. I think a lot comes down to body image of females in society. Something as simple as the fact that females are expected to wear makeup and men do not I think can explain a lot. The vast number of activities that surround makeup create an unhealthy obsession with vanity. It’s the raw amount of time spent looking at one’s self and comparing against others. This then propagates throughout life and results in an unwinnable battle against ageing that only leads to unhappiness. A typical female social media stream contains a huge amount of beauty-related content of which a male’s does not. There are just certain interests you have to have to blend into social groups that are dramatically different for men and women. Although recently men are starting to become more vain and I hear a lot of marketing crap like “men should take more care looking after their skin/appearance” - the metrosexual thing - which I think is going down a bad path. We need less social pressures for young people...but of course there is a huge monetary incentive to get men hooked on skin care etc.
  - medium_burrito 6y ago
    I'll paraphrase something I read a while back. Men have physical competition, women have emotional/social competition. Men play sports, fight, kill each other and video games imitate life. Social media is the women's version of video games, refined to weapons-grade purity.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - gonzo41 6y ago
      Yeah, Instagram really should be considered a WMD for self esteem.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    I’d love to read something that explores why social media affects females more than males, and also a first person perspective of the social pressures of young females and how much wiggle room they actually have to remain socially accepted and active whilst avoiding pressures. I'm a woman. I didn't bend to social pressure until I actually had children. Once you have a child, the amount of crap society hangs on women and all the social pressure comes at you as a form of blackmail where the subtext is "And you and your child can both go die in a fire if you, little girlie, don't go along to get along." Society generally treats mothers and their children as a package deal. Mothers tend to get custody. A woman can end up pregnant from a one-night stand and have her life irrevocably changed and the father may never know a child existed. Men bitch about having to pay alimony and child support and how unfair that is if they are no longer getting to sleep with the woman and have her pick up after him and getting to enjoy the company of the children and it gets glossed over that both having kids and the threat of potentially having kids undermines female income on a regular basis. If nothing else, women tend to support their husband's career at the expense of their own career development, either without thinking about it (because it is just a social norm rooted in history) or because if you are woman and not an idiot, it is always at the back of your mind that an unintended pregnancy with unexpected health impacts (or resulting in a special-needs child) can derail your career in a way that it typically doesn't do to a male career. This is an actual biological difference between cis women and cis men: cis women can potentially get pregnant and cis men cannot. It has profound impacts on many social things in ways that most people either don't readily see or don't want to admit because it's scary, I guess.
navait 6y ago
I’m married to an Indian woman and while I don’t have a strong gender preference, she wants a boy a lot more than a girl.
- nonamechicken 6y ago
  deleted
  - vmception 6y ago
    For anyone passing by, if you say quips like 'go find someone else' don’t be surprised when your partner does
    - nonamechicken 6y ago
      deleted
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - raunakdag 6y ago
    Are you guys first-gen immigrants? I’m 17 and nearly every single one of my Indian friends is part of a 2-child family (n>~50).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - seanmcdirmid 6y ago
    My wife quips the same (wanted a girl, had a boy, wife is Chinese, I’m American), though I think it’s more about how much work is involved in having one kid let alone two.
- ArkanExplorer 6y ago
  Son preference is an unfortunate cultural element of Asian migration. "Indian-born mothers living in Canada with two children had 138 boys for every 100 girls" https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/04/11/canadas-missing-indian-canadian-girls-linked-to-son-preference-abortion-study.html https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/04/11/canadas-missing-... These preferences are lasting into the second-generations, with no indication that even at the third and later generations these preferences are lost: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-study-suggests-prenatal-sex-selection-for-boys-remains-a-trend-among/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-study-suggest... Immigration to North America from India should restrict the number of males allowed, to balance the trend of sex-selective abortion in those communities, and to increase the 'value' of females - since they will have an easier chance of migrating.
wongarsu 6y ago
I think a large part of the thinking (at least subconciously) is that if a son gets in a stupid relationship and gets someone pregnant, it's not nearly as big of an impact on his life as it is to the daughter who got in a stupid relationship and got pregnant.
freedomben 6y ago
I have two sons, three daughters, and I was one of those who said I was terrified of having a daughter and how much I would worry. It has nothing to do with thinking girls have to be parented differently and everything to do with knowing that most teenage boys and men are pieces of shit when it comes to actually loving and caring about her (just like I was in some cases with flings and tempromances that were more about excitement than deep, long-term love and affection). I worried (and still worry) about having to watch my daughter make terrible choices in men, while being utterly powerless to do anything to protect her.
- playcache 6y ago
  They said their standards for a mate based a lot on their father and he he treats the mother. So just be a good role model.
- nullsense 6y ago
  If you have a boy then you only have to worry about one boy. If you have a girl then you have to worry about all the boys.
- tomjakubowski 6y ago
  > most teenage boys and men are pieces of shit when it comes to actually loving and caring about her (just like I was in some cases with flings and tempromances that were more about excitement than deep, long-term love and affection). Do you worry about your teenage sons acting this way?
  - oblio 6y ago
    Presumably, but considering the fact that we're programmed to care more about our family than the rest of the world, it's unlikely he'll be as worried about the situation he's described than the opposite.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      There’s also probably some underlying worry caused by the fact that women can generally be physically overpowered by men.
PrefixKitten 6y ago
weird. I'd only be content with a daughter. A son would worry me
HowTheStoryEnds 6y ago
I believe that's because of (the scare of) pregnancy and the certainty that the baby ends up in the mother's hands wether or not there's a willing let alone capable father.
watwut 6y ago
My friend who have constant problems with his teen girl and no with boy is exactly that case. He constantly takes issues with her make up - but had her in dancing group from childhood where makeup is basically required. Constant issues with interpreting her cloth sexually - while she did not understood that yet. Taking issues with a lot of things that are clearly unfair. She does more sport then boy and have good grades, but somehow she is lazy because she did not went biking over weekend.

