来源：《经济学人》
日期：2021年2月6日
Daughters have long been linked with divorce. Several studies conducted in America since the 1980s provide strong evidence that a couple’s first-born being a girl increases the likelihood of their subsequently splitting up. At the time, the researchers speculated that this was an expression of “son preference”, a phenomenon which, in its most extreme form, manifests itself as the selective abortion or infanticide of female offspring.
长期以来，人们一直把女儿与离婚联系在一起。自20世纪80年代以来在美国进行的几项研究提供了强有力的证据，表明一对夫妇的第一个孩子是女孩会增加他们随后离婚的可能性。当时，研究人员推测，这是一种“重男轻女”的表现，这种现象最极端的表现形式，是堕掉女胎儿或杀死女婴。
Work published in the Economic Journal, however, explodes that particular idea. In “Daughters and Divorce”, Jan Kabatek of the University of Melbourne and David Ribar of Georgia State University, confirm that having a female first-born does indeed increase the risk of that child’s parents divorcing, in both America and the Netherlands. 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. 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. Instead, he argues, the fact that the risk is so age-specific requires a different explanation, namely that parents quarrel more over the upbringing of teenage daughters than of teenage sons.
然而，发表在《经济杂志》上的研究推翻了这一观点。在《女儿与离婚》一书中，墨尔本大学的Kabatek和乔治亚州立大学的Ribar证实，在美国和荷兰，头胎是女性确实会增加夫妇离婚的风险。但是，与之前的研究不同的是，他们的研究还关注了女孩年龄的影响。研究发现，女儿导致离婚的风险只有在头胎女儿十几岁的时候才会出现。在12岁之前，女儿与夫妇离婚的关系并不比儿子大。“如果父亲真的因为更喜欢儿子而更有可能离开，他们肯定不会等13年才这么做，”Kabatek博士解释道。相反，他认为，特定年龄离婚风险才变高，这一事实需要另一种解释，即父母在抚养未成年女儿方面的争吵多于抚养未成年儿子。
The daughter effect, though real, is small. In the Netherlands, by the time their first-born is 18, 20.12% of couples will have divorced if that child is a son, compared with 20.48% if she is a daughter—an increase in probability of 1.8%. 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. In America, for which the data the researchers collected were less than those in the Netherlands, the numbers are roughly double this.
女儿效应虽然真实存在，但很微小。在荷兰，当第一个孩子18岁时，如果孩子是儿子，20.12%的夫妇已经离婚，而如果是女儿，离婚的概率是20.48%，女孩比男孩高了1.8%。但是在第一个孩子年龄在13岁到18岁之间的五年里，这个差异上升到了5%。当孩子15岁的时候，这个数据达到峰值，为9%。在美国，研究人员收集到的数据比荷兰少，这些数据大约是荷兰的两倍。
Anyone who has—or has been—a teenager knows how turbulent those years can be. Surveys confirm that teenage daughters and fathers, in particular, get on each other’s nerves. They also show that parents of teenage daughters argue more about parenting than do the parents of sons, and that mothers of teenage daughters report significantly more disagreements with their partners over money, and become more open to the idea of divorce. 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.
任何一个曾经养育过青少年或曾经是青少年的人都知道那段岁月是多么动荡不安。调查证实，十几岁的女儿和父亲，尤其让对方感到心烦。研究还表明，与儿子的父母相比，十几岁女儿的父母在养育子女方面争论更多，有十几岁女儿的母亲与伴侣在金钱问题上的分歧明显更多，对离婚的想法也更开放。早前的研究还显示，父母争吵最常见的问题之一是他们应该在多大程度上控制自己子女的个人选择，比如他们的着装、约会对象和工作地点。