Australian researchers have taken on the “economy of scale” argument to family planning. Like many parents of a single child, Leah Ruppanner often heard the arguments for getting going on number two. Don’t worry, people told her, it’ll be easier now that you know what you’re doing. The older one will help take care of the younger one. Plus, kids need a sibling. “There is this real pressure around having two children,” Ruppanner says. Unlike most moms, however, she had the ability to test those claims as a sociologist teaching at the University of Melbourne. So she paired up with other Australian professors to analyze 20,000 Australians, using data collected over 16 years from the country’s Household, Income and Labour Dynamics survey. Their findings? That your second child puts an equal amount of pressure on your mental health. What’s more, while expecting parents show equal levels of stress leading up to childbirth, women report double the anxiety after the first child … which only gets worse with the second. Second children double parents’ time pressure, further widening the gap between mothers and fathers. | 
