Can having children really be all that bad? *Georgia Grimmond*
investigates
THIS October, the first conference dedicated to women without children
will be held in Cleveland, Ohio. At The Not Mom Summit
, academics, writers and
inspirational speakers will cover topics like dating, volunteering and
voting.
It's a growing movement. Across the Western world, record numbers of
people are remaining childless. In the UK, one in five women have no
children by the age of 44. In the US, the picture is similar for both
genders, and the number of childless women has almost doubled since the
1970s. While many people may want kids but can't have them, some are
simply rejecting what was once considered an inevitable and essential
part of the human experience – procreation.
Across the West, record numbers of people are remaining childless
Perhaps that's not so surprising. Having children can have a significant
impact on finances, careers and the planet. More surprising is the
growing body of evidence that it can also make you less healthy and less
happy. But can the situation really be that gloomy?
No kidding, children in the wealthy West are a huge financial drain. The
average middle-class US family has spent more than $245,340 on each
child by the time they're 18. In the UK, the cost of raising a child has
swelled 63 per cent since 2003, with childcare alone eating up 27 per
cent of the average salary, according to the Centre for Economics and
Business Research in London. Luca Stanca
, an economist at the
University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, puts it bluntly: “On the basis of a
purely economic approach, the optimal number of children for a rational
agent is zero.”
Finances aside, there's an environmental question when it comes to
deciding whether to have kids. Children, though small, can come with a
large environmental footprint. In the US you can recycle and bike to
work all you want to reduce your carbon emissions, but those gains will
be 20 times less than the CO_2 impact of having a child, according to a
2009 study from Oregon State University
.
The United Nations projects that “if current population and consumption
trends continue, humanity will need the equivalent of two Earths to
support itself
by 2030”. Some have taken this message to heart. Environmentalist Bill
McKibben struggled with the decision of whether to have children, and
ultimately opted for one, defending his choice in his book /Maybe One: A
case for smaller families/. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement even
urges people not to add to the “burgeoning billions already squatting on
this ravaged planet”, seeing the only sustainable future as one without
humans.
That's an extreme view. But there is now almost half a century of
evidence on the relationship between having children and personal
happiness that might give more people pause for thought. Contrary to
what we might think, study after study has shown that having children
does not seem to make people happier, and in fact may even make them a
little less happy. “The great majority of studies find no effect or a
negative effect,” says economist Andrew Oswald of the University of
Warwick, UK.
Having children makes couples less happy with their sex lives
, is associated with
depression, sleep-deprivation, and, as one study puts it, “hastens
marital decline”. One oft-cited 2006 study co-authored by Princeton
psychologist Daniel Kahneman found that a group of working US mothers
ranked childcare 16th out of 19 everyday tasks in terms of positive
feeling, just ahead of commuting to and from work, and work itself.
This year, Daniel Hamermesh of Royal Holloway, University of London, and
his colleagues published a study of more than 14,000 Australian and
German couples, finding that mothers reported a sharp rise in stress
after the birth of a child – three times
that of the father – and that it increased year-on-year until four years
after the birth, when the study stopped. A study published last month,
which followed more than 2000 first-time German parents, found that the
average hit to happiness exacted by the arrival of an infant is greater
than a divorce, unemployment or the death of a spouse.
On this basis, it might seem utter folly for couples to take the
parenthood plunge. “If you believe that having children will make you
substantially happier, then, on average, you're wrong,” says Oswald.
On the evidence, it might seem utter folly for couples to take the
parenthood plunge
Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the University of California,
Riverside, began to doubt that black-and-white picture a few years ago.
“It didn't make sense that parenthood wouldn't make us happy,” she says.
“How would we survive as a species if no one wanted to be a parent?” In
2012, she and her colleagues published a paper in the journal
/Psychological Science/, showing that having children made men
(but not women) happier. It garnered a lot of press attention for
suggesting that researchers had got the wrong end of the stick on
parental happiness.
