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Cited by 414

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 26 of the 26 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Children and Marital Disruption

Waite, Linda J., Lillard, Lee A.·1991·American Journal of Sociology

Abstract

Children constitute the prime example of "marital-specific capital," a resource worth substantially more inside a marriage than outside it. This article examines the effect of children on marital stability, using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and tests the propositions that (1)children enhance marital stability, (2) younger children increase stability more than older children, and (3) under some circumstances children have no stabilizing effect or even increase chances that their parents' marriage will end. A proportional hazards model in continuous time is estimated and the modified to accommodate key features of the data. The results indicate that fistborn children increase the stability of marriage through their preschool years. Other children increase marital stability only when they are very young. Older children and children born before marriage significantly increase chances of disruption. The initially stabilizing and later destabilizing effects of children combine over the course of the marriage to give parents only a modestly higher change than childless couples of reaching their twentieth wedding annivesary.

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Metadata

Authors
Waite, L. J., & Lillard, L. A.
Venue
American Journal of Sociology
Published
1991-01
Volume
96
Issue
4
Pages
930-953
ISSN
  • 0002-9602 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-5390
OpenAlex
W2077808307
Cited by
414
References
26
FWCI
20.30
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Children and Marital Disruption. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/229613
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Waite, L. J., & Lillard, L. A. (1991). Children and Marital Disruption. American Journal of Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1086/229613

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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.