Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons | Hacker News Reader

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

economist.com

480 pointsjkuria600 comments

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.

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.

“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.”

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-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.

Whats the p value? If p only below 5% this could be just happen by screening 'western' countries.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If only this message were more commonly known.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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

From the article:

> that “daughter-divorce” risk emerges only in a first-born girl’s teenage years

It’s actually much more simple than that: Many girls become assholes at age 12.

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.

So do many boys, so what's your point?

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.

> 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.

Speaking of empathy, try having some for people who have to live in households where real conflict occurs despite their own best efforts.

> 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.

The last part about them being a joy to hang out with is crucial.

We need to remember we were like them once. They’re little extensions of us.

Whenever I have troubles with my kids I try to remember that I was a kid not that long ago. If I zoom out a little, it was just a blink. I’ll spend more of my life with my kids being adults, fate permitting, and the struggles of them figuring things out (and me as well) will be another blink. I really want to make the most of it.

> We need to remember we were like them once.

To be honest I'm just barely hanging in trying to pretend I'm different now at 33.

I’m not a psychologist. All of my reflecting and self analyzing suggests current me and past me were basically the same people though. I’ve developed skills and my brain works better for certain things, but more or less the same person inside.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I was taught my entire life that I’d grow into something and certain things would happen that would make me an adult, and i suppose I inferred this would be transformative. Not really though. If I drop that inferred notion I almost find it freeing. I’m not a kid or an adult or anything besides “me”, whatever that needs to mean in the moment.

> On the flip side, teenagers are actually awesome to hang out with and total joys full of creativity and fun

I absolutely agree.

> 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.

From my time as a school teacher substitute in Denmark my experience is that 12-14 (7th and 8th grade) is the worst.

you had to be that person that took away the hope... :))

Well, if it helps, different kids are different, and hit their hard times at various ages. (As a one time camp counselor, I've seen all kinds of easy and problem kids of all different ages!)

Stay strong! It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Nice sentiment, but I'd liken it so a 26.2 mile sprint.

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-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.

Consider yourself lucky, I was already in juvenile detention at that age!

> if you work through the refusal to clean their room

Well, is it their room or not? If it’s their room, viz. their inviolable space, what basis[1] do you have to enforce your standards on others’ spaces? Unless it’s an actual hygiene/H&S/hoarding situation, or part of the de-jure shared living space (like a Jack+Jill bathroom) then a messy room isn’t a real problem, and raising a fuss about it is only going to create conflict.

[1]: “my house, my rules” is not a convincing argument: your kids have no choice w.r.t. where they live.

EDIT: as you can tell, I’m not a parent - and am still too mentally close to adolescence :)

It's very simple.

As a parent, your job is to help your children become the best people they can be, not the people they'd turn out by default.

I would much rather my son hate me now and thank me later than the other way around.

To use this example - if your choice is to raise a child who is organized vs one who is a slob: aim for organized because it will help them down the road in many ways. It's not the most important thing, but leaving the kid to their own devices is just lazy.

Funny example - every woman I ever dated has a story of coming to a guy's apartment, seeing that it's gross, and turning around. So these men are literally missing out on sex/partnership opportunities because their parents didn't teach them to clean up their room. Thanks a lot mom and dad.

I'm sure those men could clean their rooms perfectly well if someone made them. Their problem isn't using the wrong solvents or mixing light and dark laundry. It's lacking the conscientiousness to do boring/unpleasant life admin work consistently when no one is making them. There may be ways for parents to impart this trait, but just making them is probably not it. Boys who clean because their mothers are angry become men who clean because their wives are angry.

FWIW my parents were 100% diligent about bedtime, nutrition, cleaning my room, etc. I threw it all to the wind as soon as I moved out for college. Predictably I felt like shit. But I had to go through those experiences of feeling like shit, and then noticing that the "responsible" behaviors helped, before I cared enough to prioritize them.

In other words, I see what my parents were trying to do. I see what so many parents are trying to do when they get into huge conflicts with their kids. Teach lessons that they learned firsthand, so that the kids can skip the unpleasant parts (being sleep deprived, living in filth, bad breakups, whatever) and just do everything right the first time. But it doesn't work that way. Everyone has to find out for themselves.

> I would much rather my son hate me now and thank me later than the other way around.

Well put.

The role of a parent is to help children grow into healthy functioning adults. Avoiding unnecessary conflict is something we should all strive for, avoiding all conflict is tantamount to simply not parenting.

Frankly this entire argument feels like an intentional twisting of the common expression "their room."

I took it to mean their bedroom specifically, assuming they have a bedroom to themselves.

I’m fine with having family “team cleans”: it’s a positive shared experience, and I can’t protest instilling discipline for tidiness either - I just draw the line at “tidy your room” as overstepping a crucial boundary that arbitrarily encroaches on our autonomy.

By analogy, it’s like if my parents forced me to use a particular desktop wallpaper image on my computer, or restricting what I wore on weekends without a better reasoned argument than “because I said so”.

>Well, is it their room or not? ...their inviolable space

It is not their room.

> “my house, my rules” is not a convincing argument

It is in my house ;)

>> my house, my rules” is not a convincing argument

>> It is in my house ;)

Just wanted to tell you - I laughed out loud. Dad power! (Or mom-power, whatever)

And as an adult, you can “own” your house, but you still have to abide by the greater rules of the society you live in.

Teenager in a house has to live within the rules. Homeowner within a HOA has to live within the rules. Homeowner within city limits has to live within the rules, etc.

What about "I'm the adult, and you're the kid"? On the one hand, you do need to respect the child's personal living space, but on the other you have parental responsibility to ensure that 1) that space meets some established minimum quality of cleanliness and 2) the child learns enough cleaning/organizational skills to function as a member of society.