But others questioned that conclusion. Saurabh Bhargava, an economist at
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, published a
critique in 2014 in the
same journal. His criticism was that by comparing a largely married
population with kids with a largely unmarried population without kids,
Lyubomirsky's study failed to control for another factor that might be
responsible for the happiness boost: being married. “One of the most
robust effects in the happiness literature is the effect of marriage on
well-being,” Bhargava says.
Lyubomirsky agrees that “marriage is one of the key alternative
explanations”. Still, in a response to the critique, she and her
colleagues stated that they were not trying to prove that children make
people happier. “Motivated in part by media portrayals of parents who
are ‘miserable’ and who ‘hate parenting,’ we simply asked whether
happiness and parenthood can coexist,” they wrote.
This idea is backed up by research done in 2014 by Angus Deaton of
Princeton University and Arthur Stone of Stony Brook University in New
York state. “We ask: Is it true that people with kids are happier than
people who don't have kids? And the answer to that question is yes,”
says Deaton. “But the people who have kids have all sorts of differences
from the people who don't have kids. They have more money, they're more
religious, all these sorts of things.” When Deaton and Stone controlled
for those variables, the correlation between children and increased
well-being disappeared .
Such niggles show just how complex parenthood and happiness are to
study. “If you want to understand the causal effect of sleeping pills on
somebody's sleep, you can run placebo trials,” says Oswald. “You can't
for children.” Kids can't be handed out at random to see what effect
they have on people.
Social support
One way round this problem is with a before-and-after study of the same
people. Their lesson seems to be that parents' happiness increases a
year or so before the birth of the first child, and then returns to
pre-birth levels by the time the baby is about one (see “The happiness
bump”).
So the true picture is clearly more nuanced than a blanket “kids make
you unhappy”. Stanca has recently found that parenthood tends to boost
people's satisfaction with their lives apart from their financial
circumstances – but for most people, the money woes associated with
children were so great that any additional happiness they felt was
swallowed up. “Children do make us happy,” he says, “provided we can
afford them – or think so.”
A parent's age may matter too. In a study across 86 countries, Mikko
Myrskylä of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in
Rostock, Germany, and Rachel Margolis of the University of Western
Ontario in Canada discovered that for people younger than 30, children
are associated, on average, with a decrease in happiness. From 30 to 39,
the average effect on happiness is neutral, and at age 40 and above,
it's positive .
For them, it's the more, the merrier, to a point – three seems to be the
optimal number (see “A numbers game”). Such effects suggest, say the
researchers, that having kids may be a “long-term investment in
well-being.”
Then, of course, there's the question of where you live. Parents in the
20 to 29 age group tend to sustain a large hit to their happiness by
having children, but Margolis and Myrskylä found the generous welfare
systems in countries such as Sweden, Japan and France soften the blow.
The most happy parents over 40 live in former socialist states such as
Russia and Poland, where care of the elderly falls mostly to the family,
so having children is a boon in later life. In countries with less
generous welfare systems such as the UK, there is a slight indication of
decreased happiness with the arrival of the first child.
Indeed, comparing happiness levels between parents and non-parents
within a country, and then between countries, can serve as a sort of
global barometer. In a study currently under review, sociologist Robin
Simon of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and her
colleagues look at 22 countries and find that the happiness gap in the
US between those with and without children is wider than in the majority
of the other countries studied where provision for parents is often more
generous. “Having kids in the US is brutal,” Simon says. “The federal
government requires that workplaces give six weeks maternity leave, but
there is no requirement that it is paid. We just don't do anything to
assist parents.”
Simon believes it is this lack of support in the US and probably other
countries that wipes out one gain you would expect to find even among
less happy parents – a sense of greater purpose. In ongoing work looking
at 12 indicators of well-being, including physical health,
self-acceptance and sense of purpose, Simon and her colleagues found
that none, except lower alcohol use, was associated with parenthood in
the US. “I thought at least purpose and meaning in life would be higher
for parents,” she says, “and we find it's just flat.”
