123 © The Author(s) 2020 D. Mortelmans (ed.), Divorce in Europe, European Studies of Population 21, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25838-2_6 Chapter 6 The More the Merrier? The Effect of Children on Divorce in a Pronatalist Society Amit Kaplan, Miri Endeweld, and Anat Herbst-Debby Abstract While most studies on the effect of children on divorce focus on coun- tries with fertility levels below or near replacement level, we explore whether the stabilizing effect of children on marriage holds in the OECD country with the high- est fertility rate – Israel. This high rate allowed us to examine the non-linear effects of having many children on divorce. We also examined whether the pattern of this relationship depends on the couple’s ethnic and economic position. Based on a data- set which merged administrative data from the tax authorities with the National Insurance Institute database, we took a random sample of 25% of all women who married in 2003 and followed them until 2015. Findings for the total sample revealed a positive, albeit non-linear, effect of number of children on divorce, while young children at home decreased divorce risks. However, the effect of number of children on the likelihood to divorce was dependent upon income and ethnic group. Children stabilized marriage among Israeli-Palestinians and destabilized it among Israeli- Jews, though with decreasing effects from the frst to the third child. Findings are discussed with regard to the importance of examining relations between children and divorce across groups in the society. Keywords Children · Divorce · Ethnicity · Earnings · Fertility A. Kaplan (*) Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo, Tel Aviv-Yaffo, Israel e-mail: amitka@mta.ac.il M. Endeweld National Insurance Institute, Jerusalem, Israel e-mail: mirie@nioi.gov.il A. Herbst-Debby Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel e-mail: herbsta@biu.ac.il