Paul Thomas: Carefree slide into extinction

Now they tell us: having children is bad for you.

A survey of 13,000 adults has found that parents experience significantly higher levels of depression than non-parents.

According to the author of the study, a Florida University sociologist, it conclusively disproves "the strong cultural assumption that parenthood is the key to lifelong personal development and happiness. The worries associated with being entirely responsible for another human being appear to outweigh the benefits."

Well, when you put it like that, it makes sense. Think of all that anxious pacing around the boundary waiting for little Johnny to have his turn at bat. You'd love to see him get a decent score but the chances are his innings will be an anti-climax if not a fiasco.

Perhaps hobbled by nerves and pads three sizes too big for him, Johnny will be run out by half the length of the pitch. Or he'll be on the wrong end of a dubious decision from an umpire who just happens to be the bowler's father.

Wherever the little ones are doing their cultural or sporting things, this pattern - nervous anticipation, unsatisfactory outcome, deflation - is being repeated. And it doesn't necessarily end there because the fall-out from that third ball duck or botched piano recital or elephantine pirouette may linger, in the form of a wretched child, for the rest of the day.

Having a gifted child is arguably even worse since the higher the expectations, the lower the depths of disappointment. And we're all familiar with that walking, talking time-bomb, the fanatically supportive parent.

These are usually men and women whose own youthful endeavours were notable for enormous enthusiasm and a dramatic absence of talent. Having spent a couple of decades brooding over their failure to make a splash, they're now determined that their child will be the star they never were.

Despite the avalanche of advice, the countless hours of practice, the private lessons from age 3 and the state of the art gear, the poor child will never be quite good enough. How could they be? How often does a Bradman, a Pele, a Fonteyn come along?

Meanwhile the parent becomes ever more maniacal, hurling tirades at officials and judging panels, removing the child from schools and clubs where the fast-tracking isn't fast enough, devoting every spare minute to administration to smooth the prodigy's progress. And we haven't even got to the teenage years yet.

For parents of teenagers the potential for angst is almost unlimited. For a start there's the drama and financial cost generated by peer pressure. Then there's the never-ending battle over the teenager's academic progress or lack thereof and the associated nagging fear that you might be lumbered with an unemployable misfit who has no intention of ever leaving home.

There's a whole sub-category of anxiety related to the social scene, some of it contradictory: you want your growing lad or lass to be socially adept and popular but not too socially adept and popular. To paraphrase Saint Augustine: give me grandchildren - but not yet.

You want them to make the most of their youth but are painfully conscious that there's a fine line between exuberance and recklessness. You sense danger everywhere.

This is the parental burden: love breeds anxiety. If you love someone, you're concerned for their well-being whether they're hitch-hiking to Mt Maunganui, trekking in the Andes or scootering to the corner dairy. The true meaning of this survey, it could be argued, is that the secret of happiness is to eliminate love from your life.

I don't know where these 13,000 adults came from but my impression, based on observation and experience, is that parents willingly embrace their burden of anxiety and regard it as a small price to pay.

But perhaps I'm not seeing the big picture because the statistical evidence suggests that more and more people in the Western World agree with the premise that a happy life is a childless one.

Mark Steyn, a brilliant columnist of the conservative gadfly persuasion, has argued for some time that the greatest threat to the West comes from falling birth rates and that on present trends, jihad or no jihad, Western Europe will be predominantly Muslim well before the middle of the century.

In the Wall Street Journal this month, Steyn pointed out that the West is running out of babies faster than it's running out of oil since only America among the Western nations has a birth rate above what he calls the replacement fertility rate - what's needed to maintain the current population - of 2.1 children per woman.

Extrapolating from this, by 2050 there will be 100 million fewer Western Europeans - as opposed to residents of Western Europe - than there are now. "We are living through a remarkable period," wrote Steyn: "The self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world."

We may be on the verge of extinction but we're happy. And isn't that what really matters?