Three economists have crunched the numbers and found that parental stress comes with a hefty price tag
The cost associated with raising a child is astronomical—a recent study estimates the average is over a quarter million per child.
But what about the other costs that go along with parenting? Three economists took it upon themselves to try and figure out what the price tag would be for the stress parents experience.
They focused on “time stress”, which is the anxiety people experience when they feel as if there isn’t enough time in the day to handle your life.
So how much did these three economists decide the stress of raising your kids costs? A whopping $66,000 per child. That is a massive amount of money, just massive. The equivalent of one year’s household income, points out Daniel Hamermesh, economics professor at University of London and co-author of the paper.
Okay, let’s breakdown the science here: the authors of the study looked at survey data comparing parents and non-parents in both Germany and Australia (where the government surveys a panel of households each year about their stress levels).
From this data, Hamermesh and his colleagues determined that after a baby is born, a mother’s time stress skyrockets. Father’s time stress also increases, but only by a third of what the mother experiences.
And, lucky moms, it seems no matter how much help dad is around the house, mom’s stress levels never seem to dwindle.
It also doesn’t matter if you are on baby #2 or #3—in fact, moms with a toddler at home saw an even greater increase in time stress levels. We can’t say we are really surprised with that one. And once you become a mother, there is no returning to your pre-baby time stress.
So you might as well start hitting the gym up because you’re more likely to get your post-baby body back than you are your post-baby stress levels.
How did they get to the $66,000 though?
Well, the economists, being economists, used statistical modeling to attempt to reduce a mother’s financial stress by the amount that her time stress had gone up, in an attempt to even the stress levels out. $66,000 for the Australian parents and $55,000 for the German mothers.
While this is just an exercise in speculation, we can’t deny the fact that that is a lot of money. Hammermesh and Co. don’t have any bright ideas to solve this time stress problem for mothers—it seems it is just a mother’s (and to a lesser extent, father’s) burden to bear.
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