We attempt to answer a simple empirical question: does having children make a parent live longer? The hypothesis we … offer is that a parent’s immune system is refreshed by a child’s infections at a time when their own protection starts …, 1991, and 2001, we are unable to reject this hypothesis. By contrast, we find in our key result that women with children …

We document the relationship of a set of individual choices - including parenthood, marital state, and income - with an … risks analysis yields several striking results. 1) Females have only a 28% chance to die of cancer when they have children … unmarried males); 3) females with children have only a 34% risk to die of heart disease and 4) a 53% chance of dying from …