Obviously this is completely different when the child is a fully-grown adult--at that point, what they need is not a life lesson--but for a minor just beginning to learn how to be an adult, the parents must impose their will on their child to some extent for the child's own good.

> EDIT: as you can tell, I’m not a parent - and am still too mentally close to adolescence :)

Just a general remark: If you're not a parent [1], don't tell others how to be parents. It's okay to ask questions (e.g., "why are you doing it like this instead of like that?"), but don't believe you know what you're talking about.

[1] "Parent" as in "functionally a parent", not necessarily "biologically a parent". If you're raising a child, you're a parent, even if they aren't your biological child.

1. That highly downvoted post looks like it's mostly questions to me.

2. It's hard to know how to properly instill good habits in a teenager. Even being a parent of a teen doesn't always mean you know how to do that, and being a parent of a non-teen is definitely not enough. So don't try to categorize parents in general as having this knowledge.

I think we should foster an atmosphere of free philosophical inquiry here on HN.

FWIW I think GP raises an interesting question.

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.

That's like saying isn't death a healthy outcome for a cancer patient? Sure, it's what happens to many people that get cancer. But getting cancer in the first place is not "healthy", and so death caused by cancer is not "healthy".

If marriage is nothing more than a legal contract - which sadly for many people it is, then why even bother making vows such as "until death do us part"? All for show? Why not just put a time-clause for when the contract expires so that you can decide whether to sign a new one? A highly utilitarian, and in my opinion, tragically sad view of marriage, but that is essentially what it has become for many people.

You're talking at cross purposes.

Divorce is a positive resolution to a terrible relationship. Death isn't a positive resolution to cancer.

Divorce is only negative if we don't condition on the existence of a terrible relationship.

Two things are accurate at the same time:

- A marriage turning into a terrible relationship is a negative outcome.

- Divorce as a reaction to a marriage turning sour is a positive outcome, since we've conditioned on that development and it's now a sunk cost.

I think this is only true if you modify the initial condition to be "...an irreparably terrible relationship". Without that, there is a third point which may be true:

- Fixing a marriage which is turning into a terrible relationship is a better outcome than divorce. In this way, divorce is a bad outcome, the same way as coming in second in Jeopardy and winning $2000 is a bad outcome compared to coming in first and winning (say) $10 000.

> Divorce is only negative if we don't condition on the existence of a terrible relationship.

Not "only". A positive relationship that's ruined by outside factors/factions, for example, might end in divorce.

A relationship that benefits both people but has been mismanaged (ignorance, inexperience, etc.), might end in divorce.

Isn't the point of the OP in part that just by the biological accident of having female offspring one might become more likely to be divorced; that strongly implies that divorce isn't always down to inherent aspects of the relationship.

You are assuming what you are mean to prove, namely that life is inherently valuable, and that marriage is not inherently valuable. Someone who favours euthanasia could easily say that death is a positive resolution to disease.

To those who say life has inherent value, death is not positive, no matter the pain it may relieve. To those who say marriage has inherent value, divorce is not positive, no matter the pain it may relieve.

To turn your argument back on you: Death as a reaction to health/life turning sour is a positive outcome, since we've conditioned on that development and it's now a sunk cost.

I happen to think that both life and marriage are inherently valuable and worth sacrificing for and holding on to, and for similar reasons.

There is a third - people facing difficulties which are surmountable, divorce and negatively effect their lives and the lives of their children

> Death isn't a positive resolution to cancer.

not sure about that.

You're begging the question.

I think anyone I know who considers marriage as “just a legal contract” isn’t saying that one should treat marriage as a contractual relationship like any other but rather that the ceremony itself is unimportant relative to the relationship as a whole. I think these are two very different things people may mean by the phrase and I feel like your comment suggests that one of those things is common while I would suggest that the other interpretation is more common.

If people thought of marriage as nothing but a legal contract, likely to be broken, and acted rationally then I expect they wouldn’t bother at all: the benefits aren’t particularly great while the risks are large.

I think we probably mostly agree with our own opinions but perhaps disagree on the opinions of others.

> I feel like your comment suggests that one of those things is common while I would suggest that the other interpretation is more common.

I read it as people taking that step in a relationship without much thought because that's what society has conditioned us to believe is normal and then divorcing like breaking-up.

> the benefits aren’t particularly great while the risks are large.

Marriage brings specific legal and financial benefits, depending on the country (married couples tax allowances, spousal rights to pensions and inheritance etc, spousal privilege in court, visa/residency rights, child custody rights).

As these benefits have reduced over a few decades, the number of marriages has gone down (at least in the West?). I don't think that's a coincidence.

You don't need a legal marriage to share a loving and fulfilling life together with a partner. But, if you do share a loving and fulfilling life together, marriage might benefit you for one or more of the above reasons.

I think it's important to make the distinction between religious and civil mariage.

Clearly civil mariage is just a contact, whose main purpose is the divorce (at least in my country - France - divorce is the main benefit of marriage). And as far as I know there is no commitment for it to last for life, but just until the end of the contract.

> divorce is the main benefit of marriage

...what? Are you saying French people intentionally get married in order to reap benefits of divorce?

Marriage and family as we know it is a relatively recent habit, only about few thousand years, even hundreds of years in many regions. It was justified and necessary to adapt in new environment like agricultural civilization, but it may be not advantageous in new current era of digital world.

This kind of thought is so far from my own. Marriage and family are the most important things in the vast majority of people's lives. Computers and Internet don't make them obsolete...

>That's like saying isn't death a healthy outcome for a cancer patient? ... But getting cancer in the first place is not "healthy", and so death caused by cancer is not "healthy".

