Why are people having far fewer babies than they used to?
Is it because women now have more fulfilling career options outside the home? Have children become too expensive? Or maybe young adults just don’t have to start families anymore.
New research from Institute for Family Studies fellow Lyman Stone suggests the answer might be none of the above. Instead, Stone argues, there is a strong possibility that women simply are not as happy as they used to be and that happier women have more children.
Stone surveyed 6,000 women about their fertility preferences and included some standard screening questions designed to detect anxiety and depression as well.
What Stone found is that no matter how many children a woman already had, the happier a woman was, the more likely she wanted to have at least one more child. Even among women who were already happy with the size of their current family, the happier a woman reported being, the more likely she intended to have more children.
To be clear, the causation is not that more children make women happy, but that happy women have more children.
Stone also asked respondents how optimistic they were about their future. Among women who thought their lives would get better in the future, more than half of women wanted to have more children. Among women who thought their lives would stay about the same, only 25% said they wanted more children, and among those women who thought their lives were going to get worse, just over 10% said they wanted more children.
So if we as a society are concerned about falling birthrates, and we want women to have more children, then the first thing we need to do is figure out how to make more women happy.
