Abstract

PIP: An extensive literature demonstrates a negative correlation between the presence of children and marital quality. Few of these studies are designed to test the reasons for this relationship. This study examines 2 possible paths: that people who choose to have children differ from those who do not in ways that affect marital quality, and that having a child changes marital structure and process. This research is based on a nationwide sample interviewed 1st in 1980 and again in 1983. In 1980, telephone interviews were conducted with 2,033 married individuals. The analysis of the effects of transition to parenthood is restricted to the 220 individuals who met the following conditions: childless in 1980, wife under 35 in 1980, successfully reintterviewed in 1983, and marriage intact between 1980-3. The results of the analysis support neither hypotheses. Prior to the birth of the child, parents and nonparents do not differ in marital interaction, happiness, disagreements, problems, or traditionalism in the division of labor, though future parents are already somewhat more likely to believe that the division of household labor is unfair. In regard to the argument that a new baby causes negative changes in marital structure and process, these data give only weak support. The sharpest difference found in this analysis is in the propensity to divorce or permanently separate, a propensity substantially greater among the nonparents. The greater willingness of childless couples to divorce means that a continuing sample of childless couples is more highly selected for marital happiness than a continuing sample of parents. This selectivity in divorce rather than the direct effect of children seems to be the major reason that cross-sectional comparisons show parents to be somewhat less happy than nonparents.