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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

EV0752

The burden of raising children on parental mental health: evidence from a natural experiment

THE BURDEN OF CHILDREARING ON PARENTAL MENTAL HEALTH: EVIDENCE FROM A NATURAL EXPERIMENT

Analyses using twin births as a natural experiment found no causal evidence that family size harms parental mental health, and the observed risks disappeared in instrumental variable regressions.

The study aimed to address the lack of causal evidence on the effects of having many children on parental mental health. Twin births were used as a natural experiment to elucidate the causal effect of family size on psychiatric outcomes, and instrumental variable (IV) regression was applied to distinguish the effects of fertility from twin-specific effects. The sample comprised more than one million Swedish parents whose index child was born between 1999 and 2021, with up to 26 years of follow-up through national registers. Among first-time parents, twin births were associated with an increased risk of anxiety/depression and severe psychiatric outcomes (mania, psychosis, self-harm) only in mothers; no significant association was observed in fathers. Hazard ratios for criminal convictions showed no marked increase in either parent. Higher parities showed a similar pattern. In instrumental variable regressions, the associations attenuated to the null, suggesting that the risk factor is related to twin births rather than family size itself. The authors conclude that concerns about larger family size harming parental mental health appear largely unfounded. Numerical hazard ratio values were shown in the figure on the poster but were not reported separately in the text.

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