More Children May Deepen Loneliness for Indian Mothers, Study Finds

A large, nationally representative study from India has delivered a result that overturns one of the most enduring assumptions about family life in later age: having more children does not necessarily protect parents from loneliness, and for mothers it may actually make things worse. Using an elegant statistical technique designed to untangle cause from correlation, researchers found that each additional child causally reduced loneliness among older fathers but increased it among older mothers, a divergence with profound implications for how societies support their ageing populations.

The study, published in BMC Medicine, drew on Wave 1 of the Longitudinal Ageing Study in India, a landmark survey designed to be representative of the country’s population aged 45 and above. The analytical sample focused on individuals aged 50 and older who had at least one child, allowing the researchers to ask a deceptively simple question with unusual rigor: does the number of children a parent has actually cause changes in loneliness, or are the two merely entangled with other factors such as poverty, education, health, and social circumstances?

Answering that question requires more than a simple comparison of lonely parents with different family sizes, because the number of children a couple has is not random. Fertility reflects choices and constraints: wealth, education, religion, region, health, and personality can all shape both how many children people have and how socially connected they feel decades later. Observational studies that simply correlate fertility with loneliness therefore risk producing estimates that are biased in unknown directions. The research team, led by Yanshang Wang of University College London with colleagues at Peking University, Heidelberg University, the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai, and Harvard University, addressed this with an instrumental variable approach using two-stage least squares estimation.

The instrument they exploited was the sex of the firstborn child. In many societies, and particularly in contexts with strong son preference, the sex of a first child influences subsequent fertility decisions: families whose first child is a daughter may go on to have more children than those whose firstborn is a son, in part because of cultural preferences and norms surrounding sons. Crucially, the sex of a firstborn child is essentially random at conception, determined by biological chance rather than by any characteristic of the parents that might independently affect loneliness. By using this natural experiment, the researchers could isolate the portion of variation in family size driven by chance, and trace its consequences for loneliness, avoiding the confounding that plagues ordinary correlations.

The headline result from the full sample was surprising in itself: each additional child was associated with higher loneliness scores in later life, with an estimated effect of 0.076 points on the loneliness scale (a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.019 to 0.132, and a p-value of 0.009). But this average concealed a striking split along gender lines. Among fathers, each additional child significantly reduced loneliness, with an effect of minus 0.095 points (95 percent confidence interval of minus 0.187 to minus 0.003, p equal to 0.043). Among mothers, the pattern ran in the opposite direction and with greater magnitude: each additional child increased loneliness by 0.218 points (95 percent confidence interval of 0.137 to 0.298, p less than 0.001). The authors stress that these are causal estimates, not mere associations, which makes the gender divergence all the more consequential.

When the researchers stratified their analyses by residential setting, the sex-differentiated patterns proved most pronounced in rural India. This geographical texture matters. In rural areas, traditional family structures, stronger son preference, and more constrained access to social infrastructure beyond the household may amplify the gendered division of labour within families. Mothers in such settings often carry the bulk of caregiving and domestic responsibilities, and additional children may extend those burdens deep into parents’ later years, even as adult children migrate away for work. Fathers, by contrast, may reap the social status and network benefits of a larger family without absorbing the same costs. Urban settings, with different norms and greater availability of non-family social ties, appeared to soften these divergent effects.

Exploratory analyses of downstream mechanisms offered further clues about why children might affect mothers and fathers so differently. The researchers examined indicators including social engagement and proximity to children, and found that geography within the family moderated the emotional consequences of family size. Co-residence with children attenuated the adverse effects for mothers by 16.87 percent, and living nearby attenuated them by 22.21 percent. For fathers, proximity worked in the opposite direction, strengthening the protective effect of additional children by 4.52 percent for those co-residing and by 14.00 percent for those with children living close by. In other words, having children nearby transforms what a large family means emotionally, cushioning mothers against the loneliness that additional children would otherwise bring, while amplifying the companionship fathers derive from them.

