Oxytocin has been called “the love hormone” because levels of it rise in women during childbirth and breast-feeding, and it is thought to facilitate bonding. It is present in men, too, and everything from eye contact to orgasm can increase its amount.

But does the hormone stimulate bonding in new fathers as it does in new mothers? A new study in the journal Biological Psychiatry, the first to look at what its authors describe as “the transition to fatherhood,” suggests that it does. And it also suggests a biological basis for the fact that men and women so often relate differently to infant and toddlers, with women more often cooing and cuddling and men tickling and tossing. ...

The researchers also observed the couples as they interacted with their infants, noting how often each parent did things like gazing at the child, talking “mommy-ese” to him or her, playing with them and otherwise stimulating love and learning. Women with the highest levels of oxytocin were most likely to demonstrate what the journal article calls “affectionate parenting behaviors” while men with the highest levels were most likely to demonstrate “stimulatory parenting behaviors.”

Labels: children, gender differences, parenting

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“I don’t know what I’ve done wrong,” the patient told me.

She was an intelligent and articulate woman in her early 40s who came to see me for depression and anxiety. In discussing the stresses she faced, it was clear that her teenage son had been front and center for many years.

When he was growing up, she explained, he fought frequently with other children, had few close friends, and had a reputation for being mean. She always hoped he would change, but now that he was almost 17, she had a sinking feeling.

I asked her what she meant by mean. “I hate to admit it, but he is unkind and unsympathetic to people,” she said, as I recall. He was rude and defiant at home, and often verbally abusive to family members.

Along the way, she had him evaluated by many child psychiatrists, with several extensive neuropsychological tests. The results were always the same: he tested in the intellectually superior range, with no evidence of any learning disability or mental illness. Naturally, she wondered if she and her husband were somehow remiss as parents. ...

But that left open a fundamental question: If the young man did not suffer from any demonstrable psychiatric disorder, just what was his problem?

My answer may sound heretical, coming from a psychiatrist. After all, our bent is to see misbehavior as psychopathology that needs treatment; there is no such thing as a bad person, just a sick one.

But maybe this young man was just not a nice person.

Labels: children, culture, parenting

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Economists may assert that we’re in the early stages of a recovery, but surveys continue to show that the impact of the Great Recession on American families is deep, widespread and grim. A Pew Research poll published last month indicated that more than half of all adults in the U.S. labor force had experienced some “work-related hardship” — a period of unemployment, a pay cut, a reduction in work hours or an involuntary move to part-time employment — since the recession began in December 2007. A report in March from the Population Reference Bureau showed that more than 70 percent of Americans age 40 and over felt they had been affected by the economic crisis. Government data indicate that the net worth of the average American household has shrunk by about 20 percent — the greatest such decline since the end of World War II. Long-term unemployment — joblessness lasting six months or more — is also at its highest level since the mid-1940s. According to recent data from the Rockefeller Institute, 20 percent of Americans have seen their available household income decline by 25 percent or more. ...

That the Great Recession could then bring hope for a major recalibration — a resetting of all the clocks — is not surprising. Unfortunately, though, it’s not happening in any meaningful way. The poor are getting poorer, and the rich, despite stock-market setbacks, are still comparatively rich. The most devastating losses in household wealth over the past two years have been suffered by the middle class. And families are fraying at the seams. The Pew poll showed nearly half of people who had been unemployed for more than six months saying their family relationships had become strained, and a New York Times/CBS poll of unemployed adults last winter found about 40 percent saying they believed their joblessness was causing behavioral change in their children.

Parents who have jobs are working longer hours than ever. Mothers are taking shorter maternity leaves. The birth rate is on the decline. The divorce rate is declining, too — it’s too expensive for people to break up their households — but that’s not necessarily a family-friendly thing, as a report from the Council on Contemporary Families noted in April: “We know from the experience of the Great Depression of the 1930s that divorce rates can fall while family conflict and domestic violence rates rise.”

Labels: children, culture, demographics, divorce, economics

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In his days as a student at the University of Utah, Chase Kimball was known as number 007, donating his sperm at $20 a pop to help infertile couples.

He estimates that over a seven-year period during the 1970s and 1980s, he likely sired "hundreds of children."

At one point the clinic told him, "You've got too many kids locally and we can only use your sperm if someone orders it from out of state."

"For a long time, whenever I'd see crowds of children, I would look intently and wonder if one of these children was mine," said Kimball, now a 56-year-old lawyer in Salt Lake City. ...

Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction.

One donor, Dr. Kirk Maxey, 52, of Michigan, said he may have sired at least 400 children after donating semen twice a week between 1980 and 1994.

"But he's nothing but another donor," said Kramer. "We have donors who have found 30-50-70 kids."

Sperm donors make about $1,200 month, donating three times a week for many years. "But that doesn't mean there are three potential children," said Kramer. "Every sample is broken out into eight to 25 vials for 75 potential children every week he donates." ...

"Make sperm distribution a mandatory non-profit activity, matching the status of all other traffic in living human tissue," said Maxey. "Disclose to all women all that is actually known about their prospective donor, and maintain a strict registry so that the knowledge base will be substantial. Make the information supplied by donors to banks legally binding, and obtained under oath. Make donor records indistinguishable from other medical records, but require them to be maintained a very long time I suggest 100 years would be a good start. Make them discoverable and subject to HIPPA."

To date, more than 28,000 people -- donor men, parents and offspring -- have registered and more than 7,500 have found their half-siblings and biological fathers.

Now, many at the center of this storm are calling for an end to anonymous donation, hoping to model government-sponsored programs in Australia, Britain and some other European countries to identify sperm donors.

Tim Gullicksen, a 43-year-old real estate salesman from San Francisco, donated for a decade after signing up as a college student at Berkeley. He said he was promised only 10 families would get his sperm but now, "it's pretty clear there are 80 or 90 kids out there."

"These kids don't know me from Adam," he said.

The first child to contact him three years ago through DSR was a 9-year-old boy in Texas whose single mother had chosen sperm donation.

"He had five years of stuff for me when I met him and right after that everything started to snowball," said Gullicksen.

"He had been pestering his mom about where his dad was since he was a toddler," he said. "He had no father figure and he actually kept a box under his bed where he kept all his school projects and wrote 'Daddy' on the box."

Since then, Gullicksen has connected with seven children, ages 9 to 16, who hail from California, Texas, Chicago and North Carolina.

"I started to feel kind of overwhelmed," Gullicksen said. "After that burst of activity, I pondered what I could afford to do. I am not going to marry mommy and move into the house, though that goes away pretty quickly. I have a life."

Labels: children, donor conception, Fathers, My Daddy's Name Is Donor

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"When I was little, my mother had a talk with me about having a 'public face,' because not everyone would understand our family," says Koe Sozuteki, a 20-year-old woman who grew up in a large poly household in Seattle. "That was a hard conversation to have in elementary school."

Sozuteki has a bio mom, a bio dad, a stepmom, three other poly moms, "several other matriarchal women in the community who I think of as moms," and an uncle. She also has a brother and half a dozen poly siblings—children she grew up with but is not related to by blood.

Sozuteki was teased in school about her family, she says, and she didn't get much support from teachers. ...

So in addition to more traditional activities for families with young children— canoeing, puppet-making classes, drum circles, and Frisbee golf—Polycamp now offers workshops for grown-ups. "We added some adults-only stuff," explains Quintus, "things like life-drawing classes, a snuggle party, an adults-only variety show, a bondage workshop."

Speaking as a parent myself—a sex- positive, kink-positive parent—um... a bondage workshop? At a family camp? With kids running around?

"The adults-only workshops are held indoors, in specific cabins and shelters," Quintus explains to me. "Kid-friendly activities are scheduled at the same time, so the kids are occupied whenever there's an adults-only workshop or activity going on. We have chaperones; we have rules." ...

"Children want to love and be loved," says Quintus. "Children grasp the concept easily. As they've gotten older, we've explained that ours is not the traditional form that most relationships take. We're not ashamed of our lifestyle. We're open with family and friends. But they had a right to know that their family is unique."

Sozuteki says she's happy and that she's grateful to have been "born into a tribe of intimate friends."

After a long period of celibacy, Sozuteki's bio mom is now involved in a quad.

"When I turned 7, my mother became celibate because she wanted to focus on me," Sozuteki explains. "I was having a hard time when people my bio parents were dating came into my life and then left my life when things didn't work out."

Sozuteki identifies as poly—her first relationship, she notes, was a quad—but her closest sibling, her brother, is in a monogamous relationship. She currently works at the Center for Sex Positive Culture, is studying to become a sex educator, and coined a widely embraced term in the poly community: "polycule."

