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How many children should you have?
From a private point of view, only one:
In comparing identical twins, Kohler found that mothers with one child are about 20 percent happier than their childless counterparts; and while fathers' happiness gains are smaller, men enjoy an almost 75 percent larger happiness boost from a firstborn son than from a firstborn daughter [TC: remember the result that fathers with sons are less likely to leave?]. The first child's sex doesn't matter to mothers, perhaps because women are better than men at enjoying the company of both girls and boys, Kohler speculates.
Interestingly, second and third children don't add to parents' happiness at all. In fact, these additional children seem to make mothers less happy than mothers with only one child—though still happier than women with no children.
"If you want to maximize your subjective well-being, you should stop at one child," concludes Kohler, adding that people probably have additional children either for the benefit of the firstborn or because they reason that if the first child made them happy, the second one will, too.
Here is the longer story. See this paper. Here is the researcher's home page.
I am hardly an expert in this area, but I find the logic appealing. One kid is quite able to fill your time and thoughts. I call this the "parent as empty vessel" model. The argument for more than one kid, in this view, would rest on risk-aversion and the chance that one kid might die or not work out so well.
Note the contrast between Kohler with Bryan Caplan's theory that you should have more kids now than you want, so you may enjoy them when you are old. At that point in time, no single kid "fills the empty vessel" and so more of them are needed.
I believe that men enjoy children more than women do, as they are less stressed by worry. Whether men want children more is a different question [this last sentence has been altered from a previous version.]
The pointer is from the still totally awesome www.politicaltheory.info.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on April 18, 2007 at 07:31 AM in Science | Permalink
Comments
What if the maximizing number is 0.7? I mean, maybe the relevant choice variable is not the number of kids per se, but how many hours do I want spend with them. I can have one kid but send him/her to the nursery and to grandma's home for 0.3 of the day.
Posted by: L Monasterio at Apr 18, 2007 8:38:53 AM
Hmm, I wonder how relevant is this kind of article. I mean the criterias are very subjective, can this study extend to a greater scale?
Posted by: C. C. at Apr 18, 2007 8:57:33 AM
Is objective well-being less important than subjective well-being?
Posted by: Matt at Apr 18, 2007 9:02:30 AM
I believe that men enjoy children more than women do, as they are less stressed by worry. Men should want more children than do women.
Do you get out much?
Posted by: Jeff Burton at Apr 18, 2007 9:04:00 AM
I have one child, and do not believe a second one would raise my happiness. However, it decreases my happiness volatility, as losing one child would result in the no children state. Therefore, I will have towo children to increase my personal sense of security.
Posted by: Hilary Bognar at Apr 18, 2007 9:10:01 AM
It would be interesting to see the happiness of children based on number of siblings factored into this discussion. Parents often value the long term happiness of their children over their own, so a sense that a child would be happier with a sibling may outweigh a small decrease in personal happiness.
Posted by: Brien at Apr 18, 2007 9:11:08 AM
A parents happiness is somewhat dependent on the happiness of his/her child(ren).
Children with siblings have built in friends. Everyone I know with multiple kids will tell you there is some type of interaction between them. Any child after the 1st has a head start in that they have another teacher to help guide them into becoming a person.
Happiness relates to how you embrace the situation. Was the inclusion of the child planned or unexpected? Are the parents barely able to keep their own life together or are they fairly stable?
Why not measure how many friends you need to be happy while we are at it? How about the number of times you fart with happiness? I speculate the less you worry about passing gas and disbursing internal pressures would make one happier. Research has shown if you far 3.4 times a day you will be 22.3% happier!
Directly relating happiness to a specific number of children is absurd. Obviously this is just an opinion (mine as well as the articles). Having kids isn't for everyone but for some people it is a very enriching experience. I have 3 kids (and plan to stay at 3). Each one is a seperate experience that both my wife and I enjoy. Our #2 & #3 kids are independent of the first - we did not have them as "backup plans" in case the 1st turned out bad.
The motivation for my comment is I feel this is a very biased opinion. Anyone thinking about having kids should have a more balanced perception. Besides people reading this are actually intelligent. We need more smart people having babies to balance out all the people who do not think before they procreate!
Posted by: Andy at Apr 18, 2007 9:16:39 AM
How meaningful are these sorts of statistics? If a certain amount of people report increased happiness with less children, can this inform individuals? Perhaps personal utility is one of many competing obligations and not the foremost consideration when deciding to have children.
I'm not taking any chances that my name won't continue for multiple millenia. Seven children at least. Be fruitful and multiply.
