Children are a wonderful gift that fill us with joy, laughter and love. But there are also toys, sleepless nights, the "why?" all the time and the remains of sticky hands throughout the house.
Many parents decide to have a second child thinking that two children do not have to assume much more work than one. But our study in Australian parents demonstrates that this logic is not valid: a second child increases stress due to lack of time and worsens the mental health of parents.
Our study used data from the Survey on households, income and labor dynamics in Australia (HILDA) where data from 20,000 Australians were analyzed, in some cases up to a total of 16 years. The objective was to analyze what happened in the stress due to lack of time and in the mental health of the parents after the birth of their firstborn, during their growth and with the arrival of new siblings.
We weigh the two main questions that many parents ask themselves when making the decision to have a second child: Do things get better when children get older, sleep more and gradually become more independent and less sensitive? Or does a second child add more work to a home where there is already too much stress and lack of time?
Many times the most important discussions about whether having a second child occur at night between the first and the second bottle of wine and make the consequences of having children in the short and long term seem far away. These consequences are what scientists call the stress processing model according to which the most important events of our lives can increase our stress levels, either in the short term (as an occasional experience) or as a chronic nuisance with effects that last over time.
In Babies and more The feeling of guilt at the arrival of the second child: how to deal with itResearchers in the health field show how chronic stress is the most damaging to our health and well-being, favoring cardiovascular diseases, obesity and other important diseases. We are not saying that children cause heart disease (our western diets are rather the cause), but we ask the question of whether the birth of the first and second children has short or long term effects on stress due to lack of time of Australian parents and, therefore, in their mental health.
The birth of a first child introduces adults to a new role (that of being parents) accompanied by certain expectations on how to distribute time at work or in the family. After the birth of the baby, many Australian mothers take a year of maternity leave. Some of them rejoin the labor market, but others do not.
Most Australian men maintain their full-time jobs when the baby is born, partly to compensate for mothers' salary reductions, but also because men in Australia take a more traditional mindset regarding gender roles after birth
Both mothers and fathers are more likely to believe that women should stay home to take care of children as soon as they become fathers than before they have children. As a result, most of the burden of child care falls on women.
The second (and third) children do not suppose a new role for the parents, but they do increase the demands of these roles. In theory, parents of second children have developed certain parental skills (including how to clean a bottle with the child in their arms or know that it is better not to buy certain expensive clothes that can only be dry cleaned). These skills could suggest that a second child will be easier and will be less stressful than the first.
However, our results say otherwise
In Babies and more, is it true that the mothers of three children are the most stressed?Before having a child, mothers and fathers show similar levels of stress due to lack of time. Once the first child is born, these levels increase for both parents, although the effect is much greater in mothers than in fathers.
The second child doubles the stress due to lack of parental time and makes the differences between fathers and mothers also greater. Although we expected that parents' lack of time stress would improve over time (once they got more skills or their children entered school age), we realized that stress due to lack of time did not improve. We also thought that parents who worked full time or those who took care of most household chores would be the ones who would experience the most stress due to lack of time.
However, we realized that stress due to lack of time increased with the first and second children in all parents, whether they continue working or not. Hence, going to work part-time is not a solution to this problem and parents with a third child do not have it better either, something that shows us that when we talk about children it is not an economy of scale.
To better understand the health implications of parents when stress increases due to lack of time, we also take a look at their mental health. We realized that the mental health of mothers improves with the first child immediately after being born and is maintained for the following years. However, with the second child, the mental health of the mothers decreases considerably and remains low.
The reason: the second child intensifies the mother's stress due to lack of time. We found that if the mothers did not have said stress after the birth of the second child, their mental health would even improve with motherhood. Parents see how their mental health improves with the first child, but they also see how his mental health worsens with the second. However, unlike the mothers, the mental health of the parents stagnates over time and clearly the parents do not suffer the same type of stress due to lack of time as the mothers in the long term.
What does all this mean for Australian families and for the institutional environment they are in? The first is that Mothers are not able to take care of themselves all the time a child needs. Even reducing your workday to accommodate the child's demands, your stress due to lack of time does not improve and is something that has important consequences for your mental health.
In addition, the effects of children on stress due to mothers' lack of time is not specific, but rather it is a chronic stress that deteriorates their health. As such, maternal stress due to lack of time should be a priority for health professionals and politicians.Second, mothers need institutions to receive support to take care of their children thanks to the help of school buses, dining programs in schools and measures that support work flexibility and allow greater involvement of parents in order to improve Mental health of mothers.
Given that poor postpartum mental health of mothers can lead to bad childhood in children, it is of national interest to reduce such stress so that mothers, children and families can prosper properly.
In Babies and more, have the second child fast or wait for the first to grow a little more?Authors: Leah Ruppanner, Professor of Sociology, University of Melbourne; Francisco Perales, Principal Researcher (Social Science Research Institute and Life Course Center) and ARC DECRA Scholar, University of Queensland and Janeen Baxter, Professor at the University of Queensland.
This article has originally been published in The Conversation. You can read the original article here.
Translated by Silvestre Urbón
