Divorce in the family: transmission of divorce across three generations

It is well-documented that there is an intergenerational transmission of divorce from parents to their children. This paper investigates how this transmission is affected by grandparents’ divorce. Using individual-level longitudinal data on marriages and divorces in Sweden, 1905–2015, I show grandparents’ divorce matters for their grandchildren’s divorce risks, even when parents remain married. Moreover, there is a stronger transmission for women but not for men when both parents and grandparents were divorced, and sibling comparisons indicate women are more likely than their brothers to replicate their parents’ marriage. These findings are the first to show that the explanations need to account for more than the parental generation to fully understand the intergenerational transmission of divorce.