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Abstract
Several hypotheses concerning the relations between probabilities of marital separation and the presence, number, and timing of children are explored using data that were collected as part of the 1970 National Fertility Study. Overall the analyses provided only weak support for connections between childbearing and marital dissolution that had been suggested in previous literature.
Several analyses explored levels of separation and of fertility separately for black and for white respondents by factors that have been observed to be related to both: age at marriage, education, religion, year of marriage, status of first birth, and age at first birth. While these factors established categories that generally discriminated well between high and low cumulative fertility and probabilities of separation, there was little evidence that within each category the number of children was related to probabilities of separation. Multiple decrement life tables were used to explore parity-specific probabilities of separation by interval from the birth of each child. Among whites there was only weak support for a U-shaped relation between number of children and separation; among blacks, there was no discernible connection. These analyses failed to support the hypothesis that the presence of a preschool child is a deterrent to separation.
For respondents married before 1960, the presence of a child was shown to be related to lower separation probabilities when compared with women with no children. This reduction was attenuated among women married between 1960 and 1964, and was not observed among women married after 1965.
Two aspects of the timing of childbearing within marriage were related to subsequent probabilities of separation. Women who had a child at a relatively early duration of marriage with respect to the durations at which all births of that order occurred were more likely to separate than women who had a birth at a relatively later duration. Women who reported that a child was wanted but had been born earlier than they preferred, and women who reported that they did not want that child, were more likely to separate than women who had children only when they wanted them.