Parental well-being, then, would seem to be a lottery. Children
themselves probably don't make you less happy – but external factors
might. If you're lucky enough to be married, well-off, or a resident of
a Nordic country with generous social provision, you have a better
chance of enjoying parenthood. For the rest, it may not be the
experience they had hoped it would be.
Despite the gloomy picture, the vast majority of people still would like
to have children, so, for Simon, the solution is to create a society
that allows more of us to reap the rewards of parenthood. “There is joy
to having kids,” she says. “But I think that for most people, the
stresses that areCan having children really be all that bad? *Georgia
Grimmond*
investigates
THIS October, the first conference dedicated to women without children
will be held in Cleveland, Ohio. At The Not Mom Summit
, academics, writers and
inspirational speakers will cover topics like dating, volunteering and
voting.
It's a growing movement. Across the Western world, record numbers of
people are remaining childless. In the UK, one in five women have no
children by the age of 44. In the US, the picture is similar for both
genders, and the number of childless women has almost doubled since the
1970s. While many people may want kids but can't have them, some are
simply rejecting what was once considered an inevitable and essential
part of the human experience – procreation.
Across the West, record numbers of people are remaining childless
Perhaps that's not so surprising. Having children can have a significant
impact on finances, careers and the planet. More surprising is the
growing body of evidence that it can also make you less healthy and less
happy. But can the situation really be that gloomy?
No kidding, children in the wealthy West are a huge financial drain. The
average middle-class US family has spent more than $245,340 on each
child by the time they're 18. In the UK, the cost of raising a child has
swelled 63 per cent since 2003, with childcare alone eating up 27 per
cent of the average salary, according to the Centre for Economics and
Business Research in London. Luca Stanca
, an economist at the
University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, puts it bluntly: “On the basis of a
purely economic approach, the optimal number of children for a rational
agent is zero.”
Finances aside, there's an environmental question when it comes to
deciding whether to have kids. Children, though small, can come with a
large environmental footprint. In the US you can recycle and bike to
work all you want to reduce your carbon emissions, but those gains will
be 20 times less than the CO_2 impact of having a child, according to a
2009 study from Oregon State University
.
The United Nations projects that “if current population and consumption
trends continue, humanity will need the equivalent of two Earths to
support itself
by 2030”. Some have taken this message to heart. Environmentalist Bill
McKibben struggled with the decision of whether to have children, and
ultimately opted for one, defending his choice in his book /Maybe One: A
case for smaller families/. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement even
urges people not to add to the “burgeoning billions already squatting on
this ravaged planet”, seeing the only sustainable future as one without
humans.
That's an extreme view. But there is now almost half a century of
evidence on the relationship between having children and personal
happiness that might give more people pause for thought. Contrary to
what we might think, study after study has shown that having children
does not seem to make people happier, and in fact may even make them a
little less happy. “The great majority of studies find no effect or a
negative effect,” says economist Andrew Oswald of the University of
Warwick, UK.
Having children makes couples less happy with their sex lives
, is associated with
depression, sleep-deprivation, and, as one study puts it, “hastens
marital decline”. One oft-cited 2006 study co-authored by Princeton
psychologist Daniel Kahneman found that a group of working US mothers
ranked childcare 16th out of 19 everyday tasks in terms of positive
feeling, just ahead of commuting to and from work, and work itself.
This year, Daniel Hamermesh of Royal Holloway, University of London, and
his colleagues published a study of more than 14,000 Australian and
German couples, finding that mothers reported a sharp rise in stress
after the birth of a child – three times
that of the father – and that it increased year-on-year until four years
after the birth, when the study stopped. A study published last month,
which followed more than 2000 first-time German parents, found that the
average hit to happiness exacted by the arrival of an infant is greater
than a divorce, unemployment or the death of a spouse.
On this basis, it might seem utter folly for couples to take the
parenthood plunge. “If you believe that having children will make you
substantially happier, then, on average, you're wrong,” says Oswald.