What if your analogy is right and marriage is really not healthy in the first place? At least it cannot work for all people?

>If marriage is nothing more than a legal contract - which sadly for many people it is, then why even bother making vows such as "until death do us part"?

It could be a legal contract with such timing: “until death” why not? Wasn’t it always has been like this by definition?

>All for show? If contract is not taken seriously then any contract become ‘for show’

>Why not just put a time-clause for when the contract expires so that you can decide whether to sign a new one?

Because it would make it opposite to what it meant to represent? Anyway, why to bother if many people consider it breakable at any moment already? Much more comfortable for those who do not intend to keep own promises.

>A highly utilitarian, and in my opinion, tragically sad view of marriage, but that is essentially what it has become for many people.

Has become? What if it always has been like this by design And many attempts to make it something else have failed?

Wouldn't a tumor removal be a better metaphor for an unhealthy marriage? There are so many worse outcomes than a divorce, there are no worse outcomes from cancer than death.

Why even have any pre-determined time clause?

I would say the most sensible thing is simply the mutual declaration for the sake of administrivia, that until any of the members of a marriage say otherwise, we all are married. The only reason to even have the document is just for things like power of attorney. Who shall be considered a legal guardian responsible for a child, who is allowed to make decisions for another while they are incapacitated, etc. And the expiration date is "until further notice".

I don't think you have a right to call that sort of family sad or "tragic".

That's actually incredibly insulting, even abusive when it's embedded in policy that everyone has to live under.

Just imagine if I called your family sad and tragic. Even if I used hard unavoidable data to back up the judgement.

You don't think they have the right to have an opinion? How tolerant.

Everyone doesn't have to "live under" it, you don't have to get married.

I suspect having Mummy and Daddy being together "until further notice" would have disastrous impacts on children's sense of permanence and development.

> That's like saying isn't death a healthy outcome for a cancer patient?

The end of a marriage (where both participants continue living) and a cancer death, are not comparable.

Your "if you're not going to stay in a bad marriage until you physically die, what's the point of marriage?" viewpoint where marriage is permanent xor utilitarian is a false dichotomy.

Divorce doesn't mean that the participants failed, or that they entered into the marriage simply out of utility.

A better analogy might be "amputating a leg is a healthy end to gangrene". Better not to have gangrene in the first place, but if someone does, better to amputate the leg than die.

But you wouldn't say "amputating a leg is a healthy end to having legs" because for most leg havers, there are better outcomes.

In the same vein, I'd say "divorce is a healthy end to a bad marriage" but not "divorce is a healthy end to marriages in general".

Divorce doesn't mean that the participants failed, or that they entered into the marriage simply out of utility.

On the contrary, by their own measure, it is a failure. No one gets married anticipating or wanting a divorce. Everyone wants it to last forever.

That's why the comment you responded to suggested a time-bounded contract. Which no one wants.

Have you ever gone through a divorce? Mine was amicable, but even then it was the worst thing I've ever experienced.

For middle class folks, marriage isn't much different than a typical employment contract with a large firm. Marriage usually revolves around house and assets, so your 200k down payment is the 100k sign on bonus for your spouse. Paying out mortgage is the stock vesting plan. Kids are additional stock grants for good performance. Divorce is selling shares.

I would say middle class folks will probably consider marriage to be more important. Like Viktor Frankl would say, the meaning of your life is either from your work, love or courage in difficulty for survival.

Most middle class folks I am sure don't fall in third bucket; and a lot of them are just doing 9-5 jobs, probably not doing something which can drive them like say most of the big entrepreneurs or researchers seem to be.

So that leaves love, which would become kind of very important to give their life a meaning. Marriage being a vow to have that love lasting throughout seems special. I am in late 20s, and even though I would want to do something great, the strive to find someone compatible with me seems to weigh on my mind more these days.

> 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.

Do you have any evidence of this? As someone from a Muslim country, my family universally has stayed in bad marriages. My wife, an American, has a family rife with divorce. (Not just her parents, but the whole community. Many people don’t really realize this—among those with college degrees, almost 80% of marriages will last 20+ years. But among those with just a high school diploma, it’s just 40%. In lower middle class communities, kids with parents who are divorced are the norm.)

It’s not clear to me which one is better for the parents. But unhappy parents seems superior to divorced ones for the kids. The financial and structural disruption on kids from divorce is massive. It’s not just individual, it’s the whole community. In the lower middle class communities where my wife’s family is from, divorce is the norm. And I can see kids suffering from the disruption, and wanting stability, but having no role models and no guidance because most people around them are divorced.

This is obviously anecdotal. I’d be curious to see data—to my knowledge this hasn’t been studied rigorously. To me, the notion that “divorce is a fine outcome for marriage” is something that is counter intuitive enough to require some evidence.

Why does it have to be one or the other?

Some relationships absolutely cause less destruction by ending. Some provide sufficiently despite great flaws.

It doesn’t have to be one or the other at an individual level, but the social and legal norms we create have aggregate effects, not just individual effects, and we should be able to talk about those as a distinct issue. From 1960 to 2010, in the US, the percentage of kids living apart from their fathers has tripled, and the percentage of kids living apart from their mothers has doubled.

My culture (and that of like 3/4 of the world’s population) says that’s a bad thing for kids and society as a whole. I used to think westerners were enlightened and had the right idea on allowing and encouraging individual freedom in this area, but now I think they’ve got it wrong. And it’s hard to really know without focusing on what’s been the aggregate effect.

Why was financial disruption worse than the emotional disruption of a bad marriage? I guess not having enough to eat is worse than an abusive marriage, but do people get into that much financial trouble from divorce usually? What about child support?