ThePadawan 6y ago

Not to get too autobiographical here, but isn't divorce a pretty healthy outcome to a marriage? So not 100% the most helpful thing to measure. My parents and the parents of some of my depressed friends are not divorced, simply because divorce requires communication and a willingness to reflect upon the state of your marriage openly. As I said, I might be biased, but I think the hidden outcome of "not legally, but emotionally divorced" makes up a significant portion of turbulent marriages.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
A single parent household leads to worse outcomes for children in pretty much every single metric you can think of.
- mistersquid 6y ago
  > A single parent household leads to worse outcomes for children in pretty much every single metric you can think of. Divorce does not always result in single-parent households. Divorced parents can and do remarry.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    While true — in addition to your point about remarriage, I’ve met a couple who legally split because same sex marriage didn’t exist at the time and one of them was trans — you should probably show the frequency rather than existence of such groups.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- DC1350 6y ago
  There’s a huge difference between single mom with a baby daddy that ran away, and a shared custody agreement between two people who are both in the picture. “Single mom” stories and statistics are usually about the former. I’m not sure how much worse the latter is compared to a two parent household

softwaredoug 6y ago

“Daughters provoke parental strife” implies causality not present in TFA. Also, as a survival of an abusive home, “daughters provoke...” sounds like blaming children for their parents dysfunction. Maybe that wasn’t the intent of the OP. However kids blaming themselves for their parents problems is a pathology many kids that went through these situations have to work to overcome. Any culpability belongs to the grown ups who couldn’t resolve their issues and put the kids first.

karmakaze 6y ago
I did know a family that fit this profile. The daughter challenged the parents and the parents, specifically the mother couldn't deal with it well. Rather than divorce, the daughter went to a private school, then to live with relatives in another country.
fogof 6y ago
This seems to me like a rare "natural experiment" where correlation implies causality. Because whether a child is a son or daughter is essentially random, it's hard to imagine a confounding factor causing both daughters and divorce.
- drjasonharrison 6y ago
  I think that the remaining factors will be the "difficulty" of parenting the behaviour of sons vs daughters in contrast to the difficulty a daughter or son experiences being parented. That is while you can use the sex of the child as an independent variable, you still need to explain why it has this effect.

username90 6y ago

> 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 Ok, so 0.36% of couples divorce over having a girl, and it only happens when the girl reaches puberty. This could just be the cases where the dad sexually assaults the girl and the mom finds out and divorces him, the numbers are small enough for me to believe that is possible at least.