Labels: children, culture, parenting, polyamory

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Among the government's most interesting reports is one -- published by the Agriculture Department -- that estimates what parents spend on their children. The latest version finds, not surprisingly, that the costs are steep. For a middle-class husband-wife family (average pretax income in 2009: $76,250), spending per child is about $12,000 a year. Assuming modest annual inflation (2.8 percent), the report estimates that the family's spending on a child born in 2009 would total $286,050 by age 17. A two-child family would cost about $600,000. All these estimates may be understated because they do not include college costs.

These dry statistics ought to inform the deficit debate, because a budget is not just a catalogue of programs and taxes. It reflects a society's priorities and values. Our society does not -- despite rhetoric to the contrary -- put much value on raising children. Present budget policies punish parents, who are taxed heavily to support the elderly. Meanwhile, tax breaks for children are modest. If deficit reduction aggravates these biases, more Americans may choose not to have children or to have fewer children. Down that path lies economic decline.

Societies that cannot replace their populations discourage investment and innovation. They have stagnant or shrinking markets for goods and services. With older populations, they resist change. For a country to stabilize its population -- discounting immigration -- women must have an average of about two children. That's a "fertility rate" of two. Many countries with struggling economies are well below that. Japan's fertility rate is 1.2. Italy's is 1.3, as is Spain's. These countries are having about one child for every two adults. ...

We need to avoid Western Europe's mix of high taxes, low birth rates and feeble economic growth. Young Americans already face a bleak labor market that cannot instill confidence about having children. Piling on higher taxes won't help. "If higher taxes make it more expensive to raise children," says demographer Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, "people will think more about having another child." That seems common sense, despite the multiple influences on becoming parents.

Labels: children, culture, demographics, economics, tax policy

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The last three men nominated to the Supreme Court have all been married and, among them, have seven children. The last three women — Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Harriet Miers (who withdrew) — have all been single and without children.

This little pattern makes the court a good symbol of the American job market. Women and men with similar qualifications — age, education, experience — are much more likely to be treated similarly today than in the past. The pay gap between them, while still not zero, has shrunk to just a few percentage points.

Yet once you look beyond the tidy comparisons of supposedly identical men and women, the picture is much less sunny. There are still only 15 Fortune 500 companies with a female chief executive. Men dominate the next rungs of management in most fields, too. Over all, full-time female workers make a whopping 23 percent less on average than full-time male workers.

What’s going on? Men and women are not identical, of course. Many more women take time off from work. Many more women work part time at some point in their careers. Many more women can’t get to work early or stay late. ...

The best hope for making progress against today’s gender inequality probably involves some combination of legal and cultural changes, which happens to be the same combination that beat back the old sexism. We’ll have to get beyond the Mommy Wars and instead create rewarding career paths even for parents — fathers, too — who take months or years off. We’ll have to get more creative about part-time and flexible work, too.

If you want a preview, you can look at the few professions in which large numbers of highly skilled women have been able to force change. Obstetrics used to be a field that required doctors to be on duty at all hours. Today, group practices allow obstetricians to share the 3 a.m. deliveries and, in the process, have a life outside of work. Optometry and veterinary medicine have their own versions of this story.

Labels: children, culture, economics, gender, gender differences, motherhood, parenting, work/family policy

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My childhood home broke in half during the autumn of 1973, when my twin sister and I were 10 years old. Our parents called us together one evening to announce that they were splitting up, and just like that we became “products of a broken home.” The scene still flickers in my mind: my sister and I sat between our two parents on a monstrous neo-Victorian couch upholstered in a weird, synthetic shade of pink. Everybody cried.

Our father ended up keeping the row house where we lived, but a few years later our mother bought the place next door. This kid-friendly arrangement softened the bite of the breakup, allowing my sister and me to jump over the porch rail whenever we felt like switching parents. ...

Although most real stepfamilies do better than that, competitive rifts are common. Disturbances float to the surface as children grow up and inheritances get parceled out. Do the older kids from Dad’s first marriage deserve to get more, less or the same as the younger kids from his second marriage? The answers aren’t obvious. (For advice on how to work out such difficulties, see Paul Sullivan’s recent piece in The Times, “Blended Families Face a Thicket of Financial and Emotional Issues.”)

