Women`s suicide risk less with more kids

Motherhood raises a woman`s self-esteem and lower`s her risk of committing suicide.

London: Motherhood raises a woman`s self-esteem and the more children she has, the lower her risk of committing suicide, a new study has claimed.

Researchers at Kaoshiung Medical University, Taiwan, who looked at data of 1,292,462 women over 20 years, found that motherhood does indeed have a protective effect and cuts the chance of a woman killing herself. The risks fall further the more children a woman has, they discovered. According to the study, women with two children were 39 per cent less likely than those with one child to commit suicide. And that figure rose to 60 per cent among women who had three children, the Telegraph reported. Part of the reason could be an increased sense of happiness and self-esteem that woman feel after giving birth, the researchers said. Mothers often have more supportive social networks than women who do not have children, they added. "A clear tendency was found toward decreasing suicide rates with increasing number of children after controlling for age at first birth, marital status, years of schooling, and place of delivery," said Dr Chun-Yuh Yang, who led the study. "Given that the women included in this study were young (the large majority of suicide-related deaths occurred before premenopausal age) and were among the youngest reported for any country, this finding is particularly noteworthy." The theory that parenthood protects against suicide was first suggested by renowned sociologist Emile Durkheim in 1897. However, later studies have found the theory difficult to prove because of the relatively low number of people who take their own lives. But the latest research, one of the largest studies of its kind, proved that motherhood does indeed have a protective effect, which increases with the number of children a woman has. Dr Chun-Yuh Yang added: "The presence of young children may increase the mother?s feelings of self-worth, possibly based on her perception of being needed." The study is published in the CMAJ, the Canadian Medical Association Journal. PTI