vmception 6y ago
What? Where did that come from aside from your own personal experience!? Your insight was so good and the conclusion was so radical! Why wasn't your conclusion: Or the numbers are small enough that its a rounding error of which no conclusion can be derived.
- username90 6y ago
  I'm not sure why you react so strongly, do you have any reason at all? A couple of percent of girls gets sexually harassed by their biological dads, that is more than enough to believably explain the discrepancy in divorce. The fact that it only happens when the girls reaches puberty reinforces my interpretation. The researchers in this study didn't research why the difference exists, so my interpretation is as good as theirs.
  - vmception 6y ago
    > I'm not sure why you react so strongly, do you have any reason at all? Because your comment and others are grasping at demonizing one thing in a fairly sexually prejudiced ways, prejudiced because the assumptions don't factor in any counterbalancing force, such as boys being sexually harassed by either parent or outside the family unit. Or creating a laser focus so quickly to there being a perpetrator and victim of sex assault at all! Plenty of other strife, such as with the boys, is also more than enough to counteract the discrepancy in divorce here. The reaction is about how this topic reflects a lot more about you, and the additional negative affects on society that are centered around pre-judicial judgement on males, and a society that ignores where males are victims. In this thread, and this current point in time, I completely understand how this might seem like a completely left field reaction to you and many people. But it shouldn't be and I can do my part by pointing that out. Regardless, it is shocking to me that people would gravitate toward "aha this must be what happened" out of the universe of possibilities in what could just as easily be a rounding error. I can simultaneously acknowledge that maybe during the time of this study, that population did do exactly what you imagine. Its just has to factor in so much more for that to even be the first thing one thinks about.

klyrs 6y ago

> 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. Sounds kinda like sexism is the wedge driven between the father, and his wife and daughter. One effective way to reduce bigotry is through compassionate exposure: knowing, and sympathizing with a member of a population different from yourself. > 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. I have friction with my stepchild. He doesn't want me to be a part of his life. Sometimes, I wish that he was older and we could try MDMA therapy to build a compassionate bond... he's not even in elementary school yet; that's a great way to get your child taken away. But I wonder if one-sided interpersonal problems like this can be addressed by giving the adult MDMA and the child a placebo...

kareemm 6y ago
> Sounds kinda like sexism is the wedge driven between the father, and his wife and daughter. That's a bit of a stretch. N of 1 but I (male) can easily see myself being more open about my daughters' personal choices than my wife. (Yes I read the article and saw the point about strife between fathers and daughters. If I had to guess my sense is that a dad's intent is not to be sexist, but to keep their daughters safe. Whether that's an effective approach is another question.)
- klyrs 6y ago
  > If I had to guess my sense is that a dad's intent is not to be sexist, but to keep their daughters safe. It can be both. Infantilizing, being overprotective, on the basis of gender is an expression of sexism. I'm sure that it's well intentioned, but if one only examines their intentions and not impact, then they're not actually reducing harm
  - da_big_ghey 6y ago
    The world is more dangerous in many ways for women. Is a father seeking to therefore protect a daughter differently than a son sexist? There are certainly things that a father would do only with a son for the same reasons.

vmception 6y ago

any link to full article or paper? paywalled and on mobile

justnotworthit 6y ago
https://academic.oup.com/ej/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/ej/ueaa140/6055681 https://academic.oup.com/ej/advance-article-abstract/doi/10....

irrational 6y ago

Anecdotal, but I have three sons and four daughters. In my experience boys are harder when they are younger (wild, causing mayhem and physical destruction in their wake, solving problems using fighting, etc.) but in their teenage years prefer to hang out quietly in their rooms. Girls on the other hand tend to be calmer in their younger years, but then in their teenage years become argumentative, moody, causing lots of emotional and psychological strife. It takes until they are in their early 20s for things to calm down. Though by then the damage has already been done. In an ideal world I'd like to raise girls when they are young and boys when they are older.

