Ruth Institute Blog

This is interesting. Yet another reason having kids is a good thing.

by Carolyn Moynihan

A study showing the contagious nature of divorce among social networks has been receiving a good bit of attention this week. Not only friends, siblings and people you work with, but also friends of friends are more likely to divorce if you do. Children can protect you from this contagion (although not, apparently, from more direct causes of divorce) — the more children the better.

The report is based on the Framingham Heart Study — a longitudinal study of the population of a small Massachusetts town near Boston which was started in 1948 to investigate risk for heart disease. Now it seems to shed some light on matters of the heart in a figurative sense — focusing again on “disease”.

The Guardian summarises:

The researchers have called it “divorce clustering” and say that a split up between immediate friends increases your own chances of getting divorced by 75%. The effect drops to 33% if the divorce is between friends of a friend, what the researchers call two degrees of separation, then disappears almost completely at three degrees of separation. It is not only the marital status of friends but also siblings and colleagues which has a significant effect on how long your own marriage might last. Breaking up will catch on among your friends, and the more divorcees you know, the higher your own chances of becoming one.

The bit about children seems contradictory at first, but, after reading the whole report, the story seems to be this: statistically, the presence of children in a marriage did not correlate with a lower divorce rate; but when the researchers looked at the interaction between the divorce status of an “alter” (friend, sibling, co-worker) and the number of children an “ego” (the focal persons in the study) has, they found that each additional child significantly “reduces the effect of alter’s divorce status on ego’s likelihood of getting divorced.” The authors continue:

For couples with no children the effect is much stronger than average—an alter who is divorced nearly sextuples the risk of divorce in the ego (593%, C.I. 106% to 1593%). But by the time a person has a third child, the effect of alter’s divorce status becomes insignificant (84%, C.I. –33% to 306%) and by the fifth child it completely vanishes (–4%, C.I. –86% to 233%). These results suggest that the protective effect of children acts specifically on a parent’s susceptibility to influence by peers who have gotten divorced.

Here is another interesting snippet about the effect of social networks on fertility and adolescent sex:

Read more.