It has been argued that it would take an annual salary of $120,000 to recoup stay-at-home-mothers fairly for the work they do. But if you wanted to include the cost of stress added to a woman’s life directly due to childrearing, you’d need to tack on another $66,000 to compensate her. Just think! You could spend that dough on a guided hike up Mt. Everest.
Yes, everyone knows having kids is difficult to some degree or another, but that’s often thought of as part and parcel of the job description—it’s monotonous and challenging and stressful, but such is the price one pays for the deep satisfaction of being a good ancestor (plus, sometimes it’s fun). But economist Daniel Hamermesh at UT Austin has gone a step further to quantify just how stressful it is, and according to a look at FiveThirtyEight by Andrew Flowers, it’s so stressful that we not only need more income to offset it, but if we were honest with ourselves at all we’d probably not even have kids, or at least have fewer. Tell us something we don’t know!
Flowers notes that Hamermesh’s paper, “The Stress Cost of Children,” has not been peer-reviewed, but he finds the results nonetheless startling. (Whispered aside: He’s about to have a baby, so really, he still Has No Idea). He writes:
Parents’ self-reported feelings of financial stress increase little after having a child. But time stress — or how overwhelmed and rushed parents feel — jumps enormously, especially for mothers, and it lasts several years. Translating that time stress into dollar figures shows that having a child produces a significant burden — on top of the $245,340 in food, housing, education and other costs that the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that it takes to raise a kid.
To make these calculations, Hamermesh and his co-authors used two massive longitudinal studies from Australia and Germany, each spanning more than a decade: the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). (The researchers would have liked to study the United States, but similar longitudinal data doesn’t exist here.) Both the Australian and German surveys followed more than 7,000 heterosexual married couples for roughly a decade through 2012 and routinely asked participants questions like “How often do you feel rushed or pressed for time?” The participants were also asked to rank their satisfaction with their financial situation. The researchers looked at how stress levels changed for couples who had a child during the study period compared with those who didn’t. Despite differences in culture and child-care services between Australia and Germany, the qualitative conclusions from both studies were similar. That suggests the results “supersede any cultural or legislative differences,” Hamermesh said.
In the survey, mothers said they felt 20 to 22 percent more stressed out with a new kid, compared to fathers, who said they were 5 to 8 percent more stressed. This fades for dads, according to Flowers, but not for mothers, during those first few years.
Then there is this sentence:
“If I were a feminist, I would love this,” Hamermesh said.
Yurgh.