(Image: Aldo Sperber/picturetank)
THIS October, the first conference dedicated to women without children will be held in Cleveland, Ohio. At , academics, writers and inspirational speakers will cover topics like dating, volunteering and voting.
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Itâs 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 canât have them, some are simply rejecting what was once considered an inevitable and essential part of the human experience â procreation.
âAcross the West, record numbers of people are remaining childlessâ
Perhaps thatâs 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 theyâre 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. , an economist at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, puts it bluntly: âOn the basis of a purely economic approach, the optimal number of children for a rational agent is zero.â
Finances aside, thereâs 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 CO2 impact of having a child, according to a . The United Nations projects that âif current population and consumption trends continue, by 2030âł. 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 âburgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planetâ, seeing the only sustainable future as one without humans.
Thatâs 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. âThe great majority of studies find no effect or a negative effect,â says economist Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick, UK.
Having children makes couples less happy with their , is associated with depression, sleep-deprivation, and, as one study puts it, âhastens marital declineâ. 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 after the birth of a child â three times that of the father â 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. âIf you believe that having children will make you substantially happier, then, on average, youâre wrong,â says Oswald.
âOn the evidence, it might seem utter folly for couples to take the parenthood plungeâ
Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, began to doubt that black-and-white picture a few years ago. âIt didnât make sense that parenthood wouldnât make us happy,â she says. âHow would we survive as a species if no one wanted to be a parent?â In 2012, she and her colleagues published a paper in the journal Psychological Science, showing that (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, in the same journal. His criticism was that by comparing a largely married population with kids with a largely unmarried population without kids, Lyubomirskyâs study failed to control for another factor that might be responsible for the happiness boost: being married. âOne of the most robust effects in the happiness literature is the effect of marriage on well-being,â Bhargava says.
Lyubomirsky agrees that âmarriage is one of the key alternative explanationsâ. Still, in a response to the critique, she and her colleagues stated that they were not trying to prove that children make people happier. âMotivated in part by media portrayals of parents who are âmiserableâ and who âhate parenting,â we simply asked whether happiness and parenthood can coexist,â 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. âWe ask: Is it true that people with kids are happier than people who donât have kids? And the answer to that question is yes,â says Deaton. âBut the people who have kids have all sorts of differences from the people who donât have kids. They have more money, theyâre more religious, all these sorts of things.â When Deaton and Stone controlled for those variables, .
Such niggles show just how complex parenthood and happiness are to study. âIf you want to understand the causal effect of sleeping pills on somebodyâs sleep, you can run placebo trials,â says Oswald. âYou canât for children.â Kids canât 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 parentsâ 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 âThe happiness bumpâ).
So the true picture is clearly more nuanced than a blanket âkids make you unhappyâ. Stanca has recently found that parenthood tends to boost peopleâs satisfaction with their lives apart from their financial circumstances â but for most people, the money woes associated with children were so great that any additional happiness they felt was swallowed up. âChildren do make us happy,â he says, âprovided we can afford them â or think so.â
A parentâs age may matter too. In a study across 86 countries, Mikko MyrskylĂ€ 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 . For them, itâs the more, the merrier, to a point â three seems to be the optimal number (see âA numbers gameâ). Such effects suggest, say the researchers, that having kids may be a âlong-term investment in well-being.â
Then, of course, thereâs 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 MyrskylĂ€ 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. âHaving kids in the US is brutal,â Simon says. âThe federal government requires that workplaces give six weeks maternity leave, but there is no requirement that it is paid. We just donât do anything to assist parents.â
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 â 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. âI thought at least purpose and meaning in life would be higher for parents,â she says, âand we find itâs just flat.â
A pet canât look after you when youâre older (Image: Martin Parr/Magnum Photos)
(Image: Jean-Marc Caimi/Millennium Images, UK)
Parental well-being, then, would seem to be a lottery. Children themselves probably donât make you less happy â but external factors might. If youâre 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. âThere is joy to having kids,â she says. âBut I think that for most people, the stresses that are associated with having kids overshadow those joys.â
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 womanâs 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 isnât true. âIn my lifetime I have had to completely revise the way I think about the nurturing potential in men. Itâs there,â she says.
Take hormones. In 2011, the first comprehensive study to follow men before and after having children showed that . 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 â where testosterone-fuelled competitiveness and musculature is an advantage â to parenting mode, where caring, attentive behaviours are important to reproductive success.
, according to a study published last year. Researchers scanned fathersâ brains twice: two to four weeks and three to four months after their childâs birth. The grey matter in the menâs brains swelled in areas associated with parenting behaviours such as responding to a babyâs cries.
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. âGenerally, people are quite poor at knowing what will make them happy,â says Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick, UK. And once people decide to have kids, thereâs no going back, which means itâs in parentsâ interest to put a positive spin on it. âThereâs not much point sitting around and saying, âThis was a bloody mistakeâ,â says Oswald. âHumans will do the best to convince themselves theyâve done the right thing.â
Our cognitive biases influence us too. Looking back on experiences, we tend to remember high points such as a childâs first smile, says economist Nattavudh Powdthavee of the London School of Economics â a phenomenon known as the focusing illusion. This mental shortcut means .
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. âThere wasnât any need for Mother Nature, and by that I mean Darwinian natural selection, to build in âOh Iâve got to have childrenâ,â she says. In the past âany female with enough fat to ovulate was going to get pregnantâ, says Oswald. âThe 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.â
Once we have a child, nurturing instincts kick in. A female âdidnât have to want that baby, but once it came there are processes in place to make her bond with the babyâ, says Hrdy. But before that, to make us have children, âall nature has to do is make us enjoy sexâ.
This article appeared in print under the headline âYou gotta be kiddingâ