astura 6y ago
Exactly the opposite for my family.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- benjohnson 6y ago
  Any reason why? If you can tell us, it may be illuminating!
nirav72 6y ago
I have one son and one daughter. This has been my experience as well. Both of them are teenagers now. Dealing with my son is a lot easier now compared to my daughter. Just a few years ago, it was the opposite.
rubiquity 6y ago
Mom? Dad? Is that you? Joking aside, I’m the youngest in a family of 3 boys and 4 girls and your comment lines up with my upbringing. Being the youngest I got to see the teenager year insanity of my sisters all unfold. Another anecdote is that when one of my brothers did get in trouble it was always something significantly worse than my sisters.
- stevetodd 6y ago

acrump 6y ago

"‘Uproar’ offers a distressing but effective solution to the sexual problems that arise between fathers and teen-age daughters in certain households. Often they can only live in the same house together if they are angry at each other, and the slamming doors emphasize for each of them the fact that they have separate bedrooms." http://www.ericberne.com/games-people-play/uproar/ http://www.ericberne.com/games-people-play/uproar/

angry_octet 6y ago
Eww.
trianglem 6y ago
This is disgusting and a terrible state for the status quo to be in. I much prefer an overbearing patriarchal normal over this cancerous middle ground.
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  Games People Play was big about 50 years ago
  - underwater 6y ago
    Sounds like it should have been called Turning complex issues into Strawmen arguments.
slovette 6y ago
What in the hell are you talking about? How did you get to a place for this comment from the parent article and the conversations here? This seems like a deranged place to go...
- acrump 6y ago
  I guess, when I read the article I was reminded of this 'Game' from Eric Berne's book (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49176.Games_People_Play https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49176.Games_People_Play). Could be a reason why (more divorce) if this tension / game was to highlight problems in the relationship.

orange_tee 6y ago

The other findings are telling: Fathers who had sisters growing up, were less likely to face divorce. Families with immigrant background were more likely to face divorce.

DangitBobby 6y ago
What does it tell you? That it's actually the fathers causing strife because they do not treat their daughters correctly? Or that fathers who understand their daughters behavior are not as negatively emotionally affected by it?
- orange_tee 6y ago
  It could also be that fathers who had no sisters were more emotionally attached to their daughters, whereas fathers who grew up with sisters has less emotional attachment to their daughters and consequently were less affected by their horrible teenage years.
- itronitron 6y ago
  There is considerably less drama with my three teenagers (combined) than I witnessed growing up with my one sister.
- runsWphotons 6y ago
  Or that the sisters help?

asebold 6y ago

This just seems all sorts of misguided. To the point where it’s blaming the daughters for parents divorce. Anyways, I tried to read the article and got hit with a paywall, so I can’t go much deeper than the headline.

croissants 6y ago

The full paper is here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3043527 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3043527.

guerrilla 6y ago

The title here on HN isn't right. There's no indication that daughters provoke this in the title or article itself, only that having daughters does, which is not the same. The actual cause is barely touched.

guerrilla 6y ago
The title has changed.

drjasonharrison 6y ago

Is there a free way to access the article? What are the citations?

taurex 6y ago
The easiest way is to use a browser plugin, I use this one that works well: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome That one's for chrome but I'm sure you can find similar for other browsers too.

x0f1a 6y ago

My anecdotal experience as a father of 3 daughters: my relationship definitely got worse and I believe the root cause is the diminished empathy from my wife, on the other hand my sister got 2 boys and our relationship became incredibly close, she became more empathetic to me and my father!

blub 6y ago
Would you mind detailing the "diminished empathy"? Is this related to the daughters somehow and would things have been different if they were boys?
- x0f1a 6y ago
  For instance the movies they like to watch, also they are annoyed with the mess of my working table, full with arduinos, eletrônics, computers - the same with my guitars or even the kind of art and decoration I appreciate. Before my daughters, the situation was more simetrical between me and my wife - now I feel more isolated, without my own space at home, furthermore without partner to Discuss books or watch tv shows, my wife is more and more focused in the girls world - during our 10 year dating, we were close friends with lot in common, I would never have predicted this change.
  - blub 6y ago
    I think I understand, if I may phrase it like this: your life before had a balance between masculine and feminine and now you feel that it is skewing heavily toward feminine.

drfuchs 6y ago

At least this is an improvement over the King Henry VIII technique for gaining a male heir (flawed though it was).