Children are resilient. For my sister and me, the painful news delivered that night in 1973 eventually coalesced with everyday reality. The terrible became normal, and the kids were all right. The pink couch still occupies a dark, poorly decorated corner of my mind, but its toxic glow has dimmed. I myself have been peacefully married for 20 years, and I enjoy warm relationships with my parents, stepparents and stepsiblings. My extended family is a creaky, leaky contraption whose inner workings often trip and jam around ex-marital fault lines. This home has been broken, but don’t try to fix it. The cracks and gashes have made it what it is.

Labels: children, culture, divorce, stepparents

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A breadwinner father loses his job. Mom goes to work full time. Stretched by bills for a broken car and a home-renovation loan, the family fears the bank will take their house.

A tale ripped from 2010 headlines? No, it's the plot of the Ramona Quimby series of children's books, written by Newbery Medal-winning author Beverly Cleary, mostly between the 1950s and 1980s. Perennially popular, these tales of the impish Ramona and her bookish sister Beezus are back in the front of bookstores these days because of the new movie, "Ramona and Beezus," starring Joey King and Selena Gomez.

As movie adaptations go, this one is fairly faithful to the books (Ms. Cleary, now in her 90s, collaborated on the project). But in sweetening the story for today's audiences, the film's creators muted Ms. Cleary's major selling point: her complete lack of sentimentality as she wrote one of the best portrayals, ever, of an American family's wrenching journey into the modern economy. ...

The books, though, have a harder edge. When Mr. Quimby loses his job in the film, he turns into an affable, if forgetful, Mr. Mom. In the books, he succumbs to the more realistic depression that often accompanies a breadwinner's job loss. He sits on the couch, watching TV, smoking heavily and not taking Ramona to the park because someone might call to offer him a job.

In the movie, the great child-care snafu is when Ramona gets sick at school and Mr. Quimby cancels a job interview to take care of her. In the books, he once leaves her, at age seven, locked outside the house in the rain because he's stuck in the unemployment-insurance line.

In the movie, Mr. Quimby ultimately finds a part-time job following his passion, teaching art; somehow without any pesky licensure requirements. In the books, he goes back to school to get his art-teaching credentials, but can't land a job in the Portland schools. So he takes a job managing a ShopRite. He doesn't like it, but hey, the pay and benefits can support three children.

Labels: children, culture, economics, Fathers, fathers and daughters, gender, motherhood

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Research published today by the Department for Work and Pensions explores the characteristics and circumstances of families and children in 2008. The report is based on analysis of the Families and Children Study (FACS). This is a longitudinal survey focusing on the circumstances of families in Britain. The study began in 1999, with a representative sample of all lone parents and low/moderate income couple families. From 2001 a representative sample of lone parents and all couple families with dependent children were interviewed. ...

The main findings are that:

* Almost one quarter (23 per cent) of children lived in a lone parent family. Lone parent families were more likely than couple families to live in social housing and to be in the lowest income quintile.
* Four out of five families had at least one parent working 16 or more hours per week (pw). 55 per cent of lone parents worked 16+ hours pw and 57 per cent of couple families had both partners doing so. Forty one per cent of lone parent households were workless compared with 5 per cent of couple households.
* One in six children (16 per cent) lived in a household where no one worked over 16 hrs per week. The majority of these (11 per cent of all children) were in lone parent households.
* Forty nine per cent of lone parents working less than 16 hrs pw reported running out of money before the end of the week or month. Thirty six per cent were worried about money ‘almost all the time’.
* Over half (58 per cent) of children with working mothers were placed in childcare. Use of informal childcare (44 per cent) was more prevalent than formal childcare (31 per cent).
* Perceptions of the affordability and quality of childcare remained more positive than negative. However, a quarter of mothers reported that there was ‘not enough childcare’ (25 per cent) and that childcare was ‘not at all affordable’ (27 per cent) in their local area. Mothers were more positive about the quality of childcare: over a half (59 per cent) said it was ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ good.

Labels: children, day care, economics, poverty, single parenting, United Kingdom

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...No one has done more to disprove Hall's stereotype than Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology and sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Falbo began investigating the only-child experience in the 1970s, both in the U.S. and in China, drawing on the experience of tens of thousands of subjects. Twenty-five years ago, she and colleague Denise Polit conducted a meta-analysis of 115 studies of only children from 1925 onward that considered developmental outcomes of adjustment, character, sociability, achievement and intelligence.

