Mental health penalties of having a child: findings from the China family panel studies

Abstract

In recent years, the birth rate in China has rapidly declined. While much research has been done on the penalties in earnings that women incur when they fall behind men in the labor market due to childbirth, there has been little to no research on the mental health effects. This study addresses the gap in current literature by examining the mental health penalties that women experience after having a child in comparison to men. We applied econometric modeling to data collected from China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) and found that women experienced a significant, immediate, and long-run decline (4.3%) in life satisfaction after their first child, while men were unaffected. We also found that women experienced a significant increase in depression after their first child. This suggests mental health penalties since the mental health risk proxied by these two measurements is only significant for women. This is likely related to child penalties in labor market performance and childbirth-related physical health issues. When countries adopt multiple tools to stimulate the birth rate for economic growth, they must consider the implicit burden on women-especially the long-term negative effects on mental health.

Keywords: Economics; Health care; Sociology.

Fig. 1. Changes in life satisfaction for women and men.

A Life satisfaction for women. B Life satisfaction for men. Each dot represents a regression coefficient, and the corresponding vertical line (error bar) represents the 95% confidence interval. Schooling years, age-fixed effects, city-fixed effects, year-fixed effects, province year-fixed effects, the year of survey fixed-effects, and the month of survey fixed-effects are included. When the 0 from y axis is not covered by the vertical line, it signifies that the coefficient is significant and different from zero. The dashed gray line in event 0 signifies the year of arrival of the first child. The event-time dummy for t = −1 was omitted as the reference.

Fig. 2. Changes in depression for women and men.

A Depression for women, B Depression for men. Each dot represents a regression coefficient, and the corresponding vertical line (error bar) represents the 95% confidence interval. Schooling years, age-fixed effects, city-fixed effects, year-fixed effects, province year-fixed effects, the year of survey-fixed effects, and the month of survey-fixed effects are included. When the 0 from y axis is not covered by the vertical line, it signifies that the coefficient is significant and different from zero. The dashed gray line in event 0 signifies the year of arrival of the first child.