Childless men are more likely to be depressed than women according to a study published this week by Keele University in Staffordshire, England.
Research presented to the British Sociological Association on Wednesday said men are almost as likely to want children, and they become more isolated and depressed if they don't have them.
Keele University's Robin Hadley surveyed 27 men and 81 women without children to ask if they wanted children and why. 59 percent of men and 63 percent of women said they wanted children.
Half of the men said the experienced isolation because they did not have children, compared to 27 percent of women. The correlation (38 percent men compared to 27 percent of women) continued when asked if the felt depressed about not having children.
“There is very little research on the desire for fatherhood among men,” Hadley said in a release. “My work shows that there was a similar level of desire for parenthood among childless men and women in the survey, and that men had higher levels of anger, depression, sadness, jealousy and isolation than women and similar level of yearning.
“This challenges the common idea that women are much more likely to want to have children than men, and that they consistently experience a range of negative emotions more deeply than men if they don’t have children.”
Subjects were surveyed through online questionnaires and were aged 20 to 66, with an average age of 41. Hadley also surveyed an additional 125 men and women with children to determine whether they wanted more children.
The results changed if the subjects already had children. The women who wanted more children, when they thought about not being able to have them, had higher levels of anger, depression, guilt, isolation, sadness and yearning than men according to the University.
