The complex relationship between birth seasonality, family size and personal satisfaction has intrigued scholars for a long time. Recent research has also recently provided some new clues on the influence of birth time and number of offspring on the parents' mental states as well as on the subsequent development of a personality in the individual offspring.
The Influence of Birth Season on Mood and Temperament
Recent works also imply that an individual's precise season of birth can have a lasting impact on his/her temperament. A ScienceDaily report stated that individuals born in a given season are genetically predisposed to refine affective temperaments, which in turn, could make individuals more prone to mood disorders later in life. Specifically, subjects born in the spring and summer months are likely to be characterized by a strong positive, happy, and altruistic disposition, and subjects born in the autumn months tend to be more prone to depressive tendencies.
This kind of effect has been assumed to depend upon temporal variations in exposure to sunlight during the year, which in turn could affect the evolution of the neurotransmitter system of the brain. The mother's exposure to the amount of daylight during pregnancy could result in the baby's biological clock and mood regulatory systems being affected and thus leading the observed differences in temperament.
Family Size and Parental Happiness
The number of children that someone will have is very personal and thus can have serious individual consequences for a parent's psychological state. Correlational studies in the Journal of Chinese Sociology have demonstrated that the increasing number of children more and more parents are able to have can have a harmful effect on parental health and physical activity. In particular, the husband's and the father's number of sons and the wife'/the mother's number of daughters, respectively, were both entered in a statistically significant, negative relationship with the outcome measures.
On the other hand, studies have demonstrated that children can contribute to higher levels of parents' life satisfaction and life meaning in older age categories. For example, results from the data in the General Social Survey (GSS) indicate that parents of adult children who subsequently become older will generally report more happiness than parents of children who are not adults. However, it is fascinating that parents of young children living under the same roof might have less happiness than empty nesters.
Balancing Parenthood and Well-Being
Raising a child is accompanied by huge modifications in the personal daily routines, commitments and identities. In the Public Library of Science, one study reports on the fine-granular effect of the parenthood experience on well-being, given the increasing number of offspring in the family. In spite of the fact that parenting appears to be a source of health and quality of life, in this paper, parenting is shown to be a source of desilencing which will inevitably lead to dissatisfaction in the people participating and which on the other hand will lead to a decrease of the couple's quality of life.
Prospective parents should be reminded not to ignore these issues when having a family in the future. Predicting what the impact of birth order and the number of siblings might be on an individual or family can assist parents in their ability to make better decisions about their own and their child's well-being.
This multifactorial, complex and multivariate interaction between birth season, family size and happiness is controlled through a chain reaction of biological, psychological, and social mechanisms. Although some trends has been reported, it is important to note that this might be at the individual level and may be different to these. Prospective parents are encouraged to take the following into account in the context of a dynamic decision process, i.e., in conjunction with their own vision and context.
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