Abstract
Previous research has shown that the number of children, their age and the timing of births relative to marriage are associated with the stability of the parental marital union. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of children in this multidimensional association as a determinant of disruption in Italy, a country where this research question is particularly interesting because of the traditional vision of the family, in terms of formation and dissolution procedures, family and gender roles, and obligations among family members. The relative risk of marital disruption is estimated using some discrete time event-history models. As expected, the findings show that children born in the marriage have a large protective effect on marital stability, a sizeable portion of which is not due to the children’s age. Conversely, children born out of wedlock do not inhibit marital disruption, but neither do they increase the risk as they do in other countries. This is probably because of the type of reproductive behaviour widespread in Italy.
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Notes
This argument based on such a vision of the family has been widely criticized (e. g., see Oppenheimer 1977).
In the United States, research on the effect of children on marital stability was conducted mainly during 1970s and 1980s. In more recent studies on marital dissolution, the effect of children is sometimes considered as a control variable (see e.g., Tzeng and Mare 1995; Hoffman and Duncan 1995; Weiss and Willis 1997; South 2001). All these studies confirm the positive association between children and marital stability.
In these studies, the number of children born in the marriage is categorized as follows: no children, one child, two or more children. Consequently, it is not possible to check for differences in the effect of children on the stability of the parental marriage between medium and large families.
The age of children is categorized into two wide age ranges (0–6 and 7 or more).
In Italy, the appropriate indicator of marital instability is legal separation, rather than divorce (Barbagli 1990; Barbagli and Saraceno 1998). This is due to the strict legislation regulating the procedure for marriage dissolution: in order to obtain a divorce, a couple must wait at least three years after the decree of legal separation. Hence, legal separation is the first, essential step in order to formally end a marital relationship, while divorce is granted only some years later. The event of legal separation does not coincide with the effective break-up of the marital couple, but unfortunately the variable concerning the year of de facto separation is seldom available in the Families and Social Subjects Survey.
It should be pointed out that area of residence, education and religious commitment are so-called anticipatory variables, i.e., variables whose values refer to what is attained by the date of the survey but are used to explain events in life course which occurred before the survey. Considering these variables as determinants of marital disruption causes a time inconsistency because data that pertain to the date of the survey become less and less informative, the further the date of marital disruption is from the date of the survey. For this reason, the estimates of these variables could be biased. However, this problem should not jeopardize the validity of the study’s findings, because the anticipatory variables are included in the models as control variables, and their effect on the risk of marital disruption is not a matter of interest.
Some brief preliminary remarks are in order before focusing attention on the association between children and marital stability. Because of the structural characteristics of the binomial logistic regression, it was sometimes necessary to change the reference category of the independent variables of main interest when running the models in order to fully understand the findings of the analysis. The comments that follow apply not only to Table 1, but also to the figures of the models with the different reference categories used in the analysis. These figures are not shown here for space reasons, but are available on demand from the author. Table 1 gives the figures of the models with the reference categories chosen in order to facilitate interpreting the effects of the other categories.
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Acknowledgment
The author wishes to thank Manuela Naldini and Daniele Vignoli for their helpful comments.
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Todesco, L. A Matter of Number, Age or Marriage? Children and Marital Dissolution in Italy. Popul Res Policy Rev 30, 313–332 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-010-9190-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-010-9190-1