Markoff 6y ago

i find it odd how article doesn't discuss at all possibility of sexual abuse (or suspicion) of teenage daughter by father as reason for elevated risk during puberty suddenly disappearing when daughter moves out around age 20

notsureaboutpg 6y ago
Because it's extremely uncommon, so it wouldn't affect the findings at the level they see here.

mrcartmenez 6y ago

> parents of teenage daughters argue more about parenting than do the parents of sons From my own experience. When my daughter hit 12 it was a fucking nightmare. The hormones hit girls hard and they can become incredibly difficult. That said, now she’s 13 things are much easier and look to be getting easier by the week. Although my wife and I both have to be very understanding and on the same team to deal with difficult behaviour — we have a lot of strategy meetings. Lacking empathy, and wanting independence without responsibility are part of being a teenager. But 12-year old girls can sometimes be super charged griefers. On the flip side, teenagers are actually awesome to hang out with and total joys full of creativity and fun — if you work through the refusal to clean their room, general lack of hygiene and the drama.

lifeplusplus 6y ago
I feel western culture defines teen culture in a certain way and then 'teens' act in that way. Even now and in the past, you were see as an adult by 15. https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/02/23/the-invention-of-adolescence/ https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/02/23/the-inventi... Often by age 12 girls would be fully contributing household member doing all work done by adult women and by age 14-15 so would be boys doing everything an adult men would be doing. Even now that's the case in many places in developing countries, teenagers act like complete adults in mannerism, thoughtfulness and responsibilities. Teenager is a phase that is a luxury, where despite being capable you use more than you bring/produce. In west, it gets you to be an adult without any consequences.
dgb23 6y ago
Stay strong! It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  Nice sentiment, but I'd liken it so a 26.2 mile sprint.
ars 6y ago
> and look to be getting easier by the week. Good luck :) From my understanding the worst age is actually closer to 14/15, and only by 17 or so do things get better.

supergirl 6y ago

even though article rejects this, it’s because fathers don’t want daughters. that hits the hardest when daughters hit puberty and dads realize things are different

dimgl 6y ago
Wait what? This is a massive generalization. I’m hoping to have a daughter soon.
- supergirl 6y ago
  i remember there was some study. men prefer sons while women have no preference. i don’t remember the percentage. btw once your baby is born you might not feel the same way. reality kicks in. and it kicks in even harder at puberty.

LatteLazy 6y ago

For all the bad press, I've found teenage boys easy to deal with. They get loud or break things but only by accident, they rarely mean any harm and are rapidly ready to apologise and mean it when they do. Put the breakables away, stick to a few simple rules, interact with them and ignore tactically and they'll be happy, productive and social. Some rough housing helps a lot when they're younger too. 10 minutes of wrestling will buy you an hour of helping clean up or playing nicely with others.

mrcartmenez 6y ago
This is very true. It also helps with their ability to regulate emotions. I’d like to the study but, on mobile...

fukmbas 6y ago

Too many tampons

gnicholas 6y ago

> 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. Can anyone with grown daughters and a sister speculate as to why this may be the case?

1123581321 6y ago
He has seen his parents go through the same process.
- gnicholas 6y ago
  I'm wondering if men who have gone through this can suggest some of the ways in which having a sister changed how they interacted with their daughters or wives. It isn't entirely clear from the brief mention in the article whether having had a sister changes how a man interacts with his wife or how he interacts with his daughter.
  - 1123581321 6y ago
    Sorry, I meant to respond as one of those men. Observing my parents' experience informed my approach.
    - gnicholas 6y ago
      Can you elaborate? Did it change how you wanted to raise your daughter, or how you interacted with your wife in relation to raising your daughter?
      - 1123581321 6y ago
        In my case, I was generally happy with how my parents raised us, looking back as an adult, and with the differences in how they approached my adolescent years and my sister's. I saw that my parents' relationship was challenged and ultimately strengthened by the challenge of raising both boys and girls. That strengthened my confidence in my ability to raise children with my wife while preserving and strengthening our marriage, and some small challenges have been eased by observing some of my parents' specific successes and failures. I don't know if I would have divorced had I been an only child, of course.

fallingfrog 6y ago

We seem to be a self selecting group of mostly men here.. I would be interested in hearing from someone who had been a teenaged girl to hear the other side of this. It’s at the very least plausible that much of the conflict comes from the expectations that society places on young women.

hycaria 6y ago
I am a girl. My parents are still happily married. But no siblings so no drama. They were (and kinda still are actually even though I’m nearly 30) hostile to boys though. Because of getting pregnant or falling madlessly in love with an idiot. Which always sounded ridiculous to me since I’ve disliked children from a very young age and was academically ambitious. And actually not very much versed in romantic activities either.