I find it hard to imagine a child growing up in a house with two parents who treat each other like shit is worse off than one with a single parent, but who knows?

> Why was financial disruption worse than the emotional disruption of a bad marriage? I guess not having enough to eat is worse than an abusive marriage

Look, I’m not talking about abusive marriages. For people without a college degree, 60% of marriages will end before the kids are independent and in their own two feet. Most of those don’t involve involve abuse.

> but do people get into that much financial trouble from divorce usually?

Yes. For the average middle class family, having to split into two households is incredibly financially disruptive. Most middle class couples aren’t in a position where one person can take over the housing payment alone. That means moving, potentially changing schools, etc. And there’s a ton of other shared expenses that each parent now has to pay separately.

> What about child support?

For a non-college educated man making the median $36,000 a year, child support here in Maryland works out to $567 per month. That doesn’t come close to offsetting the support of the other householder.

Wholly disagree.

Divorced parents are vastly superior to unhappy parents for the happiness and outcomes of the children.

There’s lots of data that is google-able. Children of single parents end up significantly worse off.

> but isn't divorce a pretty healthy outcome to a marriage?

How is this even a question, never the less the most upvoted comment?

No, divorce is not a healthy end to a marriage.

It is a healthy end, if the couple wasn't right from the beginning or if they became different people.

It's unfair to expect two humans to remain compatible their entire lives. We evolve massively. A person i would have married at 18 is not the same i'd marry now.

Which isn't to say that difficulty should be met with break ups. Rather, it's to say that some marriages should end. Both parties would be better off. Other marriages would be better served to have problems met, worked through, and the couple made stronger as a result.

It is a healthy end. If it's a bad marriage.

Divorce is the healthy end to a failed marriage. The unhealthy thing in a marriage is it being failed, and we use divorce as a proxy for that (although not all failed marriages have ended or ended in divorce).

It strikes me that GP is observing that legal divorce is happier than abuse, detachment, resentment, cold war, etc.

I think they have a point.

Why not? Sometimes things just don’t work out. It’s obviously worse than staying together and being happy about it, but it’s a sunk cost fallacy to think you should always repair your marriage instead of finding a new partner.

I disagree. There are two ends to a marriage that I am aware of — death and divorce. Suppose the marriage was one of mental and physical abuse, but ends in death. I think it may have been healthier for that particular marriage to end in divorce.

Here is a more fun question: What is the optimal reproductive strategy that also maximizes the chance that the children also reproduce? I will add as an established fact that daughters has a higher base chance of reproductive success than sons, but sons have higher base variance.

Game theory should always be asked when biology is involved. I am not sure myself on the answer, but it seems more plausible than the article's "teenage girls are annoying" theory or the speculated "son preference" theory. If there is an optimal strategy, such a strategy may result in a small biological effect which makes parents look for a new chance of reproduction once the majority of child investment is done, resulting in the statistical data that shows 20.12% becoming 20.48%.

> How is this even a question, never the less the most upvoted comment? No, divorce is not a healthy end to a marriage.

I think the original comment was referring to divorce being a better outcome in a failed relationship. There are a lot of failed relationships that continue to raise their kids in a disfunctional way and that is not good. A couple who divorces and are on good terms afterwards when raisig their children is way healthier.

A divorce is a much more healthy end to an abusive marriage than the other options. Your blanket statement "divorce is not a healthy end to a marriage" is patently false.

Not an ideal ending, as it negates the fundamental promises of the marital contract. However, it's two peoples' (plus kids maybe) lives at stake. Staying together in a dysfunctional marriage can damage all those lives (with downstream repercussions on even more people). In those circumstances, a divorce can lead to much healthier outcomes.

In those cases, is the tragedy that the marriage ended, or would the tragedy be if it remained?

I think the way the commenter worded it, it sounded like they thought a couple just entering into marriage might sit down and talk about the healthiest outcomes of their marriage and say: "Well, we could stay deeply in love for the next 50 years, or we could get divorced tomorrow. Either way, both equally good options." But that's probably not what they meant.

Agreed. I can’t believe what a massive cultural shift I’m witnessing. Divorce is in no way shape or form a “healthy end” to a marriage. The point of marriage is that it doesn’t end. It is a lifelong commitment.

People evolve and so too should marriages.

Divorce is merely the end of the business relationship of a marriage, not necessarily a social end to the relationship. It should be as healthy as ending any other business relationship.

Why not? If you don't get along the its better to end it than force it. That was the parents meaning. Do you have a counterargument?

Sorry about your situation, but no. It's healthier than some of the worst outcomes but it's far from the top.

A marriage is an enterprise two people join in together, and then go through life doing the really important work of raising children and supporting each other.

Ideally this is accompanied by deep love and passion etc. Short of that, it's done with deep mutual commitment and appreciation of the other person and the work you're doing together.

Way shittier down the line are relationships plagued with resentment and mistrust, that in my experience have more to do with what the people bring into the relationship than their partner (basically: if both people are sane and enter thoughtfully into the marriage, you should not end up here.)

Once you're in that mode, where you don't have it together to work it out and grow together, sure divorce is happier than eternal rancor and abuse, but it's super-down the line.

I think this is important to understand because once you do, you're much more thoughtful about what you're getting into in the first place. I guess it's easier said for me because I married in my later 30s and had the life experience and introspection to know what I want and need and to appreciate my wife (who is different than me in ways that a less mature version of me might resent rather than appreciate)

> Once you're in that mode, where you don't have it together to work it out and grow together, sure divorce is happier than eternal rancor and abuse, but it's super-down the line.

This might be a bit of a trope, but it is at this exact moment that some couples have kids (like my parents did).

