Children, unhappiness and family finances
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Children, unhappiness and family finances David G. Blanchflower 1,2
& Andrew
E. Clark 3
Received: 1 February 2020 / Accepted: 19 August 2020/ # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The common finding of a zero or negative correlation between the presence of children and parental well-being continues to generate research interest. We consider international data, including well over one million observations on Europeans from 11 years of Eurobarometer surveys. We first replicate this negative finding, both in the overall data and then for most different marital statuses. Children are expensive: controlling for financial difficulties turns our estimated child coefficients positive. We argue that difficulties paying the bills explain the pattern of existing results by parental education and income and by country income and social support. Last, we underline that not all children are the same, with stepchildren commonly having a more negative correlation with well-being than children from the current relationship. Keywords Children . Subjective well-being . Age . Financial difficulties . Eurobarometer JEL classification codes D14 . I31 . J13
1 Introduction In this paper, we examine well-being data from the USA, Europe and ten other nonEuropean countries1 on the correlation between children and subjective well-being. Much of the existing literature reports that this correlation is negative. We replicate this result, both in regressions that control for income and ones that do not. We find, however, that once we take account of the respondent’s ability to pay their bills, then the sign switches and children are positively correlated with parental happiness. 1
China, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Africa, Surinam and Taiwan.
Responsible editor: Klaus F. Zimmermann
* David G. Blanchflower [email protected] Andrew E. Clark [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
D. G. Blanchflower, A. E. Clark
Financial distress therefore helps to explain the negative relationship between children and well-being. As Cetre et al. (2016) note, subjective well-being scores are usually well-behaved, in that they produce estimated coefficients that match our intuitions. On the contrary, the estimated coefficients on children do not always fit well with the sentiment of many that (at least for evolutionary reasons) children should produce well-being. While some analyses have produced positive correlations, these do not apply to all parents equally, and other works have concluded that there is a negative relationship between children and parental well-being.2 Kahneman et al. (2004) concluded that childcare was only slightly more enjoyable than housework or commuting to work. The effect of children in general may well be different from that of young children. The lags and leads analysis in Clark et al. (2018) suggest that life satisfaction rises at birth but then turns negative when the child is aged two. However, th
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