asimjalis 6y ago

If parents are getting divorced because they are arguing about the upbringing of girls, why is this risk only materializing when the girl is the first child? Why would the dynamics be different if the girl was not the first child? Ergo, the conclusion is not thought through and likely to be false.

sideshowb 6y ago

It cites a relative risk of only around 0.5-1% in the background literature, and only in the US. Although an interesting aggregate finding, for anyone considering their own relationship here it's likely to be lost in the noise of individual variation.

novia 6y ago

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/12/why-women-s-bodies-abort-males-during-tough-times https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/12/why-women-s-bodies-a... Male fetuses are more likely to die in the womb if the mother is stressed. Marriages are more likely to end if the marriage is stressful. Therefore, marriages with first born daughters are more likely to end with divorce, by no fault of the daughter. Disclosure: I was once a first-born teenage daughter. Yes, my parents divorced.

micouay 6y ago
They explicitly say it in the article (in the second paragraph, visible even to non-subscribers) that there is no correlation in the first years of life of the son/daughter. Interesting hypothesis but seems false from what I read in the article. > 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.
- yellowbeard 6y ago
  Childless parents as a result of self aborting male fetuses would not show up in the study.
  - moonchild 6y ago
    Yes, exactly. That means that (assuming there are no other gender-dependent birth factors; this is not true but serves to make the point), we should expect to see slightly more females born than males. The 'surplus' females being born to mothers who were stressed enough that, had they conceived a male, the child would have self-aborted. Thus, assuming stress is correlated with divorce, those families are more likely to divorce.
    - micouay 6y ago
      Then how can you explain no correlation before the daughter has become a teenager? If I understood you correctly, you suggest that parents of daughters divorce more often because the daughter was born to a couple of stressed parents (which is more likely to happen than a boy born to that family). If that would be the only cause of the divorce (I'm oversimplyfying, of course), then there would be no difference whether the daughter is a teenager or not. Perhaps parents think of taking care of a child in their first years of life as a moral obligation, which would reduce the divorce rate. However, it's still suspicious that the divorce occurs around the time the daughter reaches puberty, not some time earlier (after she's 5 or something).

musicale 6y ago

I wonder how much of bad teenage behavior is exacerbated by mandatory school attendance combined with the way secondary schools typically operate, which I seem to recall as being somewhere between day care, a factory, and a prison. Girls were often disciplined for "socializing" which I thought was one of the things you were supposed to learn in school. Moreover, secondary school students live in a supposed democracy yet few actually have the right to vote on policies that affect them (not to mention taxes such as sales/use tax which are "taxation without representation.") Student "governments" typically have little to no actual power over school policies or the curriculum. On the other hand, I have heard media pundits suggest that the current wave of youth crime is due in part to schools being closed. I'm not sure whether that supports or refutes the first paragraph. p.s. Instead of downvotes on my speculation I'd prefer logical arguments and/or evidence one way or another. Then again this seems kind of off-topic for HN so it may not work well with the HN format anyway.

gumby 6y ago

The thing about teens is what makes them so infuriating is also what makes them so interesting. Otis not possible to have the one without the other.

notacoward 6y ago

I've seen many possible explanations mentioned. Most common seems to be that raising daughters is more stressful than raising sons (for various reasons) leading to more arguments etc. Most intriguing might be that sons conceived into tenuous marriages don't even make it out of the womb. I'll add one more: mother/daughter friction. I can't even count the number of families I've seen in which a mother feels betrayed when her daughter doesn't follow her example in everything, and lets those feelings show. I've seen the same with father/son, though less so perhaps because mothers tend to be more active parents. It would also be foolish to ignore the issue of daughters growing into their adult bodies and becoming sexually active right when many mothers are feeling insecure about their own attractiveness. We can argue about causes, but the effect is real. When mothers and daughters fight, it always puts fathers in a difficult position. A dad who consistently sides the mother might get credit for being a good co-parent (usually not) but be alienated from their own child. A dad who consistently sides with the daughter is likely to lose all contact with either due to divorce. All this, regardless of who's right or wrong between the two. Again, a bit of this happens when fathers and sons are in conflict, but it doesn't seem quite as severe and has different potential outcomes because of how "family" court works. That's just one possible factor, affecting some cases, but it seems worth mentioning along with all the others.