These findings arrive at a moment when loneliness is increasingly recognised as a public health concern of the first order. Chronic loneliness in older adults is associated with elevated risks of depression, cognitive decline, cardiovascular disease, and premature mortality, prompting several countries to appoint ministers for loneliness and to treat social connection as a measurable policy target. Much of the evidence on family size and wellbeing, however, comes from high-income countries with different family systems, and many studies have been content to report correlations. By delivering causal estimates from a low- and middle-income country with one of the world’s largest ageing populations, this study fills a substantial gap and complicates the received wisdom that bigger families buffer older people against isolation.

The implications are particularly pointed for India, where the population aged 60 and above is projected to grow rapidly in the coming decades and where the joint family, long idealised as a safeguard against the isolation of old age, is being reshaped by urbanisation, migration, and declining fertility. If additional children raise loneliness among mothers, then policies that implicitly treat fertility as a solution to elder isolation, or that assume adult children will reliably supply social support, may be misguided. The authors argue that their results challenge the assumption that larger families uniformly protect older adults from loneliness and instead call for gender-sensitive and community-based approaches to later-life social support, ones that do not lean on family size alone to secure wellbeing in old age.

Like all instrumental variable studies, the analysis rests on assumptions that cannot be verified directly, including the requirement that a firstborn’s sex affects loneliness only through its influence on subsequent fertility. The researchers also note that the downstream analyses of proximity and social engagement were exploratory rather than definitive tests of mechanism. Even so, the study’s design represents one of the most credible attempts to date to pin down the causal effect of childbearing on late-life loneliness, and its central lesson travels well beyond India. Family size is not a one-size-fits-all prescription against isolation. Whether children connect parents to the world or quietly cut them off from it depends on who carries the work of family, and where everyone ends up living.

The data underpinning the study come from LASI, one of the largest longitudinal ageing surveys ever mounted in a low- or middle-income country, which interviews tens of thousands of older Indians across all states and union territories. Because the survey captures detailed information on household composition, health, income, and social participation, it allowed the researchers to construct loneliness measures alongside the family and residential variables needed to probe mechanisms. The instrument itself draws on a well-documented demographic phenomenon: in settings with son preference, firstborn sex shifts completed fertility, a pattern demographers have exploited in other contexts to study the consequences of family size for child health and education.

The asymmetry between mothers and fathers fits a broader literature on gendered ageing. Women typically outlive men, are more often widowed, and tend to have fewer independent sources of income and social contact outside the household, which can leave their emotional wellbeing more tightly coupled to family dynamics. At the same time, mothers in large families may face intensified expectations to provide grandchild care and household labour, obligations that can crowd out other forms of social connection even as they anchor parents within busy, and sometimes physically distant, family networks.

The moderating role of proximity is consistent with research on migration within India, where adult children frequently move to cities for employment, leaving parents behind in origin communities. Such distance can sever the day-to-day contact that converts a large family into a source of companionship, and the study’s finding that nearby residence changes the emotional arithmetic of family size echoes earlier observational work on transnational and internal migration and elder wellbeing.

For policymakers, the results suggest that interventions targeting loneliness in ageing populations should look beyond household structure. Community centres, self-help groups, and social pension schemes that expand older women’s networks outside the family may matter more than encouraging co-residence alone. The authors’ call for gender-sensitive, community-based support aligns with a growing international consensus that social connection in later life is a modifiable determinant of health, one that family size alone cannot be relied upon to secure.

Subject of Research: Causal effect of number of children on loneliness among older parents in India

Article Title: The effect of number of children on loneliness: a nationally-representative instrumental-variable study in India

Article References: Wang, Y., Yang, F., Wayal, S., Bakht, S., Sujata, S., Kern, M., Singh, A., & Bäernighausen, T. (2026). The effect of number of children on loneliness: a nationally-representative instrumental-variable study in India. BMC Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-026-05232-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12916-026-05232-w

Keywords: loneliness, number of children, instrumental variables, India, ageing, BMC Medicine, LASI, gender differences, rural health, social support, fertility, older parents