On the evidence, it might seem utter folly for couples to take the
parenthood plunge
Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the University of California,
Riverside, began to doubt that black-and-white picture a few years ago.
“It didn't make sense that parenthood wouldn't make us happy,” she says.
“How would we survive as a species if no one wanted to be a parent?” In
2012, she and her colleagues published a paper in the journal
/Psychological Science/, showing that having children made men
(but not women) happier. It garnered a lot of press attention for
suggesting that researchers had got the wrong end of the stick on
parental happiness.
But others questioned that conclusion. Saurabh Bhargava, an economist at
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, published a
critique in 2014 in the
same journal. His criticism was that by comparing a largely married
population with kids with a largely unmarried population without kids,
Lyubomirsky's study failed to control for another factor that might be
responsible for the happiness boost: being married. “One of the most
robust effects in the happiness literature is the effect of marriage on
well-being,” Bhargava says.
Lyubomirsky agrees that “marriage is one of the key alternative
explanations”. Still, in a response to the critique, she and her
colleagues stated that they were not trying to prove that children make
people happier. “Motivated in part by media portrayals of parents who
are ‘miserable’ and who ‘hate parenting,’ we simply asked whether
happiness and parenthood can coexist,” they wrote.
This idea is backed up by research done in 2014 by Angus Deaton of
Princeton University and Arthur Stone of Stony Brook University in New
York state. “We ask: Is it true that people with kids are happier than
people who don't have kids? And the answer to that question is yes,”
says Deaton. “But the people who have kids have all sorts of differences
from the people who don't have kids. They have more money, they're more
religious, all these sorts of things.” When Deaton and Stone controlled
for those variables, the correlation between children and increased
well-being disappeared .
Such niggles show just how complex parenthood and happiness are to
study. “If you want to understand the causal effect of sleeping pills on
somebody's sleep, you can run placebo trials,” says Oswald. “You can't
for children.” Kids can't be handed out at random to see what effect
they have on people.
Social support
One way round this problem is with a before-and-after study of the same
people. Their lesson seems to be that parents' happiness increases a
year or so before the birth of the first child, and then returns to
pre-birth levels by the time the baby is about one (see “The happiness
bump”).
So the true picture is clearly more nuanced than a blanket “kids make
you unhappy”. Stanca has recently found that parenthood tends to boost
people's satisfaction with their lives apart from their financial
circumstances – but for most people, the money woes associated with
children were so great that any additional happiness they felt was
swallowed up. “Children do make us happy,” he says, “provided we can
afford them – or think so.”
A parent's age may matter too. In a study across 86 countries, Mikko
Myrskylä of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in
Rostock, Germany, and Rachel Margolis of the University of Western
Ontario in Canada discovered that for people younger than 30, children
are associated, on average, with a decrease in happiness. From 30 to 39,
the average effect on happiness is neutral, and at age 40 and above,
it's positive .
For them, it's the more, the merrier, to a point – three seems to be the
optimal number (see “A numbers game”). Such effects suggest, say the
researchers, that having kids may be a “long-term investment in
well-being.”
Then, of course, there's the question of where you live. Parents in the
20 to 29 age group tend to sustain a large hit to their happiness by
having children, but Margolis and Myrskylä found the generous welfare
systems in countries such as Sweden, Japan and France soften the blow.
The most happy parents over 40 live in former socialist states such as
Russia and Poland, where care of the elderly falls mostly to the family,
so having children is a boon in later life. In countries with less
generous welfare systems such as the UK, there is a slight indication of
decreased happiness with the arrival of the first child.
Indeed, comparing happiness levels between parents and non-parents
within a country, and then between countries, can serve as a sort of
global barometer. In a study currently under review, sociologist Robin
Simon of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and her
colleagues look at 22 countries and find that the happiness gap in the
US between those with and without children is wider than in the majority
of the other countries studied where provision for parents is often more
generous. “Having kids in the US is brutal,” Simon says. “The federal
government requires that workplaces give six weeks maternity leave, but
there is no requirement that it is paid. We just don't do anything to
assist parents.”
