A Joint Model of Marital Childbearing and Marital Disruption

Abstract

Married couples with children appear to be less likely to end their marriages than childless couples, especially when the children are young. Although this suggests that children affect the chances that their parents will divorce, the process may not be so simple: the chances that the marriage will last also may affect couples' willingness to make the commitment to the marriage implied by having children. This paper uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to test the hypothesis that the risk of disruption faced by a married woman affects the chances that she will conceive and bear a child. The model used takes into account the simultaneous relationships between marital dissolution and marital fertility by including the hazard of disruption as a predictor of timing and likelihood of marital conception, and by including the results of previous fertility decisions as predictors of disruption of the marriage. We find that the hazard of disruption has strong negative effects on the hazard of marital childbearing, lengthening the intervals between births and decreasing the chances that a child will be born. This effect appears to be strongest for women who have had at least one child, either before or during the current marriage, although it is also large for childless women. Explicitly including the hazard of disruption in models of marital childbearing has sizable and important effects on many predictors of fertility.

The Influence of Partner Relationship Quality on Fertility

“…Whereas an extensive literature exists on the expected consequences of having children for the quality of the relationship between partners (Callan 1985(Callan , 1986Fawcett 1988;Bulatao 1981;Miller and Pasta 1994) and on its real consequences for relationship quality (Glenn 1989;Helms-Erickson 2001;Kurdek 1999) and stability (Cherlin 1977;Lillard and Waite 1993;Waite and Lillard 1991), theory and research on the opposite influence of relationship quality on fertility is relatively scarce. Moreover, most studies that address the issue focus almost exclusively on the influence of union stability.…”

“…The first hypothesis suggests that higher perceived union stability leads to earlier childbearing. This position is advocated by Lillard and Waite (1993), who emphasized that children represent the largest investment in marriage and that, therefore, the presence of children (especially young children) raises the costs of dissolution. A dissolution could imply either having to raise the children alone or to have reduced or no contact with the children.…”

“…Lillard and Waite (1993) modelled the hazard of union disruption and the hazard of marital conception simultaneously, and included the estimated hazard of disruption as a predictor in the equation to estimate the hazard of marital conception. They found that the risk of marital disruption faced by a married woman has a negative effect on her likelihood of marital childbearing: it lengthens the intervals between births and decreases the chances that a child will be born.…”

“…Nevertheless, as yet little attention has been paid to the question to what extent fertility is influenced by the quality of the partner relationship itself. The literature that does pay attention to it focuses almost exclusively on one specific aspect of relationship quality, namely union stability (Koo and Janowitz 1983;Lillard and Waite 1993;Myers 1997;Thomson and Henz 2005;Wu 1996). Yet, a vast social-psychological literature shows that marital quality is a multidimensional phenomenon.…”

“…Couples with a high-quality relationship might be more likely to have children, because their relationship constitutes a favourable environment to raise a child (Myers 1997) and because they are more willing to make the major joint investment that having children implies (Lillard and Waite 1993). However, couples in a low-quality relationship might want to have a child in order to revitalize their union.…”