Fathers' and Mothers' Expectations about Child Rearing after Divorce: Does Anticipating Difficulty Reduce the Chance of Divorce?

Anne-Rigt Poortman, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Judith A. Seltzer, University of California, Los Angeles

This paper investigates how married parents' expectations about whether children will live with them and about the difficulty of child rearing after divorce affect whether the parents stay together or end their marriage. We use longitudinal data from the National Survey of Families and Households to examine the effect on divorce of married mothers' and fathers' explicit evaluations of whether being a parent would be worse if they divorced. We also estimate the effect on divorce of the predicted probability that children will live with their mother (or father) after divorce. The prediction of living arrangements takes account of the nonrandom selection into divorce. The paper considers both fathers' and mothers' attitudes as well as the potentially offsetting effects of expected social and economic costs of divorce.