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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

• 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.
  • caturopath 6y ago
    You can forego family court and settle through mediation if you want. In my experience, the core driver of friction as usually seemed to be that the parties hate each other.
    • maratc 6y ago
      You can't "settle through mediation if you want" if the other side doesn't want that. You need two sides agreeing to settle through mediation and coming with reasonable requests, while it's enough that one side disagrees or is coming with unreasonable requests, to get both sides to the court.
  • alpineidyll3 6y ago
    If only this message were more commonly known.
  • rechevskiy 6y ago
    Just want to add here that family court comes into play anytime there are underage children involved, irrespective of whether the parents are married or not (in most states). So not getting married provides no protection from being involved in those same, potentially endless, ongoing family court cases.
    • Retric 6y ago
      I decided to avoid marriage and kids in large part due to the divorce courts, so you do have that option. Vasectomy is not the ideal option, but it’s seriously worth considering in our utterly broken society.
      • SignalNotSecure 6y ago
        If you spend enough time living with a partner together in the same locale you are de-facto married in many jurisdictions Being not married is often utterly meaningless. You will be caught up in the dragnet.
• someelephant 6y ago
  > When mothers and daughters fight, it always puts fathers in a difficult position. If a father shows empathy to both there's no reason for him to be put into the crosshairs. If both daughter and mother have a with us or against us attitude that says more about their character than anything else. These issues can be helped with healthier living choices, therapy or medication.
  • notacoward 6y ago
    Speaking of empathy, try having some for people who have to live in households where real conflict occurs despite their own best efforts.
    • watwut 6y ago
      Sometimes you have to accept that people who are not you have conflicts. For that matter, dad's have conflicts with their kids too. With both their sons and daughters. Moms have conflicts with their sons too. I don't know why mom daughter conflict is singled out as special here.
      • notacoward 6y ago
        > I don't know why mom daughter conflict is singled out as special here. Then you didn't read before responding. As I said, there are issues of mothers' vs. fathers' roles, female self-perception, family court, etc. Each combination of mother/father and son/daughter plays out differently. Is it so hard to believe that conflict within one combination might lead to divorce more often than conflict in others? My experience leads me to believe that - through no fault of their own - mother/daughter relationships are more fraught than others. Maybe that's not true, but "they're all the same" is even more clearly not true.
• bitexploder 6y ago
  I can’t stress how important it is for parents to build really strong communication skills. Young kids, and especially teenager, are experts at divide and conquer. If parents are not presenting a united front, stress and parents fighting often follows. We never countermand one another in front of the children. Ever. Any time kids ask for something or want something it’s always “what did your mother/father” say first. If they mislead or lie about their answer to that question it’s on them and the consequences are much heavier for them. It’s a simple system but it takes a lot of trust and patience with your spouse.
• Supermancho 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) My mother specifically stated that she always intended to leave my father after she had a daughter. The custody hearing was basically "I want the daughter, you keep the house kthxbye". I have a feeling that this is not a special case.
  • scruple 6y ago
    She wanted to be a single mother if she had a daughter but not if she had a son? Why did she want to be a single mother? Why specifically if she had a daughter? Why not if she had a son? Was she concerned about your father raising a daughter and she wanted a different man, or different "type" of man, to raise her? I'm sorry if that is personal and feel free to ignore me, but you did go there. I'm just oftentimes confused about people and their behavior / motivations in life... And this one is up there.
    • Supermancho 6y ago
      > She wanted to be a single mother if she had a daughter but not if she had a son? / Why not if she had a son? / Why specifically if she had a daughter? These are all the same question, which is answered "I didn't want the father to be involved with a daughter, after being married to him for a few years, she would be damaged." - my very frank mom, who was a teacher - and I'm her elder son. My mom was never worried about being a single mother. Of course these questions have been asked, but the answer isn't really interesting. My question is if the conclusion that "daughters cause more instability" vs "mothers have diverse motivation to break a marriage", are the takeaways. I'm not sure that proper consideration was given, as if someone was searching for an answer, since they are pointing to it like it's a proper characterization of the data.
    • taneq 6y ago
      Because she'd never met a girl child before and had unrealistic expectations about what being singlehandedly responsible for a mini-her would be like. :P
  • 6y ago
• tgv 6y ago
  We're talking about 20.12% vs 20.48% chance of divorce. Take this sentence from the article: > “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. It's pure speculation: no data, no model, nothing. But even if dr. Kabatek is right, it only takes a fraction of the fathers to obtain that 1.8% difference. You can't really explain such small differences with sweeping explanations (raising daughters is more stressful than raising sons, abortion of sons conceived into tenuous marriages, or your mother/daughter friction) without adding many, many more factors that mitigate them. And let's not forget that the data is difficult to interpret. The (preprint of the) article's abstract even starts like this: > Evidence from the U.S. that couples with daughters are more likely to divorce than couples with sons has not been found for other Western countries.
  • andi999 6y ago
    Whats the p value? If p only below 5% this could be just happen by screening 'western' countries.
    • enkid 6y ago
      Right. There's more than 20 western countries. If P is around 5% we would expect the result just from random fluctuation. If you start looking at other factors, such as number of children, when you have children, age gaps between children, etc., let's say 5 different potential scenarios, you would expect to see things that only have a 1% chance of happening. If 5 other groups are doing similar analysis, one of them is likely to see trends that only have a 0.2% chance of happening. I would take this result with a huge grain of salt.
  • as2344 6y ago
    “But in the five years when the first-born is between the ages of 13 and 18, that increase goes up to 5%. And it peaks, at 9%, when the child is 15.”
    • _qulr 6y ago
      It's crucial to understand what these percentages mean. "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... There are 2 ways of spinning this. 10.7% to 11.3% is only a 0.6% increase in "absolute" terms. In "relative" terms it's a 5.6% increase, but that sounds worse than it really is. If you start with a very small number, then almost any increase no matter how small represents a significant increase in relative percentage. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
• mrcartmenez 6y ago
  It’s actually much more simple than that: Many girls become assholes at age 12.
  • leroy_masochist 6y ago
    Parent comment is likely getting downvoted for its tone, but they've kind of got a point....the hormonal changes underway and the sociopathic clique-power games going on at school do indeed often combine to make many girls quite standoffish at that age.
    • lupire 6y ago
      And many boys experience hormonal changes that make them physically aggressive at that age.
  • lupire 6y ago
    So do many boys, so what's your point?