Generally, those studies showed that singletons aren't measurably different from other kids — except that they, along with firstborns and people who have only one sibling, score higher in measures of intelligence and achievement. Of course, part of the reason we assume only children are spoiled is that whatever parents have to give, the only child gets it all. The argument Judith Blake makes in Family Size and Achievement as to why onlies are higher achievers across socioeconomic lines can be stated simply: there's no "dilution of resources," as she terms it, between siblings. No matter their income or occupation, parents of only children have more time, energy and money to invest in their kid. ...

"Most people are saying, I can't divide myself anymore," says social psychologist Susan Newman. Before technology made the office a 24-hour presence, we actually spent less time actively parenting, she explains. "We no longer send a child out to play for three hours and have those three hours to ourselves," she says. "Now you take them to the next practice, the next class. We've been consumed by our children. But we're moving back slowly to parents wanting to have a life too. And people are realizing that's simply easier with one."

Labels: childhood, children, culture, family size, parenting

VOTE

...When the institution of something once called “fatherhood” falls apart, this is what happens. We leave each child to “define” the relationship of him or herself to the person who is his or her biological father. The children must “decide” what that person “means” to them. They should “think about the parameters” of what they want. They should “speak up.”

Probably some of them can manage this task quite well, at least on the outside. The 11 and 12 year olds quoted in the guide sound eerily mature, like people twice their age. The people in high school or college quoted in the guide sound like they are forty. Their parents make a lot of money (in this sample) and they’re impressively articulate and sound mature. Compared to the thick, complex negotiations of their childhood, the “real world” might not be so hard for them.

But what of the others? Two-thirds of the donor offspring in their sample are girls or women.[liv] Where are the boys? Where are the fumbling young people, the ones who are too confused to log onto a web survey, or too angry at their parents to take a survey their parents tell them to take? Where are the ones who got in trouble at school that day and are the last kids their moms would want to be studied by some researcher? Where are the ones who just aren’t gifted with emotional intelligence, who aren’t skilled at negotiating ambivalence and speaking up about their own needs in the face of their parents’ tender feelings, who have no clue how to explore and accept the limits of undefined relationships? When we ask children and young people to behave like little adults, what happens to the ones who can’t rise to the challenge? And what happens to the ones that do?

Labels: adolescence, children, donor conception, Fathers, gay parenting, lesbians, My Daddy's Name Is Donor, parenting

VOTE

Maybe it's because I live in the famously child-friendly neighborhood of Park Slope, in Brooklyn, N.Y., where I'm forced to dodge 15 strollers every time I go to the grocery store. Or maybe it's because I'm 32 and it seems every other woman I know is having a baby. Or maybe it's because I grew up in rural Texas, surrounded by pregnant teenagers. No matter the reason, I was genuinely surprised to read the recent Pew Research Center study showing that the share of American women who are skipping out on motherhood has nearly doubled since 1976, rising from 10 percent of the population to 18 percent.

Personally, I was happy to see that more women feel free to forgo childbearing. But not everyone shares my enthusiasm. According to Pew, 38 percent of Americans now denounce childlessness as bad for society. That's up from 29 percent just two years ago. So what's behind the increase in women choosing the non-mom route? According to social conservatives, legal abortions are to blame for declining birth rates. Mike Huckabee told reporter Max Blumenthal that if it weren't for abortion, there would be no need for immigrants to come work in the United States. Some anti-choicers are issuing dire warnings about a "demographic winter" bringing an end to Western civilization.

Conservative histrionics aside, women who have abortions aren't the ones causing the uptick in childlessness. After all, 61 percent of women who have abortions already have one child. ...

Part of this new self-awareness might mean that women are forsaking motherhood because we're finally admitting that it isn't all it's cracked up to be. As last week's New York magazine cover story documented, parenthood is becoming increasingly miserable because of the exploding expectations placed on mothers—making the child-free lifestyle seem all the more attractive. In 1988, only 39 percent of Americans disagreed with the notion that the childless "lead empty lives." Now a majority—59 percent—disagree that childlessness automatically means you're unfulfilled. ...

Because the Pew research showed an increase in people denouncing childlessness as bad for society, I also asked these childless women how they felt about the social impact of their decision. Most believed that it wasn't harmful to society and could, in fact, be beneficial. But few spoke about benefits to the environment or women's pocketbooks. Instead, childless women argued that increasing childlessness is good … for the children.

Labels: abortion, childfree, children, culture, women

VOTE

At 46, Lisa Schiller walks into her Fort Lauderdale, Fla., law office, sees her name among others on the shingle, and knows she's exactly where she wants to be in her career. Working long hours and staying on top of legal developments has led her to become sought after by clients and recognized as a top lawyer in her field, she says.

