Childlessness and Mental Well-Being in a Global Context

Abstract

Pronatal norms exist in various countries to varying degrees. Depending on the strength of pronatalism, adults who remain childless can experience negative sanctions that could affect their happiness and life satisfaction. We test these ideas on childless respondents from 36 nations in two waves of the World Values Survey (1994-1999 and 1999-2004). Childless adults are unhappier and less satisfied if they live in highly pronatalist nations than in other nations. The negative relationship between childlessness and life satisfaction is stronger for childless people in strongly pronatalist nations that have below-replacement fertility or low-to-medium scores on the Human Development Index than in strongly pronatalist nations with at- or above-replacement fertility or high scores on the Human Development Index. The findings show the importance of taking national-level contextual factors into account in understanding the mental well-being of childless people.

Personality and voluntary childlessness

“…Whilst the childless, particularly if so by choice, are not generally shown to have lower life-satisfaction or happiness than parents (Hank and Wagner 2013;Hansen 2012), a supportive social environment is important. Childlessness is more likely to be associated with worse psychological wellbeing in strongly pronatalist countries which have intolerant norms towards childlessness (Huijts et al 2013;Tanaka and Johnson 2014), although these two studies did not distinguish by volition. As forgoing parenthood within a very pronatalist society would involve resistance to strong social pressure, perhaps there would be a greater difference between the childfree and the non-childfree in terms of personality traits, although it could be expected that Agreeableness, Extraversion and in particular Independence would again emerge as influential.…”

Missing Out on the Parenthood Bonus? Voluntarily Childless in a “Child-friendly” Society

“…In countries such as these the high cost of children for women is recognized and women's choice to pursue a professional career better understood and supported. Similarly, according to Tanaka and Johnson (2014), Sweden is a nation characterized by a low proportion of people believing motherhood necessary for a woman-something that often correlates with childless people being happier and more satisfied than in other countries. In addition, although political debates do exist, the Swedish redistributive tax system seems well established and the parenthood bonus mostly undisputed in public debate (Kulin and Svallfors 2013;Söderlind 2005).…”

“…By doing this the article addresses recent studies' call for more research that take the national context into account when researching voluntary childlessness (cf. Avison and Furnham 2015;Tanaka and Johnson 2014).…”

“…Generally, the proportion of voluntarily childless women has been estimated to between 4 to 7 % (slightly higher for men) of the 1960 cohort in Western, industrialized countries such as Sweden, Italy and the US(Persson 2010;Tanaka and Johnson 2014;Tanturri and Mencarini 2008). Most articles dealing with voluntary childlessness, published in English-language journals, investigate the phenomenon in Western, industrialized countries making it difficult to find statistics concerning other parts of the world.…”

Managing social support for childless older Malaysians who are poor

“…Demographers who looked at childlessness from a demographic transitions standpoint seek to explain childlessness from a macro perspective. The impact of industrialisation over time and increased labour force participation of women (Tanaka & Johnson, 2014) are linked to changes in family structure in terms of family size.…”