Having kids is hard, regardless of their gender, age or personality. But, if you’ve ever wondered if some kids may make parenting harder than others, you’re onto something.
A study uncovered just how difficult life can be for parents of sons. Surprisingly, there is significant cognitive decline in parents of at least one son compared to parents who only have daughters. This is startling news, but it may fit with the stereotypical personalities of boys and girls.
The study, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, saw researchers from Columbia University and Prague’s Charles University teaming up to discover what impact having sons has on parents. Apparently, the only real advantage to having sons is that there is a lower rate of divorce.
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Other than that, there’s really no good news. Parents of sons have an increased mortality rate. Additionally, cognitive decline occurred more rapidly in parents of sons than in parents of daughters. Researchers said this could be partially due to the fact that daughters are more likely to act as “informal caregivers” for their parents as they age and provide them the emotional support they need. This can lead to a lower risk of dementia.
To gather their data, researchers used the University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Study (HRS). They took a look at over 30,000 parents who were at least 50 years old who self-reported the genders of their children. 13,000 had at least one son. Researchers performed cognitive tests on the participants by having them do things like remember a list of ten nouns and count backwards by seven.
Researchers noted that having at least one son led to “a faster rate of cognitive decline” for parents. “Our results also suggest that cognitive decline was faster among parents of multiple sons, compared to parents with only daughters,” they noted. They said the decline was relatively “modest,” but still noticeable.
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Beyond the idea that daughters tend to make better caregivers, researchers weren’t able to shed much light on why exactly having sons leads to faster brain aging. Further research will be needed to determine that. Nevertheless, it is concerning that a child’s gender, something parents have no control over, could affect them so greatly.
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Luis Prada, who reported on the study for Vice, summarized the findings quite bluntly. “The research teams found one recurring theme throughout all of their data: having a boy is basically a death sentence for your brain, and having multiple boys seems to make things even worse,” he stated.
The study contradicted previous findings that suggested there was a positive link between having sons and the health of mothers. On the other hand, there are some non-human studies that support their conclusions because they found “raising male offspring has been linked to accelerated maternal aging.”
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HuffPost contributor Joe DeProspero shared that he did notice a difference when he had a baby girl versus when he had his previous two sons. It had to do with people making objectifying comments about her from a very young age. This gave him an inside look at the reasons why women struggle so much with their self-image.
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On the other hand, Sophie Brickman wrote an opinion piece for The Guardian about having a son after two daughters. She quickly learned that masculinity was prized, and friends and family would make comments about how lucky they were to finally have their boy.
Gender divisions and stereotypes are embedded so deeply in society that someone can’t even have a baby without another person bringing them up. Perhaps it’s better to stop trying to look for such stark differences between sons and daughters.
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Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
