AP, Warsaw
Apart from all the joys that girls bring into this world, turns out they can also add some precious years to their father's life, says a new study. According to this study, dads with daughters tend to live longer than those who do not have any daughter.
Since it’s mostly mothers we talk about when it comes to childbirth, this research was conducted to find out how father’s health and body was affected when a kid is born. The study was conducted by Jagiellonian University, for which data from over 4,310 people was collected, which included 2,147 mothers and 2,163 fathers.
It was found that sons did not have any kind of effect on their fathers. However, it was discovered that the number of daughters was linked to paternal longevity.
The study further claimed that the more daughters they have, the longer they live. To be precise, 74 weeks more for each daughter born, they have much beneficiary. This is great news for all the dads, but not for mothers. This was because, according to another study published in the American Journal of Human Biology, both sons as well as daughters have a negative impact on a mother’s health and reduces her lifespan. Another study revealed that women who stay single for longer are happier.
A different study found that having a child regardless of the gender increases the lifespan of both the parents. The data for this study was collected for over 14 years and it was found that couple with kids live longer as compared to the ones who don’t have any kids.
Contradicting that specific study, another one is claiming that having a child, regardless of the gender, increases the lifespan of both parents. Based on data collected over 14 years, these researchers have found that couples with a child are more likely to live longer compared to the ones who choose to remain childfree.
The report from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm found that once you reach the age of 60, men and women live longer if they have at least one child. The researchers used Swedish census data from over 1.4 million men and women born between the years of 1911 and 1925 to draw their conclusions.
They discovered that on average, fathers live 20.2 years past the age of 60, compared to 18.4 years for childless men. For women, mothers are expected to live 24.6 years past 60, 1.5 years longer than childless women. The researchers gave this example: The one year risk of death for an 80 year old man with a child was 7.4 per cent, compared with 8.3 per cent for a childless man of the same age.
Interestingly, the study found that when men were divided into married and unmarried as well as childless and fathers, the unmarried men had a greater death risk: the difference in death risk was 1.2 per cent among unmarried men and 0.6 per cent among those who were married.
“Unmarried men might be relying more heavily on their children in the absence of a partner by way of a possible explanation,” the study authors suggested. “They are also likely to be less well educated, whereas the opposite tends to be true of women.” While other studies have found that parents of daughters live longer than those who have sons, the latest study concluded that the sex of the children makes no difference.
The researchers admit that no firm conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn, but they say: “Our finding that the association grew stronger when parents became older is further in agreement with research suggesting that childless people face support deficits only towards the end of life.” Reproduction is energetically and physiologically expensive, and an individual investing resources into producing offspring should suffer costs such as deterioration in health condition and possibly shorter life span.
Since the energetic and nutritional demands of pregnancy and breastfeeding render reproductive costs much higher in women than in men, women with a large number of children should show signs of deterioration in condition, while men with large families should not. However, whether reproductive costs reduce longevity in women is still questionable, and in men this issue has not been adequately addressed.
In addition, since sons are energetically more expensive to produce than daughters, having sons should have a more pronounced negative impact on maternal longevity than having daughters. Here we document a striking disparity in the impact of children on the life span of mothers and fathers in a Polish rural population. We show for the first time that number of daughters was positively related to a longer life span of their fathers, increasing their longevity on average by 74 weeks per daughter born, while number of sons did not have a significant effect on paternal longevity.
In contrast, in women, the number of daughters and number of sons reduced maternal longevity and did so to the same extent, on average by 95 weeks per son or daughter, indicating that for women, the costs of having sons and daughters are similar.
