by Lyman Stone (@lymanstoneky)
We recently surveyed 24,000 parents around the United States. One question we asked is on a lot of parents’ minds: how difficult is parenting? Many parents feel stressed or burdened by raising kids and would like to make it easier: 7.4% of parents in our survey say parenting is “very hard,” and 36.5% say it is “fairly hard.” We wondered if our data could point to ways in which parents could lighten their own load—both because we think parents could use a break, and because parents who describe parenting as easier are likelier to say they will have more children. Controlling for the number of kids, 48% of those who say parenting is very easy intend more children, vs. 38% of those who say parenting is fairly easy, 35% of those who say parenting is fairly hard, and 33% of those who say parenting is very hard. When parenting is too hard, fewer children are born.
