Not Wanting Kids Is Entirely Normal

half of pregnancies in the United States are unintended.

.. Once you factor in the abortion rate and pregnancies that end in miscarriage, we’re left with the rather surprising fact that one-third of babies born in the United States were unplanned. Not so surprising, however, is that the intention to have children definitively impacts how parents feel about their children, and how those children are treated — sometimes to terrifying results.

.. Over 60 percent of the children studied were reported as planned, almost 30 percent were unplanned (“mistimed”), and 10 percent were unequivocally “unwanted.”

.. Barber’s research looked at things like the number of children’s books in the home, and how often a parent read to a child or taught them skills like counting or the alphabet for the “cognitive” aspect. For the “emotional” support rating, they developed a scale measuring the “warmth” and “responsiveness” of the mother, how much time the family spent together, and how much time the father spent with the child. Across the board, children who were wanted got more from their parents than children who weren’t. Children who were unplanned were also subject to harsher parenting and more punitive measures than a sibling who was intended.

Having Kids Can Make Parents Less Empathetic

Some new experiences seem par for the course—feeling less annoyed by crying kids on planes, embarrassingly tearing up to dad-themed commercials—but other changes have surprised me. I’ve grown more suspicious of strangers, for example. I’ve mentally rehearsed potential sidewalk conflicts. I’ve researched nearby boxing gyms, as though by becoming stronger or more threatening, I could somehow keep her safe.

.. Past research has shown that people who endure hardships tend to treat others more compassionately. By contrast, years of medical training candecrease doctors’ connection to their patients’ suffering. And yet scientists know almost nothing about how having children—among the most titanic and most common life changes—affects empathy.

.. First—and this one is easy—I feel empathy for my child on a scale I’ve never experienced before. Second, I can feel my empathy for others sometimes diminish in her presence.

.. By way of analogy, consider self-control. Scientists have long held that will power is like a muscle that tires with repeated use.

.. Based on my own research with Dweck, I have a hunch that empathy works the same way—people are most likely to run out of it when they believe they have only so much to give. Some psychologists have drawn distinctions between two types of empathy: vicariously sharing someone else’s pain, and compassionately wishing to improve others’ experiences. In this view, the former leads to emotional fatigue, while the latter rejuvenates.

Paul Ryan’s Parenting Problem

While some, most notably John Boehner, have said Mr. Ryan would be able to be an effective speaker and a dad, others have been skeptical. The biggest issue seems to involve fundraising — will Paul Ryan have time to raise the money the party needs if he also wants to be home for dinner? “Speaker John Boehner raised $50 million,”said Representative Tim Huelskamp, Republican of Kansas. “The speaker has to work more than 40 hours a week.”

These reservations aren’t surprising — many people think high-level government office is simply incompatible with being a very involved parent. But it’s not running the government that would keep Mr. Ryan from his kids — it’s raising the money to keep Republicans in office, many of whom actually oppose running the government.

This debate raises the intriguing possibility that politicians might be able to tuck their kids into bed if they didn’t have to spend large portions of their time convincing wealthy people to donate vast sums of money to their campaigns. Unfortunately for Mr. Ryan and everybody else, we’re not likely to explore that possibility anytime soon.