Girl children make it easier for a wife to divorce her husband, a psychologist is prosing in a radical new look at an old conundrum.

“We’ve known for years that parents of girls divorce more,” Dr. Anita Kelly said Wednesday in an interview with the Star. “That’s been interpreted as boys hold marriages together.”

What if that’s backwards, Kelly thought. What if what was really happening was that girl children were providing the emotional and home support for their mothers to the point where the women didn’t need their husbands?

Kelly, a professor at the University of Notre Dame, floated the idea on her Psychology Today blog and is preparing grant material to launch empirical tests to find out what’s behind the phenomenon.

“This is not a trivial difference. For parents with three girls versus three boys, the rate of divorce is almost 10 per cent higher. This is really, really incredible and it’s happening in many countries.”

The initial 2003 research found the 10 per cent figure and also that in general girls versus boys led to at least a 5 per cent higher divorce rate. What’s more, unmarried couples who found they were expecting a boy were more likely to marry that those expecting a girl.

Kelly flipped conventional wisdom on its head after looking at other research data:

• 73 per cent of U.S. divorces involve wives leaving their husbands.

• Adult sons at home add to the daily workload of parents; adult daughters decrease it.

• Females offer more and better social support than men.

• A strong human motivation is to avoid being lonely.

All this could mean, wrote Kelly, that “wives with daughters are less likely to stay with their husbands because they know that with a girl, they’ll never be lonely or without help.

“Thus, they may be less willing to tolerate any bad behaviors from their husbands (and less willing to stay married) because they don’t need their husbands as much. This idea could even explain why couples expecting a girl are less likely to marry: A woman carrying a girl anticipates that she won’t need a husband.”

Kelly, married mother of a 5-year-old girl, balks at the idea her proposal is feminist.

“That sounds like I’m already committed to an ideology. I’m just seeking the truth.”

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A recent comment on her blog suggested that women of sons stay married because father and son spent more time together. Another suggested women are harder to please and may be less willing to tolerate their husbands’ behaviour. Yet another recognized that women might not want daughters to witness less-than-equal treatment from their husbands.

“We need a new lens on this. What we do know is that women are leaving men. It’s overwhelming. We need to know why.”