The Risk of Divorce as a Barrier to Marriage among Parents of Young Children

Drawing on data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we examine how unmarried parents’ risk of divorce influences their decision to delay marriage. We first use the sample of initially married mothers in the study to estimate their probability of marital dissolution as a function of individual, relationship, and contextual variables. We then use the parameters from that logistic regression to calculate a dissolution propensity for parents who were unmarried at the time of their child’s birth and examine the association between the dissolution propensity and these parents’ transition to marriage within three years. Regression results show that unmarried parents with a high predicted probability of marital dissolution had significantly and substantially lower odds of marriage even after taking into account the quality of their relationship and other factors expected to influence marriage transitions. Because our dissolution propensity also includes a measure of the local divorce climate, our results provide empirical support for the argument that high rates of divorce in the population have led to a fear of divorce among unmarried parents of young children which reduces their probability of marriage.