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YOU could say my enthusiasm for parenting peaked at the age of 4, when I was cast in the leading role in the school nativity. I took my responsibilities as Mary extremely seriously until, during a high tempo carol on the big night, I dropped the baby Jesus – a doll, just to be clear – on its head. I was never given a named part again.
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I don’t know how many young girls play with dolls because they are fascinated with babies, or simply because it is what society suggests they should do. But I do know that, as a child, I had no interest. If baby Jesus had been a plastic dinosaur or an astronaut, I might have held my focus. However, while I didn’t grow up with strong aspirations to become a parent, it is a question that is increasingly on my mind. I am now married, some of my dearest friends are expecting babies and I turned 30 last year. With these life events comes societal expectations and pressure. But I am not sure what I want.
I am not alone. In the UK, 38 per cent of people aged 25 to 34 say or say they don’t want kids now but might one day. Around the world, birth rates have plummeted – and among those who have children, a significant number regret it. To avoid becoming one of them, I want to set aside the emotional baggage and cultural expectations and find out whether the cold hard facts can steer me in the right direction.
I start with the big question, the one that seems to crop up time and again in conversations and articles I read: what impact does adding a person to the world have on the environment? One review paper from 2017 someone in a high-income country can make, pitting their environmental merits against each other. Eating a plant-based diet would typically save the equivalent of 0.8 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. Avoiding flying would save 1.6 tonnes per transatlantic return trip, while living without a car would save 2.4 tonnes a year. Yet have one fewer child and you emit a whopping 58.6 tonnes less a year, on average – the equivalent emissions of burning about 24 tonnes of coal.
This seems huge, and there is a reason why. “If you’re talking about the decision to have a child, the counterfactual is not creating an additional person,” says at Lund University, Sweden, who coauthored the review. If you decide to create an additional person, says Nicholas, the 58.6 tonnes takes into account not only that child, but their potential children, grandchildren and so on. “It adds up to a really big number.”
This number isn’t set in stone, however. The estimated 58.6 tonnes is an average for high-income nations – the impact of having children varies hugely depending on which country you live in. And unlike flying or eating meat, emissions from a future child and the rest of their lineage will be produced much further down the line, so that full 58.6 tonnes won’t hit right now while we are urgently striving to cut emissions.
Moreover, as we head towards a lower-carbon world, adding a new person into the mix will have an ever-lower impact, so my potential kids are likely to have a smaller carbon footprint the older they get. It will never be zero, says Nicholas, but it will be much lower than today. Even so, if I waited until the UK reaches net zero before having children, I would be 58 based on the current target. Holding out until then isn’t really an option.
For fear of throwing the baby out with the environmental bathwater, I move on to the next big issue on my list: happiness. People who are parents often say that having children is the best thing they have done in their life. And yet many of them seem constantly stressed and tired. What does the evidence say?
Here, there is plenty of research and its findings may be disturbing to prospective parents. “The studies on wealthier, industrialised countries pretty much all show the same thing,” says at the University of Texas at Austin. “There is no general improvement in happiness when you have children, which is shocking to most people.” In fact, for most, having children comes with a “happiness penalty”, says Glass.
That dip in happiness is often attributed to lack of sleep, time and money, which, in turn, can depend on things like the parents’ . People who have children when they are over the age of 30 tend to be happier – which is music to my ears. But on the money side, living in the UK doesn’t bode well. Glass has found that than in many European countries. In France, Norway, Spain and Sweden – where there is cheaper or more freely available childcare, for example – the joys of parenthood balance out the stresses. Data published by the UK Office for National Statistics in June 2022 showed that a full-time nursery place for a child under 2 . In the US, the situation seems even more dire. “Over the past few decades, the act of just bearing a child is increasingly likely to push a mother’s household into poverty in the US,” says Glass.
Does parenthood make you happier?
Further evidence for money’s crucial relevance to the baby question comes from research published in 2019 by David Blanchflower at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and Andrew Clark at the Paris School of Economics. They looked at surveys completed by more than a million people in Europe over 10 years and found that, after all. However, this was only the case for parents in a committed relationship, not those who are single. My husband and I are pretty rock steady, which is also good news, but it does make me consider the stress that parenting could put on my marriage.
Indeed, a study from 2021 gave me more to reflect on. In it, at the University of Wrocław, Poland, and her colleagues from 33 countries who were asked to rate how much they agreed with questions like “Do you enjoy your husband’s/wife’s company?” or “Do you enjoy doing things together?”. The researchers found that the more children a couple have, the lower the marital satisfaction among women, but not men (see “What’s the magic number?”). But even if children don’t make people happier on the whole, there could be more profound benefits, says Glass, “like life satisfaction, a sense of meaning or purpose in life, all of which “.
Another question weighing on my mind is the physical toll of pregnancy and birth. There is almost no system in my body that wouldn’t be affected by having a child, with some changes lasting much longer than others.