Having not been born yet, that was not very down the line from my point of view at all.

Yes, divorce is a good thing, if it's warranted.

I created a new account in case this gets indexed somewhere. I am in my 30s and my own parents are still married, but they should have gotten divorced a long time ago. They never did, "because of the kids" and it pains me. They are fucking miserable. I have not seen them lovingly kiss each other in at least 3 decades (I only remember once when I was a toddler). They do not have intercourse of any kind, sleep in separate bedrooms, fight constantly, my dad has been having affairs (unsure if my mom knows about them, I doubt it would change anything if she did), all because they are too ashamed to get divorced, and at this point, they're too old to do it.

Of course looking in from the outside they seem like a happy couple - always went to social functions together, etc. But on the inside, definitely not. I always wonder once you take out the marriages that end in divorce, how many of the ones left are like my parents - happy on the outside, fucking miserable on the inside. In my own experience, the vast majority of friends' parents have been divorced, sometimes multiple times, and I already have friends my age who were married and divorced.

Needless to say, I am in no rush to get married, even in my 30s. I do have relationships when it's right, but I don't let society tell me if or when I should be getting married, if ever. It's way too big a risk to my personal happiness.

Unfortunately, my marriage resembles that of your parents. My only counterpoint to your belief that they would be happier if they divorced, is to suggest you may be minimizing they value they get from stability and certainty.

There’s value in knowing who’s going to care for you when you get cancer, even if there’s a lot of animosity now.

> isn't divorce a pretty healthy outcome to a marriage?

It's a bit of a provocative way of saying things, but I am surprised at how conservative (in the social sense, not political) the other comments are, defending traditional family values and arguing that divorce is always a failure

Divorce can _absolutely_ be a healthy outcome to a marriage. If your marriage doesn't work after a time, the healthy option is to stop it. You can argue that you should try to "save your marriage"... but if neither you or your partner really wants to, why would you have this duty to try and salvage it rather than move on? At least if you don't have kids, as divorce tends to have bad impact on them apparently, although I think it's mostly because they're brought up in a society that teaches that divorce is failure and that a family is a mom and a dad.

Of course nobody is saying that divorce is "the most healthy" outcome, it's just "pretty healthy" in a whole range of situation, though not all. And there's divorce and divorce: sometimes it involves incredible drama, fighting and stress (not very healthy, although staying married probably would be worse in this case), and sometimes it's smooth, shake hands and go your own way.

Anecdotally: my parents divorced when I was ~15. It was smooth as far as I could see, although I imagine that unfun things happened that led to this. It made absolutely no difference to me, and I saw them bloom and be happier than I ever saw them: my father went from being a 9-5 robot to doing sports, be involved in local associations and take an unexpected interest in african art. My mom started doing photography and developped a passion for dance. I entirely credit their divorce for how much happier and interesting they got!

I haven't read anything about divorce always being a failure (or not yet).

If you get all your input from non-engineering journalists, comedians, talking heads, etc, you may never encounter any differing opinions; just as if 100 years ago you'd have believed divorce is always bad from those same people, and been surprised at what engineers said about how it can be occasionally a good thing.

I think it depends. Financially, if you're a man, no. Most family law courts favor women.

Relationship-wise, if you're a woman, no. Odds are if you're getting divorced as a woman past her 30s, it'll be harder for you to find a partner as opposed to when you were in your 20s (when the woman should be finding a potential husband). Especially if you're a single mother. High-quality men have no desire to raise someone else's kids.

So, imo, divorce can be so lose-lose unless the man and woman are both past 50s. At that point, the kids are grown up and both partners are hopefully financially secure without the need of one another.

Hard disagree on the statement "High-quality men have no desire to raise someone else's kids" based on my experience with an amazing step father and a father who himself has been an excellent step father.

I might even venture to say that having the heart to care well for children who are not genetically your own is part of being a high quality man.

> High-quality men have no desire to raise someone else's kids

Generally I agree. There are exceptions, especially if the biological father is totally out of the equation. A friend married a woman who already had a kid. Father had vanished, had no interest. He legally adopted the kid, and they had several more together, he considers them all as his own.

> it'll be harder for you to find a partner as opposed to when you were in your 20s (when the woman should be finding a potential husband)

I feel like we just went back in time 80 years. No, women don't need to spend their 20's finding a husband. They can have also go to school, volunteer, have friends, start a career. You know - the things men can do.

> High-quality men have no desire to raise someone else's kids

What does this even mean? Let me guess - you are a high-quality man?

This comment is so backwards.

Your comment about high quality men is way off the mark. Fathers of other men’s offspring are among the highest quality men. Who wouldn’t want to review their potential child before committing?

I agree. Also not to get too autobiographical, but life was much easier for me and my siblings after divorce than having to deal with constant fights. Divorce can be a positive outcome, especially if it can be done amicably.

> Divorce can be a positive outcome

This doesn’t pass the universality test - would it be positive if all marriages ended in divorce?

Lots of “bad” outcomes become good given circumstances, but they are still not universally good:

“Amputation can be a positive outcome, especially if gangrene has started”

> isn't divorce a pretty healthy outcome to a marriage

Isn't bankrupcy a pretty healthy outcome to a business?

Isn't death a pretty healthy outcome to life?

Isn't coup a pretty healthy outcome to a country?

Isn't segfault a pretty healthy outcome to program?

> Isn't segfault a pretty healthy outcome to program?

I don't know much about the other ones but segfault is definitely healthier than a buggy program being allowed to write at address 0 or continuing arithmetics after division by 0.

> Isn't segfault a pretty healthy outcome to program?

I remember when Firefox's crash recovery got so good, and its normal shutdown process took so long, that someone suggested that it should just crash when the user hit the exit button.

