The Value and Cost of Children

Abstract

Between May 1977 and February 1978, 717 Australian, Greek, and Italian parents were interviewed in Sydney, Australia, concerning their attitudes to having children. Open-ended questions related to the advantages and disadvantages of having children provided measures of the economic and social-psychological values and costs of children to parents. Analysis of responses to these questions showed that Southern Europeans were more likely to mention the benefits of children in completing the marriage and in establishing the family unit. The major costs of children to all groups were reported as economic, concerns about the care of children, and restrictions to parents. A number of multiple regression analyses revealed that the psychological variables for Southern European parents provided substantial explanatory power in the prediction of the number of children wanted by them. The variance explained for Australians, however, was considerably smaller. It is suggested that measures which take into account changes in attitudes to having children with the experience of child rearing might improve upon the percentage of variance explained by social-psychological indices.