Simon believes it is this lack of support in the US and probably other
countries that wipes out one gain you would expect to find even among
less happy parents – a sense of greater purpose. In ongoing work looking
at 12 indicators of well-being, including physical health,
self-acceptance and sense of purpose, Simon and her colleagues found
that none, except lower alcohol use, was associated with parenthood in
the US. “I thought at least purpose and meaning in life would be higher
for parents,” she says, “and we find it's just flat.”
Parental well-being, then, would seem to be a lottery. Children
themselves probably don't make you less happy – but external factors
might. If you're lucky enough to be married, well-off, or a resident of
a Nordic country with generous social provision, you have a better
chance of enjoying parenthood. For the rest, it may not be the
experience they had hoped it would be.
Despite the gloomy picture, the vast majority of people still would like
to have children, so, for Simon, the solution is to create a society
that allows more of us to reap the rewards of parenthood. “There is joy
to having kids,” she says. “But I think that for most people, the
stresses that are associated with having kids overshadow those joys.”
/This article appeared in print under the headline “you gotta be kidding
”/
*Leader:* “Kids, who'd have them?”
The paternal urge
Having children may not necessarily increase happiness (see main story),
but mothers tend to love them anyway. This is in part because of the
changes that occur in a woman's body and mind after she becomes
pregnant. But what about fathers?
For anthropologist Susan Hrdy of the University of California, Davis,
the stereotype of the detached dad isn't true. “In my lifetime I have
had to completely revise the way I think about the nurturing potential
in men. It's there,” she says.
Take hormones. In 2011, the first comprehensive study to follow men
before and after having children showed that fathers' testosterone
levels were lower than those of their childless peers
. Dads who spent 3 or more
hours a day caring for their child had the lowest levels. The
researchers suggest that the change allows men to switch from mating
mode – where testosterone-fuelled competitiveness and musculature is an
advantage – to parenting mode, where caring, attentive behaviours are
important to reproductive success.
Parenthood can also change a man's brain
,
according to a study published last year. Researchers scanned fathers'
brains twice: two to four weeks and three to four months after their
child's birth. The grey matter in the men's brains swelled in areas
associated with parenting behaviours such as responding to a baby's crie
s.
That broody feeling
Why do people think having kids will make them happier, if the evidence
suggests otherwise?
One explanation offered by psychologists is that we are simply bad
decision-makers. “Generally, people are quite poor at knowing what will
make them happy,” says Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of
Warwick, UK. And once people decide to have kids, there's no going back,
which means it's in parents' interest to put a positive spin on it.
“There's not much point sitting around and saying, ‘This was a bloody
mistake’,” says Oswald. “Humans will do the best to convince themselves
they've done the right thing.”
Our cognitive biases influence us too. Looking back on experiences, we
tend to remember high points such as a child's first smile, says
economist Nattavudh Powdthavee of the London School of Economics – a
phenomenon known as the focusing illusion. This mental shortcut means we
may overestimate how much happier children and many other things have
made us
.
What about an inbuilt desire to breed? According to anthropologist Susan
Hrdy of the University of California, Davis, the desire for children is
cultural, not hardwired. “There wasn't any need for Mother Nature, and
by that I mean Darwinian natural selection, to build in ‘Oh I've got to
have children’,” she says. In the past “any female with enough fat to
ovulate was going to get pregnant”, says Oswald. “The heaviest selection
pressure was on her striving for local clout to be able to defend the
resources that she needs to get that fat on board.”
Once we have a child, nurturing instincts kick in. A female “didn't have
to want that baby, but once it came there are processes in place to make
her bond with the baby”, says Hrdy. But before that, to make us have
children, “all nature has to do is make us enjoy sex”.
*Georgia Grimmond* is a journalist based in the UK. Additional reporting
by *Sonia van Gilder Cooke*
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