> Isn't bankrupcy a pretty healthy outcome to a business?

Absolutely, especially when the alternative is financial ruin because you didn’t take legal remedies available to you.

People get caught up in absolutes because they fit in a nice box, but most of the time life is messier.

> Isn't death a pretty healthy outcome to life?

I mean, since it's the inevitable end result no matter what actions one takes in their life, yes?

> Isn't segfault a pretty healthy outcome to program?

Pardon the snark: http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/318

A single parent household leads to worse outcomes for children in pretty much every single metric you can think of.

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

If you could measure what would have happened if parents stayed together then yes. But parents break up for a reason, and trying to put that back together makes zero sense. In the US, a large minority of single parents have fathers who have spent time in jail...is it a good idea to put a child into that environment? Probably not.

And the main issue with single parents is income/income instability (which is why there are focused benefits in many countries for single parents). As ever, an income issue gets classed as something else.

> 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.

From a financial standpoint, probably.

Children not encountering lies, strife, or emotional disattachment on a daily basis anymore seems a significant improvement, however.

Not the healthiest of outcomes but could be healthier than others.

Kind of like saying the most healthy outcome is getting fired or rage quitting. It could be but once you found the job you signed a contract for life for, retiring is the healthiest outcome.

The parent didn't say "most healthy", they said "pretty healthy". I think we all agree that the "most healthy" outcome is to be happy and fulfilled as a couple forever.

> Kind of like saying the most healthy outcome is getting fired or rage quitting

I don't agree, a closer analogy (keeping in mind that all analogies have limits) would be to say that a _pretty_ good outcome to taking a job is to quit. Which doesn't seem particularly controversial, there's plenty of situations where quitting is a perfectly reasonable and healthy choice, even if you don't have an abusive relationship with your workplace.

This is an interesting perspective.

People tend to associate single-parenthood as source of many problems based on statistics. But I wonder if those are simply correlation and not causation. i.e. people with certain traits are more prone to get divorced, and it could be those traits, and not divorce itself causes most other issues in their children. But it's easier to measure divorce rates than personality traits.

More likely the traits of both people. There are people who study the factors that predict divorce. https://www.gottman.com

It's both.

> Not to get too autobiographical here, but isn't divorce a pretty healthy outcome to a marriage?

i guess it isn't very healthy for the kids. http://marripedia.org/effects_of_divorce_on_children_s_healt...

The intended comparison is presumably not be to all marriages, but to marriages which are strained enough for divorce to become a question. I don’t know what good data on that would look like.

Perhaps ‘Outcomes for children of parents who went to marriage counselling’

Even then, couples that get counselling are probably a healthier subset of all marriages than would make for an ideal reference.

It's not a healthy outcome to marriage. You don't get married to be divorced later. The problem is that our society has out-advanced marriage but people still did not realize it (although marriage rate are trending lower).

Marriage made sense when the population was sparse, the parents needed workforce, and the woman needed protection. Most of that doesn't apply today. Marriage is mostly a "reliquat" from former society's traditions.

>but isn't divorce a pretty healthy outcome to a marriage?

Could be and then it would mean marriage is not ‘healthy’ in the first place? Which could be by the way.

What if it’s so by design? I mean it’s very difficult to come up with one design that works for ‘all’. Not a trivial task I would say and isn’t it destine for failure?

Define healthy.

It's explicitly the outcome almost every married couple agrees they don't want upfront. So something has failed by that point.

It's not unhealthy in the sense that no one gets sick or physically injured I suppose?

This is definitely one of the more bizarre things I've ever seen written on here.

I meant that compared to 40 more years of resentment, divorcing and possibly finding a healthier relationship seems worthwhile.

There are worse outcomes but it is a poor outcome. It is best viewed as the best worst-case exit strategy.

It’s a healthy outcome for a bad marriage.

There’s really bad statistics for the children of divorced parents. It may be healthy in your some cases but it’s damaging to the child.

Nuke it from orbit, its the only way to be sure.

Is anger and strife a healthy outcome to a public vow?

No, that's why the spouses should get a divorce :).

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.

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.

Childless parents as a result of self aborting male fetuses would not show up in the study.

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.

This doesn’t effect the result. They are comparing people with children. If you didn’t have children or aborted a child it’s the same as not getting married. You simply aren’t part of the study because you are irrelevant for the same reason that a kangaroo is irrelevant to the study.

A disproportionate amount of parents with first born daughters over sons is inconsequential because they are measuring the percentage of divorces for each population, not the total number of divorces for each population.

The logic she uses here is really far fetched and unlikely to be true so you really need statistical causal links in order to say anything substantial. I mean her disclosure also discloses a possible bias. She may not have the ability to admit that she her self was the causal factor in her own parents divorce.

But how does this explain the difference between first and second born daughters?

It doesn’t. The difference is that all teenagers become difficult. But girls are often worse.

If parents have already seen a boy go through their teenage years, they’ll be better prepared for the grief a 12-year-old girl can cause.

Also, anecdotally, a close friend of mine had a very difficult older sister. The younger siblings witnessed her bad behaviour, and decided not to repeat the theatrics.

> 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.

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.

This is the opposite of what I teach my sons about men and women. The truth is, women are every bit as capable of being shitheads as men. Gender plays zero role in a person’s capacity to empathize, be trustworthy, and love. I think we set men up for failure when we encourage them to put women on a pedestal. There’s the risk they do that and don’t get the results they’re after and develop a strong bias against women—all because they’ve been misinformed their whole life about gender roles and behavior.

