Counterintuitive kid count findings

After feverishly fighting my viral battle, Ben caught the dreaded bug, and then Kristen, our nanny, succumbed to something similar, and so, for three weeks, I have been low on blog time, and with my baby due in less than a week, I don't imagine the window of opportunity is going to be flung open again anytime soon -- so here I am, writing long-winded run-on sentences in an attempt to get out at least a few of the ideas I've been pondering during my offline time. I'll start where I left off in my last post: the "Childless Europe" article that appeared in the June 29 issue of the New York Times magazine.

What I found most intriguing from this article, as related to my kid count obsession, is that sociologists have found that women who's better halves are actually close to better and share in the responsibilities of managing a family household -- who drop the kids at daycare, change the dirty diapers, do the dishes, and make a game out of bath time -- are more likely to want to have another child than women who do more than 75 percent of the housework and childcare. As a result, families in seemingly family-friendly countries like Italy, Greece, and Spain, have the lowest fertility rates in the world. Simply put, in these places it is more common for women to stay home and deal with the kids day in and day out without the aid of a husband and these women are, thus, less inclined to have more kids. On first read, at least for me, it was counterintuitive. I expected, perhaps naively, that the more traditional old-school family structure = more children. But, honestly, when I think a little harder about the three weekdays I spend at home alone with my one son, who I adore, it's not difficult to see how these mothers who spend the majority of their lives glued to their children, without the useful assistance of their husbands, get a little turned off at the idea of mass production. 

On the flip side, the article highlights how women in the Netherlands, and other northern European countries with greater gender equality, have among the highest fertility rates on the continent. When women are working and husbands are helping out on the home front, the urge to procreate is convincingly stronger. These studies don't translate perfectly to American society, which doesn't offer the same parental benefits (termed "generosity" in the article) as its European brethren, but it does offer, according to the article, more flexibility for women, who can leave their jobs for a handful of years and then return to the workforce sometime down the road. (I'm not 100 percent sure I will see this born out among my friends who have passed up their careers to stay at home, but the article does claim that America is more flexible in this regard than most European countries).

This leaves me pondering what the ideal situation for having a higher than average kid count is. Would the recipe for prospering (and I use this word with purpose) with a kid count of four be two working parents in a household where chores and childcare responsibilities are divided equally between husband and wife? And, if so, at what cost? In my next post, I think it's high time I take a closer look at the financial realities of raising a larger than average family.