The Impact of Children on Divorce Risks of Swedish Women

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of children on divorce risks in 1971–1994 for first-married Swedish women. This impact is examined using two measures of family composition, namely the number of children and the age of the youngest child, and we find an independent effect from each of these factors on the propensity to divorce. There is an additional impact of births prior to marriage on the subsequent divorce risk. We present time series of divorce risks for women with different types of children, showing trends for both the factors of parity and age of youngest child. The general picture of Swedish divorce-risk trends shows a strong increase in 1974, mostly among childless women, in response to a reform of the divorce legislation. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the risks have increased steadily, mostly among mothers. Our study is performed by indirect standardization of register data and we also control for the effects of age at and duration of marriage.