The 'Stress Cost' of the Empty Next

WASHINGTON -- "The Stress Cost of Children."

It's all in the headline -- or, in the case of academic papers, the title -- and this one, released recently by the National Bureau of Economic Research, somehow was more alluring than its competitors coming to my attention: "Does Exporting Improve Matching? Evidence from French Employer-Employee Data." Or, "Different Types of Central Bank Insolvency and the Central Role of Seignorage."

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 longitudinal 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 -- indeed, to 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.

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.

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