Schiller never intentionally set out to forgo children. It is more that marriage and children didn't work into her schedule, she said. "I was focused on my goal of becoming a successful lawyer, then a partner and then a name partner."

Today, nearly 20 percent of women end their child-bearing years without biological children, compared to 10 percent in 1976, a new Pew Research Center report shows. Researchers believe public attitudes have changed, putting less pressure on women to get married and bear children.

"The fact that nearly one in five women does not have a child of her own is an enormous transformation from the past," said D'Vera Cohn, coauthor of the Pew report "More Women Without Children."

A look behind the numbers reveals more of what this trend reflects - a generation of women who are not necessarily choosing career over kids but rather finding that time has passed and their focus has been elsewhere. Women are starting businesses in record numbers, advancing in corporate arenas, and blazing career trails in male-dominated industries. They are the bulk of people getting advanced degrees, and they are getting married later in life. Many of these women say they are happy and fulfilled. Some are juggling as many time demands as me, a mother of three. Others have come to peace with their life's path.

Labels: childfree, children, culture, economics, women

VOTE

Consider Marie, Lola and Grace, fictional nannies all.

Marie sleeps with the husband of the family that’s hired her, kidnaps her charge and passes out drunk. Lola works two jobs to support five children back in the Philippines, furiously networks with other nannies and offers advice to a couple who are still mastering modern parenthood. Grace, a teenager who leaves Trinidad for New York, confronts her employers’ condescension while making friends, finding romance and learning the ropes about America from an established coterie of nannies.

Years after “The Nanny Diaries,” the satirical 2002 best seller that hit a cultural nerve, the nanny novel lives on, showcasing complex and imperfect nannies whose personal stories intersect with thorny larger questions about race, class, immigration and parenthood. ...

“It’s sort of the dark magic of the global economy — if you have a well-paying job here, you’re making 10 times what you make there,” Ms. Simpson said of the foreign women who look after American children. “Of course we want our children to be loved, but there is an economic reality on both sides.”

Labels: children, culture, economics, motherhood, parenting, race

VOTE

...A few generations ago, people weren’t stopping to contemplate whether having a child would make them happy. Having children was simply what you did. And we are lucky, today, to have choices about these matters. But the abundance of choices—whether to have kids, when, how many—may be one of the reasons parents are less happy.

That was at least partly the conclusion of psychologists W. Keith Campbell and Jean Twenge, who, in 2003, did a meta-analysis of 97 children-and-marital-satisfaction studies stretching back to the seventies. Not only did they find that couples’ overall marital satisfaction went down if they had kids; they found that every successive generation was more put out by having them than the last—our current one most of all. Even more surprisingly, they found that parents’ dissatisfaction only grew the more money they had, even though they had the purchasing power to buy more child care. “And my hypothesis about why this is, in both cases, is the same,” says Twenge. “They become parents later in life. There’s a loss of freedom, a loss of autonomy. It’s totally different from going from your parents’ house to immediately having a baby. Now you know what you’re giving up.” (Or, as a fellow psychologist told Gilbert when he finally got around to having a child: “They’re a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit.”)

It wouldn’t be a particularly bold inference to say that the longer we put off having kids, the greater our expectations. “There’s all this buildup—as soon as I get this done, I’m going to have a baby, and it’s going to be a great reward!” says Ada Calhoun, the author of Instinctive Parenting and founding editor-in-chief of Babble, the online parenting site. “And then you’re like, ‘Wait, this is my reward? This nineteen-year grind?’ ”

When people wait to have children, they’re also bringing different sensibilities to the enterprise. They’ve spent their adult lives as professionals, believing there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing things; now they’re applying the same logic to the family-expansion business, and they’re surrounded by a marketplace that only affirms and reinforces this idea. “And what’s confusing about that,” says Alex Barzvi, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU medical school, “is that there are a lot of things that parents can do to nurture social and cognitive development. There are right and wrong ways to discipline a child. But you can’t fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others and constantly concluding you’re doing the wrong thing.”

Yet that’s precisely what modern parents do. “It was especially bad in the beginning,” said a woman who recently attended a parents’ group led by Barzvi at the 92nd Street Y. “When I’d hear other moms saying, ‘Oh, so-and-so sleeps for twelve hours and naps for three,’ I’d think, Oh, shit, I screwed up the sleep training.” Her parents—immigrants from huge families—couldn’t exactly relate to her distress. “They had no academic reference books for sleeping,” she says. (She’s read three.) “To my parents, it is what it is.”

