Putin’s bold-faced lies serve as test for West

“The Stress Cost of Children”: It’s all in the headline – or, in the case of academic papers, the title – and this one, released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, somehow was more alluring than its competitors coming to my attention.

In this season of high school graduations, including one in my own household, the “stress cost” paper turned out to be particularly apt. It examined not only the impact of adding children to a family, but of subtracting them – the Empty Nest, quantified with data and analyzed with reference to Lagrangean multipliers and the Ashenfelter Dip.

But you don’t have to be adept in multivariable calculus to understand or predict the results. Hielke Buddelmeyer and Mark Wooden of the University of Melbourne, and Daniel Hamermesh of Royal Holloway, University of London, examined surveys filled out over the course of a decade by couples in Australia and Germany, asking respondents how often they felt pressed for time and how much they worried about finances.

The authors found what any parent – certainly any mom – could have told you.

“We show that births increase time stress, especially among mothers, and that the effects last at least several years,” they write. “Births generally also raise financial stress slightly.” But overall, it was the lack of time, not the lack of resources, that was so draining.

“There is no reasonable transfer of earnings from husband to wife that can compensate for the increased time stress that she experiences with the new child,” the authors report. In one of their simulations, the required one-time transfer to offset the stress would amount to twice the husband’s annual salary.

IRRATIONAL CHOICE

Economically speaking, the decision to have children is not utility-maximizing. And yet, most of us – intentionally, passionately, joyfully – make this least rational of choices. More than once.

But here’s the more intriguing part of the study: The effect of emptying the nest is much less than that of filling it. “While the departure of a child from the home reduces parents’ time stress, its negative impacts on the tightness of time constraints are much smaller than the positive impacts of a birth.”

Translation: Children may leave your home but they never leave your heart. To have children is to permanently devote a segment of your brain to tracking their whereabouts and worrying about their well-being.

I suspect this is why the death of Beau Biden at age 46 felt so gut-wrenching, even to strangers. As parents of young children, we are responsible for their well-being and their safety. We can never protect them entirely, as the car accident that took the life of Joe Biden’s first wife and infant daughter cruelly demonstrated. Yet at the outset we have, or imagine we have, some degree of control: the sleeping on the side (or is it the stomach?); the well-fortified car-seat; the preservative-free mashed peas.

The arc of parenting is the process of increasingly accepting the futility of managing risk. You have to let them out into the world – into a car driven by someone else or onto a playground where another child might be cruel.

Buddelmeyer, Wooden and Hamermesh advise that “time constraints” will diminish, although not quite to an extent that is statistically significant. “Births tighten the constraints much more than departures loosen them,” they write.

Indeed. We deride helicopter parenting; we vow to avoid it. Yet our hearts cannot help but hover.

Washington Post Writers Group