vannevar 6y ago
That difference seems small enough that child abuse (and specifically sexual abuse) could conceivably account for all of it. Girls are 4x more likely to experience childhood sexual abuse than boys.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
javajosh 6y ago
Yes, it's shocking how our "family" court system works. It seems designed to generate maximum pain, maximum billable hours, even if the parents start out being reasonable, if an attorney whispers enough poison, and the parents listen, then the fight will go on and on, at least until you can't afford the retainer. I'm not sure how real the risk of losing all contact with your kids is, however that threat is the only weapon some attorneys know how to use, and it can be incredibly difficult to a) keep your head, remember her attorney has no authority over you and every motivation to put you on tilt, and b) endure the injustices. especially with young children, even week-long absences are painful, and it will put you on tilt. A month, or 3 months, is a lifetime, and it will reduce you to a puddle of tears, and you'll have to learn how to reconstitute yourself, like Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen. This is why I strongly recommend against marriage until the divorce industry is reformed to provide harsh penalties to any actors (attorneys or parents) that use time-sharing as a tool of torture to extract legal agreements. I would also harshly penalize shunning, and "pile on" behavior that parents friends and family might indulge in, but that's a little harder to control.

usrusr 6y ago

Conservative assumptions explanation: mothers might be less confident about being able to raise a boy well without a father than a girl without a father so they are less invested in the marriage if it's a girl, fathers tend to feel threatened by a female majority so they are also less invested in the marriage if it's a girl. I feel kind of relieved that this explanation doesn't even survive the subheading "But the difference only emerges when the children are teenagers"

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>"But the difference only emerges when the children are teenagers" I don't see how that disproves what you said. The extra stress of dealing with 1.5 women in the household causes more marriages to get to the possible divorce threshold at which point everything you've stated subconsciously kicks in.

haltingproblem 6y ago

https://archive.is/BsXXr https://archive.is/BsXXr There has to be an Evo Psych explanation. I am not an evolutionary psychologist, wish @primalpoly or @sentientist were on HN for their take. An obvious (and obviously naive take), is that one of parents would initiate breakup in search of a son because having a son offers some evolutionary advantage. It happens around the girls hitting puberty because it now signals that their care taking period is over.

djbelieny 6y ago

I would argue that this is because the mother projects her dreams, aspirations and rejections of her own childhood on the daughter and that, could lead into the mother creating resentment towards the father due to projecting her experiences with her own father upon her spouse. This undoubtedly will lead to more arguments, more stress and ultimately to a failed relationship.

_qulr 6y ago

This is much ado over almost nothing: "between the ages 13 and 18, parents of first-born girls divorce more than parents of first-born boys. The odds of divorce within this period are 10.7% for parents of boys, and 11.3% for parents of girls." https://theconversation.com/parents-of-teenage-daughters-more-likely-to-divorce-study-84704 https://theconversation.com/parents-of-teenage-daughters-mor... 10.7% vs. 11.3%. Not much difference. What little difference there is could be explained by, for example, the father sexually abusing the teenage daughter, not by trouble caused by the daughter.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago
I've learned well that when popular news not come with actual numbers, one can assume that the numbers aren't spectacular. It tends to print then whenever they be spectacular.
elefanten 6y ago
That’s quite a leap at the end. You’re saying 0.6% of fathers sexually abuse a daughter?
- awillen 6y ago
  Yeah... what? Wow. Just really took a turn there all of a sudden.
- _qulr 6y ago
  I don't know. Does anyone know? Accurate stats are hard to come by, as this is of course underreported by the victims. We do know the number is greater than 0.0% though. The Conversation article has a link to the original paper https://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/2494524/wp2017n26.pdf?platform=hootsuite https://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_... which does not even mention this possibility at all as a factor. I find this to be a curious omission. Non-sexual physical abuse could also be a factor. The teenage years are when boys and girls start to "grow apart" in terms of height and strength, which makes teenage girls on average less able to defend against physical abuse than teenage boys. Also, our society is "more accepting" of violence against males than violence against females. Is this a factor in the divorce rate? I don't know, but the possibility should not be ignored.