I think GP is saying women face greater risk than men in dating and society. (I’m using man/woman here instead of male/female as the former seems less clinical)

I honestly wonder at this and prefer to not take a stance as I have too little information. Watching some reflections from transgender people after their transitions may help. I’ve heard female to male trans report society treating men with much less care. Meanwhile I imagine women get a lot more engagement from society than men.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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...

Suicide attempts, however, are far higher in females: 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

I'm worried about this trend too. I saw an ad the other day that started with talking about how much time and effort women need to spend on beauty etc. My thought while watching this part was "This is horrible, we should encourage less of this."

But instead of this conclusion, the ad concluded with "If women have to put this much effort in, men should step up and start putting in more effort. Here's a product we make so men can put in more effort." I found it absurd!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not just themselves, but those around them as well. The only defense is that they usually telegraph their headbutts, if you keep your eyes on them when they're within striking distance.

I have a son who is a toddler right now, very well put - "ingenuity" made me laugh.

The Economist (relatively) recently featured a long article about the modern lives of adolescent girls: https://archive.is/OGxxk.

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.

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-...

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-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.

>with no indication that even at the third and later generations these preferences are lost

That's likely an unintended side effect of the change in western attitudes on integration, going from "conform" to "melting pot" and now to "cultural stew". The pressure to adapt to the new country's values is less than it used to be while it is also encouraged for cultural communities to form and persist. Beyond that, the revolution in cheap global communications likely as plays a role, as cultural values can be reinforced in the new country from the source country. It may be that the only way to change the attitudes towards gender in the Canadian-Indian community will be to change those attitudes in India itself. That of course gets us into the messy territory of cultural imperialism.

I’ve known a few Indian women who suggested I would be disappointed if I had girls. I never had the courage to ask I if they hated their own existence or something.

Wait, how are they able to do this? Do they selectively abort on sex determination? I suppose sex determination isn't illegal in North America like it is in South Asia.

I have an Indian-american friend. His sisters were allowed to marry whomever they wanted, but his parents nearly disowned him when he married a white non-Hindu, since it was his sole responsibility to carry on the family. Years later his mom still will not talk to his wife.

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For anyone passing by, if you say quips like 'go find someone else' don’t be surprised when your partner does

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.

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).

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.

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.

weird. I'd only be content with a daughter. A son would worry me

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.

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.

Most boys learn to mask their emotional state once the teenage years roll around owing to various vectors of messaging. I fear too many people are relieved by the ease of interface this brings about, but it can and usually is very deceptive. The consequent lack of communication just makes a void that gets filled with all sorts of terrible information about being "CHAD OR NOT" amongst other garbage that has to be unlearned.

Our culture doesn't have a lot of coming of age rituals or expectations. Lack of purpose and responsibility does not do good things to people or societies. Ambiguity in self identity can lead to emotional and psychological isolation, and things like loneliness epidemics. I totally agree with the need for communication, expectations/helping set goals, and love is spelled T.I.M.E.

Yep, it starts really early in grade school with the relentless teasing boys receive for crying. You learn to bottle that shit up by 4th grade to make it as a “big kid”.

Yes. Unfortunately the society as a whole still dont recognise it as a problem. I am generally MUCH more worried about my boys in the modern world than my girls.

Suicide statistics would seem to correlate:

(edit: changed link, didn't realize how spammy statista.com is)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States

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.

Not to be snide, but was wondering if the number of bathrooms available in a family might matter. Growing up with sisters, that was a frequent source of tension.

Funny, I’m also the youngest of 3 boys and 4 girls.

I have two boys age 8 and 11. It’s nontrivial keeping a boy alive between the ages of 3 and about 6. We’ve been in the ER so many times for stitches and other care that I asked if they had a rewards system or like a punch card for a free visit.

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.

With 7 kids, you're close to crossing over from "anecdotal" into "dataset" territory.

Do you think if this a difference between the nature of genders or a difference emerging due to how parents and/or society treats boys and girls differently?

I have two sons and two daughters. What you described is exactly my experience.

Be careful what you wish for.

Seven is a fair amount! Any tips that those of us with two may have missed?

Your description of boys sounds like my 6 year old daughter. Except she's also emotional, moody, and can go from 0 to 60 in half a second. Can't wait till the teenage years, I'm sure that'll be a blast. Luckily our twin 3 year olds (boy/girl) are much easier so far.

I've overheard parents talk about how easy daughters are. Always made me laugh a little.

Mine are currently the opposite. My daughter (10) has been a handful pretty much since she turned three. Love her to pieces, but nothing about raising her is easy. My son (8) is super relaxed, laid back, compliant. He gets into fights with his sister, but she is the one who picks the fights. She's also much larger than he is, which does not help.

Girls calmer in their younger years? I have some outliers then! Hopefully it means we’re prepared for teenage :-)

Exactly the opposite for my family.

> Though by then the damage has already been done.

Wow that sounds severe, what damage was done?

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"

>"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.

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!

Would you mind detailing the "diminished empathy"? Is this related to the daughters somehow and would things have been different if they were boys?

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.

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.

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?

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.

There is considerably less drama with my three teenagers (combined) than I witnessed growing up with my one sister.

Or that the sisters help?

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

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.

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

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

>"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_B...

> 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?

I have an older sister who was the first child, and my oldest child is currently a 13 year old girl.

Girls go through very negative emotions between ages 12 and 18. These can be very challenging for a family. PM me for details!

This 5-year-longitudinal study from the Netherlands backs up my anecdotal assertion, adolescents are difficult, girls are slightly worse, and it starts really horribly at 12/13 then eases off as they approach adulthood: https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cdev.12...

Here’s an article with advice on how to cope from the NHS: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/copi...

Contact info?

He has seen his parents go through the same process.

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.

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.

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.