Posted by: John Goes at Apr 18, 2007 9:17:58 AM
From my own admittedly limited experience, it seems like people have a second child because doing so actually makes it easier to raise well-adjusted kids. That is, having two kids is harder (less happy) for the parents in the short run, but if it makes for a better "product" in the long run it is easy to understand why they do it.
I know some well-adjusted only children, but in my experience they are the exception and not the rule.
Posted by: Amber at Apr 18, 2007 9:20:32 AM
I believe that men enjoy children more than women do, as they are less stressed by worry. Men should want more children than do women.
It seems there are other factors at play, as in my experience this is dramatically false.
Posted by: Charles Hope at Apr 18, 2007 9:45:11 AM
The findings about to what extent boys and girls are substitute goods surely must be regarded as culturally variable.
Posted by: Cyrus at Apr 18, 2007 10:10:59 AM
I sometimes wonder whether the enjoyment of children is a giant endowment effect.
Posted by: Yan Li at Apr 18, 2007 10:48:35 AM
Well, it is a damned good thing for the species that we don't know what would make us the most happy.
Posted by: Yancey Ward at Apr 18, 2007 11:02:28 AM
Yancey,
Falling birth rates in high income countries suggest people
are figuring it out.
Second kid brings sibling rivalry. Of course, single kids
are more likely to be spoiled, including having parents who
can afford to send them to a more expensive college...
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Apr 18, 2007 11:15:30 AM
Can anybody comment on how the number of sibling's affect a child's happiness?
I grew up with seven siblings and I find the support network they now provide to be extremely valuable in almost every aspect of my life: professional, social, spiritual, even academic.
Posted by: Charles DuHadway at Apr 18, 2007 11:42:35 AM
cats > children
Posted by: Noah Yetter at Apr 18, 2007 11:47:46 AM
I have three siblings. They made my life miserable as a child, and they contribute nothing to it as an adult. In addition to generating misery as a child the split of resources for education and enrichment also severely adversely effected me (my parents with one, or perhaps two children could have afforded to send me to decent private schools, better universities, etc, with four kids to support, there was simply no way).
I very occasionally run across folks like Charles Duhadway for whom a large number of siblings has been an asset, but more often than not the folks I know who had more than one sibling found them to be a net detraction from their life.
Posted by: quadrupole at Apr 18, 2007 11:52:11 AM
I don't think this study informs us whether we should have children or not. Women without children tend to be people who have never been married, have social problems, or are otherwise unstable: therefore, they don't have children.
So, I think, at least in the case of women without children, the causal chain should be reversed.
Posted by: Josh at Apr 18, 2007 12:03:29 PM
It's too narrow a question. The obvious complementary question is: What makes you happier as grandparents? If you have just one child, the chance of even becoming a grandparent before you are dead is lower.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Apr 18, 2007 12:37:40 PM
As a first child, these results are unsurprising.
Posted by: Josh at Apr 18, 2007 12:37:40 PM
What this reminds me of is the value of tradition, as pointed out by G.K. Chesterton. Here we have a lot of smart people commenting, but nobody thought of the grandparents angle for quite some time, which shows that even the most rational tend to miss the point a lot. A tradition-based society, in contrast, is a sort of "democracy of the dead" in which we don't suffer as much from our own personal limitations as thinkers.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Apr 18, 2007 12:43:25 PM
On the grandparent angle... if you have more children than you can acceptably capitalize, you reduce your chances of them having grandchildren in a time frame you will be allowed to enjoy them.
Posted by: quadrupole at Apr 18, 2007 1:28:13 PM
Gee, if we all take that advice we can cut global population in half in one generation. And we'll all be a little subjectively happier until we realize how badly we've screwed ourselves.
Having four small children I can verify it's an awful lot of work, and clearly takes an awful lot of my resources away from pleasing myself. Why, I could be trading up to a new Porsche every year instead of paying tuition and nanny bills. But my resource allocations are now made on the basis of maximizing the enjoyment of a family of six rather than just me.
There is also an unbridgeable difference between the consideration of the effect of a hypothetical further child on your happiness and the consideration of your actions in respect to an actual child.
Posted by: mkl at Apr 18, 2007 2:30:30 PM
Dogs>cats
Posted by: Fletcher at Apr 18, 2007 3:49:20 PM
Is all very simple.
If you like kids and can afford to have them, you should have kids. You should have as many as you can handle. If you don't like kids and are not a "kids-type" of person, then you should not have kids.
What more can anyone say about it?
Posted by: Kurt9 at Apr 18, 2007 4:06:06 PM