So how do they explain your anguish? I ask.

“They just think that Americans are a little too complicated about everything.”

One hates to invoke Scandinavia in stories about child-rearing, but it can’t be an accident that the one superbly designed study that said, unambiguously, that having kids makes you happier was done with Danish subjects. The researcher, Hans-Peter Kohler, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says he originally studied this question because he was intrigued by the declining fertility rates in Europe. One of the things he noticed is that countries with stronger welfare systems produce more children—and happier parents.

Labels: children, culture, Denmark, economics, motherhood, parenting

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I'm wondering if a parent's happiness is overrated. I've been trying to make sense of the evidence. Will Wilkinson offered us a critique of GMU economist Brian Caplan's argument for additional children as a means of self-satisfaction, which I think was spot on given evidence that parents report lower happiness than non-parents. But then there are those who claim that children increase happiness when they are born into two-parent homes where they are wanted. And there are also those who claim we have to look at twins, because maybe it's inherent psychological factors causing the happiness, which in turn causes the baby-making.

Any parent will tell you children are difficult, and they wear you out, and they likely will just break your heart in the end. And who knows -- maybe when we believe we are feeling deep joy from parenthood (usually over a glass of wine, after all the little stinkers are finally in bed), we are simply sentimentalizing the whole ordeal to keep ourselves from rooting out our unused passports from the sock drawer and dashing off to Europe, never to be heard from again. Or perhaps we just feel too guilty to admit that, while we couldn't bear losing them now that we have them, we very well could have been delightfully satisfied had we never met them.

And here's where I wonder if we ought to re-examine our commitment to happiness. It seems to me that there's possibly some merit -- if we persevere and have the sense to learn from it -- in the other-orientation that is (good) parenting. It's fine to go through life happy, in other words, but I suspect we also want to go through life without becoming big fat self-absorbed jackasses. Children really help in that regard.

Labels: children, culture, parenting

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A middle-income, two-parent family will spend $222,360, on average, to raise a baby born in 2009, according to a government estimate (PDF) released today.

Yes, a number like that screams false precision. Still, some of the broad outlines that go into the estimate are pretty interesting:

* Housing is the most expensive part of raising a kid. It accounts for 31 percent of the cost, followed by childcare and education (17 percent) and food (16 percent).

* The annual cost rises a bit as the child gets older — from less than $12,000 per year for a baby to more than $13,000 for a teenager.
* Among urban areas, the Northeast is the most expensive region to raise a child, and the South is the cheapest. Rural areas, which are lumped into a single category, are even cheaper.
* The cost per child for a two-child family is 25 percent lower than the cost per child for a one-child family.

Labels: children, culture, economics, family size, parenting

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My friend and George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan has been working on a book on "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" and offers a précis of his argument in today's Wall Street Journal. I've been pretty critical of Bryan's argument in the past and I see no reason in this piece to let up.

Angus (aka Kevin Grier) at Kids Prefer Cheese I think sums up Caplan's case pretty well:

1. In happiness research, the big negative hit comes from having one child. Once you've passed that, the extra unhappiness from having more is fairly small.

2. Parents have little to no influence on how their children turn out, so you can relax, not bother to read to your extra kids or make costly "investments" on their behalf.

3. The more kids you have, the more grandkids you might get and everyone knows grandkids are *awesome*!

I have problems with each of these lines of arguments, but let me concentrate here on happiness research. Bryan really struggles with the fact that children tend to have a negative effect on self-reported happiness. (Most economists are dismissive of survey evidence, but, to his credit, Bryan isn't.) He tries to minimize the damage this finding does to his argument by pointing out that the negative effect is small for the first kid, and even smaller for additional kids. But it remains that if one is trying to maximize happiness, no kids appears to be the best bet and fewer is better than more.

Of course, self-reported happiness is just one dubiously reliable piece of evidence about the effect of kids on well-being. The trouble with Bryan's strategy in the WSJ essay is that he resorts to even less reliable survey evidence to support his position.

Labels: children, culture, economics, parenting

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... After all, from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, the childhood “best friend” has long been romanticized in literature and pop culture — not to mention in the sentimental memories of countless adults.

But increasingly, some educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents: Should a child really have a best friend?

Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend. But the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.

“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”

Labels: childhood, children, culture, schools

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