... 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)

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

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.

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.

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?

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!

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

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.

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

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

The easiest way is to use a browser plugin, I use this one that works well:

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

That one's for chrome but I'm sure you can find similar for other browsers too.

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.

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/copi...

http://archive.today/BsXXr

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.

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.

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. "

any link to full article or paper?

paywalled and on mobile

https://academic.oup.com/ej/advance-article-abstract/doi/10....

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

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-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.

That’s quite a leap at the end.

You’re saying 0.6% of fathers sexually abuse a daughter?

As awful as it may be, that doesn't sound so far-fetched to me.

1/4 woman and 1/7 men have been "victims of severe physical violence [...] by an intimate partner in their lifetime." That's 25% for women! Very different statistic, but it does provide perspective. Is GP's 0.6% so implausible?

---

Source for the above is https://ncadv.org/STATISTICS. This is just what came up in a quick Google search, but it was inline with what I recalled reading in the past.

Yeah... what? Wow. Just really took a turn there all of a sudden.

I haven't seen any studies putting the prevalence of father-daughter incest as low as 0.6%. I believe that a quick google scholar search will lead you to guesstimate a figure about 10x higher than that (at the low end) but it depends on how the populations have been sampled, what the definition of incest is, and how surveys are worded.

But in any case, sounds like GP is saying that the difference in prevalence of incest between boys and girls could lead to a difference of 0.6% in divorce rates. Which is quite a different hypothesis.

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_... 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.

Maybe not that. I am thinking something along the lines of "Have more stringent, less rational parenting techniques towards daughters" which would not necessarily be sexual.

Probably a lot more than that.

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.

the article is behind a paywall

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.

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

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

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

Wait what? This is a massive generalization. I’m hoping to have a daughter soon.

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.

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)

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

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.

The title has changed.

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.

> 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...

In reality daughters are getting all these ideas about how to behave from their friends and from contemporary popular culture.

So actually what is happening is a struggle between parental advice, and outsider influence.

Now I find it interesting how you immediately make the jump and accuse the father (and it's also interesting that you single out the father) to be the bad guy. Dare I say outsiders don't give a shit about the daughter and their influence over her is very likely much more negative?

It isn't a jump. It's a deduction made from the second paragraph: dads primed to empathize with their daughters seem to be immune to this. I'd conjecture that dads without sisters, who had close (non-romantic) friendships with girls in their teens, are also less inclined to this friction.

If he’s a four-year old or younger, I’d just give it time. Trying to do anything even minutely like MDMA therapy would be massive overkill. Four-year-olds are narcissists just getting used to cooperative play with other kids.

Show that you take your responsibility as a step parent as a duty, even if he says he hates you (the best reaction to that is to unemotionally and calmly make it clear your parental role is unconditional, e.g. ‘ok, but i’m still your stepdad and i love you.’) Or: ‘ok, you feel how you feel but it’s still my job to help you brush your teeth.’

Give him low pressure opportunities to do things with you, don’t force anything that isn’t necessary.

Don’t expect too much right now, you are likely connected to some trauma in his life, and no four year old likes to be forced to do anything.

If he’s younger than four, it all applies doubly.

Stepmom, actually. Just because I contemplate a thing doesn't mean I'm seriously interested in attempting it. I'm a problem solver, and out-of-the-box thinking requires contemplation of bad ideas. And yeah, your advice is in line with my actual approach to the situation. But sometimes I worry that I don't have enough compassion for him, which planted the seed of me needing the MDMA treatment. Sometimes bad ideas just need some rework to get a genuine out-of-the-box solution.

> 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...

And which side do you think those one-sided interpersonal problems are on?

FWIW if you were my step parent and you seriously considered this to be a potential solution I wouldn't want you to be part of my life either. Maybe approach this from the other viewpoint: your stepchild does not want you in their life because they want someone else in their life instead. It never was about you in the first place.

> And which side do you think those one-sided interpersonal problems are on?

Mine! Did you even read what I said? Y'all having trouble with that "generous interpretation" here.

> It never was about you in the first place.

No, it's about his wellbeing. He would be happier if he was happy to have me around. He'd be better off not spiting himself simply for the purpose of defiance.

> 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.)

> 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

He currently doesn't want (you) to be a part of his life

Considering he's not even in elementary school yet, I wouldn't worry too much about it right now. I'm not a parent, but it seems to me like 4-5 year olds or younger aren't the most rational or emotionally-developed people.

Just be a good person/parent and I imagine he'll warm up to you as he gets older.

Pretty sure a cornerstone of gender studies is the idea that patriarchy is self-perpetuating - that is women learn and suffer from norms which they then push on other women. Is it not just as likely a wife was taught "the way women should dress and act to be "happy"" and tries to force it on her daughter despite opposition from the father?

> I have friction with my stepchild. He doesn't want me to be a part of his life. [...] he's not even in elementary school yet

Just be an adult, keep working at the relationship. Spend time being there, available for the play that children enjoy. Be open, let the child lead the stories and tell you things. If there is a preschool, visit and volunteer. It can be easier if the other parent is not there while you play.

> I wonder if one-sided interpersonal problems like this can be addressed by giving the adult MDMA and the child a placebo...

Had to laugh at this, you know what you are doing, it will work out.

You've described this as a one sided issue, which makes it sound like you see your worldview as correct and are seeking a way to get the child to adjust his viewpoint.

Some empathy, rather than drugging the child, might help. Try and understand where he is coming from and be honest with yourself about whether there are things that you are doing that could be contributing to a rift.

If you read carefully, you might notice that I'm suggesting that the parent is the one who needs more empathy; that the parent is the one who I'm willing to entertain the thought of "drugging".

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