When parents find time to sit down and have a bottle (or two!) of wine, conversations get deep. This is often when the subject of having a second child comes up.
It turns out that those decisions might require some extra consideration, as social scientists in Australia are now reporting that the decision to have a second child is likely to be damaging to parents’ mental health. The effect is felt most keenly in mothers.
First children drastically change a couple’s lives, adding new responsibilities and expenses, and drastically reducing the amount of time parents have to themselves, or to give one another. But the researchers found that parents both recover from the stress once they settle into a rhythm (though mothers recover more slowly).
It’s when couples decide to have a second baby that things get overwhelming, and often stay that way long term.
While many parents assume that adding a second child to their lives can’t be all that much more work than having one, a study of Austrailian families shows that it actually compounds the time pressure already facing parents, especially moms (if they are the primary caregiver).
Mothers also tend to recover much more slowly from the stress of having a second child, so this can widen the emotional distance between parents.
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The study looked at 20,000 different families, who were all tracked over a period of 16 years. Using data from a project called the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, the researchers analyzed how couples made the decision to have a second child, as well as how they felt in the months and years following their births.
The researchers explained:
“We weighed two main questions that many parents ask themselves when making the decision to have a second child: Do things get better as children grow older, sleep more and gradually become a bit more independent and robust? Or does a second child add to what may already be a highly stressed and time-poor household?”
They were trying to figure out whether second children has a different short and/or long-term impact than their older siblings. It turns out they do.
Traditionally, the bulk of childcare responsibilities falls to mothers, especially in Australia, where new moms can take up to a year of leave from their jobs. This is one of the reasons the majority of responsibility (and therefore stress) falls on them. Of course, this isn’t the case with every family, but generally speaking, it’s more common.
You might be thinking that second children have the benefit of parents who have already learned some child-rearing skills, therefore bringing less time pressure and stress. But the results were the opposite of what researchers expected.
In the study participants, second children doubled their parents’ experience of feeling pressed for time (regardless of whether they were working full or part-time or not at all).
Things don’t get any easier with more children, it turns out. Regardless of how much parents feel like they’ve gotten into the swing of things as they have more kids, each new child increases stress, especially in mothers.
There’s no easy solution, of course, but the researchers suggest that mothers’ mental health could improve long-term if fathers took on more of the child-rearing responsibilities.
It’s important to note that researchers found that fathers recover faster from these overwhelming feelings, while mothers see a drastic dip after a second child that doesn’t always get better. Instead, stress becomes the new normal for them, and serious mental and physical illness can follow.
Feeling stressed all the time can lead to things like clinical depression, anxiety, cardiovascular issues, and chronic weight gain. The public health effects are real and, if nothing else, we should note that helping out moms (or dads, if they are the ones who take on the primary caregiving role!) can save healthcare dollars for everyone.
Having stressed-out parents also leads to poor educational, behavioral, and health outcomes for children.
This doesn’t mean that families should never have a second child. But if time pressure leads to stress and subsequent mental and physical health episodes, parents should consider trying to divide caretaking duties more evenly.
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