One study participant in his 60s explained, “If you don’t have children or grandchildren then that dimension of your life is missing.”
According to a new study from researchers at the UK’s Keele University, it appears that heterosexual men may be just as “baby crazy” as women, if not more. As Salon reports, Robin Hadley, the lead researcher for the study, found that “men were almost as likely as women to want children, 59 percent to 63 percent.” But what was truly surprising was that he discovered that a higher percentage of men than women felt depression, anger, and jealousy if they didn’t have children.
Of the men who wanted children, 50 percent experienced isolation because they did not have them, compared with 27 percent of women; 38 percent experienced depression, compared with 27 percent of women; and 56 percent experienced jealousy of those with children, compared with 47 percent of women.
Hadley says that the results of the study, and ongoing research he is still conducting with so-called “involuntary childless men,” truly challenges the belief that women are more inclined than men to want children, and that women “consistently experience a range of negative emotions more deeply than men if they don’t have children.” In fact, one could point to this new research as more proof that the assertion of a man’s parental drive being less than a woman’s is simply a construct of society and has no bearing in fact whatsoever.
Photo: fruity monkey/Flickr
Thank you @OrenCEisenberg for the lead on this story.
There are a few things to consider. 1. The study was done on people who wanted to have children. What percentage of men relative to women want children. 2. Men have less control and fewer options over having children than women. A woman can artificially inseminate even if she doesn’t have a man. If a man impregnates a woman, he can’t force her to carry to term and if she does, the law inadequately protects his rights if she chooses to place the child for adoption against his wishes. 3. Even in cases of adoption, I suspect that a single… Read more »
Sure, do a better study, but most things are socially constructed. Looking at biology/behavior, men are the ones who are eager to spread their seed. I think it makes sense for them to be pretty upset when that doesnt come to fruition.
I think the study was more about parenting than “spreading their seed”.
While I believe that men’s desire for children is commonly underestimated, surely there is something wrong when a survey of 27 self-selecting W.E.I.R.D. men randomly filling in an online questionnaire is considered a sufficient basis upon which to arrive at a radical conclusion about half of the human race. We put far too much trust in the social sciences and far too little in careful and imaginative anthropological reflection on human nature and culture.
Thank you for your down to earth qualifying remark on the ‘below par’ quality of the ‘research conclusions’ in this article, Alistair. And I completely agree with all of your other conclusions as well.