MichaelMoser123 6y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20210207003003if_/https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/02/06/parents-of-daughters-are-more-likely-to-divorce-than-those-with-sons http://web.archive.org/web/20210207003003if_/https://www.eco... link without paywall. didn't get one thing: is it only the father who is doing all the fighting with his daughter? also interesting: "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. "

sethc2 6y ago

I grew up with no sisters and have my fourth daughter on the way (first born girl too). Wonder what the differences are for those of us with more kids than the average.

mrcartmenez 6y ago
The first one will be a nightmare at 12, the others will witness their behaviour and likely decide not to repeat it. Here’s some advice from the NHS: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/coping-with-your-teenager/ https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/copi...

xyst 6y ago

the article is behind a paywall

proxygeek 6y ago

... in the US. Also, the difference in divorce rates between parents of male child and female child is not something which necessarily indicates a deeper cause. Far too often we accept such headlines at the face value and start looking for reasons than first critically examining the data itself (sample size, localisation, sampling, statistical significance, design)

chemmail 6y ago

I think these dumb headlines can just be chocked down to godincidences in numbers. Nothing really to coax out of them.

xyzelement 6y ago

I hit the paywall so couldn't read the whole thing but the last visible sentence about deeper quarrels about how to raise a teenage son vs daughter make sense. One easiest stressor I can imagine is teenage pregnancy, or the threat thereof. If my son is going to be a rebellious teenage idiot, that's hard. If my daughter, then so much more stressful. Both because the consequences (pregnancy) are harsher and because there are way more people preying on women. It's probably much harder on the marriage to have this kind of stress.

mrtweetyhack 6y ago

"A 2015 study by the American Sociological Association found that women initiate two-thirds of all divorces, a staggering 69% to be exact." "College-educated women initiate divorce at an even higher rate: 90%" https://www.divorcemag.com/blog/why-do-women-initiate-divorce-more-than-men https://www.divorcemag.com/blog/why-do-women-initiate-divorc...

mmwelt 6y ago

http://archive.today/BsXXr http://archive.today/BsXXr

stosto88 6y ago

Population control.

throwawayco801 6y ago

Dude with two sons under the age of 3 here. God a divorce sounds like heaven to a man boiling in hell but I cannot bare to think of making those two kids sad/not being there for something.

mrcartmenez 6y ago
It gets easier every day. Once they hit 6 you’ll be riding high. Until they hit 13

andi999 6y ago

Anybody has a reference to a scientific article? Or knows the numbers of these stats?

pookieinc 6y ago

There seems to be a paywall, can anyone provide the text or a mirror to keep up with the interesting discussion?

throwfifi 6y ago

Crudely, think reason is that the father subconsciously becomes sexually attracted to daughter after a while and only option is to search for a replacement. Understand this will get banned, but think it's closer to the truth. (not due to daughters more difficult to handle etc)

sethammons 6y ago
How would this strange view be supported by this being about having a girl as firstborn rather than having any daughters?

baxtr 6y ago

I’ve read many explanations here based on different family dynamics. But what if this was just a correlation? I have read that richer parents tend to get more sons and also read that divorce rates are higher in poorer families. So maybe it’s simply related to the wealth of families?

thegabriele 6y ago

To me, a Mother and a daughter together form a stronger bond to face the perils of a post divorce life. I feel like, in unsubconsious way, the mother with a daughter would find more courage in leaving the husband

lldbg 6y ago

>"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." Maybe parts of the article I could not access goes more into detail, but this is an odd perspective when it is known that women initiate 70% of divorces (see fig. 1 in [0]). [0]: https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_Who_wants_the_Breakup.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_Who_wants_the_B...

Cyberthal 6y ago

Two key phrases: "But the difference only emerges when the children are teenagers" "in both America and the Netherlands" A third, unstated assumption: Data is post-1960s and reflects the feminist revolution. Since contradicting feminist orthodoxy is heresy against the West's religion of Progressivism, no Hacker News reader is allowed to state the obvious reason for this phenomenon. I find this amusing, living in China, where I suspect the average person on the street could work it out from stereotypes in a matter of seconds, and would certainly have no qualms about baldly stating it. Perhaps the US thalassocracy will be the first empire to successfully dispense with the need for female chastity ensuring paternal certainty as an incentive for men to invest in future generations. In which case, there is no reason the same speech code cannot remain in effect in the Anglosphere indefinitely. It is certainly not the case that its adherents are unprincipled self-interested self-deceiving conformists!