The morning after the birth of our fourth daughter, my husband bumped into a neighbour in our street and announced the news. Her response surprised him. “Are you very disappointed?” she asked.
Gary headed indoors and reported the news to me, whereupon we cackled with laughter and had another glass of champagne. The previous morning, I’d finished reading Little Women with one of my older daughters; I’d already had an excited inkling I was about to become Marmee, a mother of four girls, and now I’d been proved right.
We were thrilled to have another daughter to add to our brood; but it quickly became apparent that the world, like our neighbour, had other ideas. And that view seems to be backed up by research published last week, which found that the birth of a third daughter, in a family with no boys, was a downer on parental wellbeing – especially the mother’s psychological wellbeing. The findings, published in the Journal of Behavioural and Experimental Economics, suggest that it takes the mother a whole decade to entirely recover their sense of wellbeing after the arrival of a third girl. The research doesn’t extend to the arrival of a fourth daughter, but its logical conclusion is that a mother like me is in for an even rougher ride.
None of this corresponds to how I felt about having a fourth daughter. Pregnant with my first, I remember thinking I’d probably be having a boy, which I put down to inbuilt patriarchal bias – boys come first, in the sexist world that surrounds us. The baby was Rosie. Second time around, my expectation was that I’d have a boy this time, which was perhaps based on the law of probability; the new arrival was Elinor. Third time around, I was convinced I was having a boy, but the person who emerged was Miranda. And by the time I got to Catriona, I was absolutely certain I’d be having another girl – and I was.
What I don’t remember, though, was any sense of preference in all this. But, definitely, others assumed I’d had a preference – and their assumptions were eerily similar to the trends revealed in this study. Our neighbour who thought we’d be disappointed was the first of many to assume we’d been hoping for a boy; and, indeed, we’d already had plenty of similar comments after the birth of our third daughter. One friend, who had a boy after four girls, encouraged us to “keep trying”. Even the Nigerian friend who told me that “you’d be the luckiest mother in the village where I was born” seemed to be trying to cheer me up, assuming that I’d be wishing my fourth child’s sex was different.
I found it all slightly mystifying, because what felt very real to me was that gender is only one aspect of what makes your child interesting, and it certainly isn’t the most crucial element. The authors of this new study write of the assumption that parents with two children of the same sex want a third child of the opposite sex, and say it may be the case that some parents want a third child of the same sex. How about parents like me and my husband, who simply wanted another child?
I resisted any opportunity to find out whether I was having a girl or a boy on the grounds that this information would tell me only one small thing about the individual person I was going to shortly meet – and with that would come expectations and assumptions and biases that I could perhaps swerve if I waited to see what sort of personality I’d given birth to, rather than what sex. Twenty-one years on from the birth of my last child, the fact that they’re all girls doesn’t give much clue as to who they all are. One is a keen football fan, and has been since she was a small child; two earn as much, or more, as their (male) partners. In the partnerships of at least two of them, I wouldn’t be surprised if the partners become the main early carers of any children they might go on to have.
I can’t help wondering – and, in fact, hoping – that this new research has already been overtaken by a more enlightened approach: it uses data from two studies, one based on people born in 1958, the other based on people born in 1970.
Could it be simply that the trends the researchers have discovered are already outdated and that, for a contemporary cohort of parents, the arrival of a third girl might not be associated with what the academics in this paper describe as a “negative hit”? I’d be interested down the line to read the views on this of participants in the Millennium Cohort Study, which focuses on people born around 2000: maybe they will have a different take on it.
It’s hard to understand what a piece of research such as this has to offer, beyond “fancy that” and a flurry of headlines. In a society that’s increasingly aware of how blurred the boundaries can be between “male” and “female”, and is far less limited by biology (all very positive directions, in my view), research like this feels a bit out of its time. So, too, does the assertion that: “In our results it seems that mothers do not want to have too many children of the same sex as them. It is possible this reflects not just an issue of children, but one of household composition, with the mother not wanting too many females in the household.”
The inference is jealousy: that a mother is somehow programmed to become envious of, or undermined by, her daughters. That’s not a feeling I’ve ever experienced: it seems to me to belong to a different place and time, and happily not the space in which I’ve been raising my children.
• Joanna Moorhead is a Guardian and Observer journalist
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