To start, studies suggest that giving birth is associated with shorter telomeres – the caps at the end of chromosomes. This shortening is the equivalent of around 11 years accelerated cellular ageing. Then there is physical fitness. Despite expectation from society, it can be incredibly hard for even the very fittest to get back to the same level after having a baby.
We also hear a lot about the effects of pregnancy on the brain, particularly its potential impact on cognitive abilities, or so-called baby brain. “There are still many things we don’t know about how pregnancy affects the brain,” says neuroscientist at the Amsterdam University Medical Centers in the Netherlands. Research by Hoekzema and others in recent years suggests that . The changes to structure seem to be long-lasting, while the changes to function are temporary, but they all appear to be linked to the mother’s behaviours, helping her respond to the baby’s needs and cues and assisting with bonding, says Hoekzema. When she and her colleagues tested these mothers’ cognitive abilities, they found no changes, which is a relief.
Even more concerning to me were the statistics I found relating to mental health. More than 1 in 10 mothers develop postnatal depression within a year of giving birth, and the same percentage of expectant mothers experience antenatal depression. And while maternity-related deaths in the UK are rare, a published by the University of Oxford showed that deaths from mental health-related causes account for nearly 40 per cent of deaths occurring within a year after the end of pregnancy. There aren’t many studies into the mental health of adoptive parents, but some suggest up to a third experience depression. All told, it indicates that improved care for new parents is desperately needed.
Regretful parents
I had also held grandiose ideas that becoming a parent – the ultimate responsibility – would make me feel like more of a grown-up, but it turns out that having a child doesn’t necessarily make you more mature. A 2020 study by and at Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, studied data from about 6900 people who had become parents between 2002 and 2017 and who were participants in a long-running study that included personality tests. They found that becoming a parent made people more extroverted, less open and, for women, more agreeable. But they didn’t find any increase in emotional stability, which is linked to maturity. Overall, the personality changes were all small and tended to be temporary, lasting a few years.
Looking at all the evidence, I start to wonder why anyone decides to have children. It would cost me dearly in terms of money and probably happiness too, change my body and my brain, and could put my marriage under strain. No wonder, then, that in my research I come across Reddit and Facebook groups called things like “regretful parents” and “I Regret Having Children”. These appear to be safe havens for people who feel shame about their regret, but wish they had made a different decision. Reading the posts from mostly anonymous parents – some a few months in, some decades down the line – is eye-opening.
But it isn’t representative of most parents. Surveys of people in the US and Germany suggest that, at most, , but in most places this figure is much lower. It is also possible that, for many of them, the sense of regret is transient.
What’s more, in some cases, the regretful parents didn’t have reproductive choice in the first place. Some were denied access to contraception or abortion, for example. Others talk about having children without really questioning whether they wanted to or not. I can’t find a huge amount of research on the reasons people give for having children, but one study led by at Cardiff University, UK, published in 2018, found that . In some countries, a big factor was that childless people are stigmatised in society; in others, people’s own desires or wanting to comply with pressure from partners or family members was more important.
The real reasons to have kids… or not
It seems obvious that nobody should feel like they must have children to avoid stigma from society. But are there universally good and bad reasons to have kids? Yes, says bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. If, for instance, you had children to supply the state with future soldiers, reverse the trend of falling birth rates or even simply to provide your parents with grandchildren, these are probably bad reasons, he says. “It’s treating your future children as a means to yours and society’s ends.”
Equally, however, there are potentially good reasons to have children that aren’t easily quantifiable. “When we have it as a central goal of our lives to experience creation, and to form a family, perhaps with a person who you deeply love,” he says, “this sort of value can ground a good moral reason to make a new person.”
In the end, perhaps the cost to the planet, my finances and my physical and mental health aren’t the right issues to be considering. “My advice to prospective parents is to really reflect on the reasons that they would have children and to see if those reasons are based in the value of love and creation,” says Rieder.
Even if I didn’t find conclusive answers in the scientific research, when I come to make my decision, I now know a lot more about what I would be letting myself in for. Who knows, maybe one day I will rekindle the zeal for parenting I thought I had dropped, along with the baby Jesus, in December 1996.
Children: What’s the magic number?
What can research tell us about how many children will make us happiest? The answer seems to be at least partly down to culture, as study results vary in different countries.
When sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania surveyed identical twins in Denmark who had chosen to have children, he found that . For men, having a son made them feel 75 per cent happier compared with having a daughter. On the arrival of a second child, the men saw negligible change to their happiness, while the women’s happiness decreased, implying that, for the greatest happiness, one is the magic number.
But research on , suggesting you should stop at two. Why the disparity? We already know that many other factors, such as age and wealth, play a part (see main story). Whether the number of children you have matches how many you hoped to have is also important.
Catherine de Lange
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