CHILDRENS RISKS OF EXPERIENCING DIVORCE AND REMARRIAGE - DO DISABLED-CHILDREN DESTABILIZE MARRIAGES

In this paper, U.S. data from the 1981 Child Health Supplement are used to estimate the effect of a child's disability or serious chronic illness on: (1) the risk of the parents' divorcing before the child reaches the age of 11, and (2) the mother's chances of remarriage after divorce. Divorce is significantly more common among the parents of disabled or sickly children than among those of healthy children, and these disruptive effects of a child's frailty are even stronger when children are between six and nine years old than when they are younger. Possibly, divorce only becomes a viable option for some parents once a sickly child had started to spend part of the day away from home, in school. In contrast, a child's health status does not predict the mother's waiting time to remarriage. A range of potentially confounding demographic factors are controlled in the models, and their effects on children's chances of experiencing parental divorce are as expected. For example, having a mother who married young significantly predicts parental divorce.