Does the sex of your children have an effect on your marriage? Data drawn from US Census records of 3 million adults seems to say that having daughters is not great for marital bliss. But the raw numbers don't say why.
Researchers don't know the cause, but have proposed many possibilities, from the presence of daughters making a mother more likely to leave an abusive husband to the idea that a man is more likely to marry a woman who is pregnant with his son. In any case, the statistics do not necessarily reflect the odds for an individual marriage. Link
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In the original 2003 research on the topic, economists Gordon Dahl, from the University of California-San Diego, and Enrico Moretti, at UC Berkeley, found that couples with a first-born girl were about 5 percent more likely to divorce than parents of a first-born boy. When there are as many as three daughters that difference spiked to 10 percent.
Researchers don't know the cause, but have proposed many possibilities, from the presence of daughters making a mother more likely to leave an abusive husband to the idea that a man is more likely to marry a woman who is pregnant with his son. In any case, the statistics do not necessarily reflect the odds for an individual marriage. Link
(Image source: Clipart for Free)
What a child is born with should not effect a marriage, the couple in the marriage effects the marriage. The rest is just coincidence. Those children shouldn't have to feel like being born differently would have made a difference. On the flip side, saying a baby would keep a marriage together is just as silly of a point. Marriage and parenting are different roles usually fulfilled at the same time but not always. The adults and not the children should really be factors in that equation. Ideally the children should be taken care of regardless...but that's ideally.
Anyway, we're about to have our third baby girl. The kids are well rounded. Play ball, know how to defend themselves, love dinosaur museums, football, and even all the stereotypical girl stuff. I'm the mom and it's funny but their dad is more interested in some of the stuff I'm not to excited about. Getting them pretty clothes, getting pictures taken, getting them pink stuff, ha ha. Anyway what they are interested in, I can manage to get interested in too. It's nice to do something out of what you are usually used to. It's like you don't have to force yourself to love those things but rather support the people you love while doing it, there wouldn't be such a gender divide in the home. You can find a balance in any situation.
Anyway, I'm surprised my parents didn't divorce over me (pretty messed up kid)...so glad they didn't, though. I don't think I could have gotten out of adolescence without both of them helping me in the same place.
On the flip side, one of my girlfriends has parents who didn't divorce when she was a teen (not necessarily because of her, she was a pretty good kid) and *really* should have. When they finally did, everyone was much happier.
Either way, raising a teen girl has to be super difficult. I can't imagine doing it on my own.