14 DAY TRIAL // A team of researchers speaking at yesterday's annual meeting of the British Sociological Association in London maintain that, as their investigations have shown, men do wish to have children, and are likely to get more depressed than childless women if they don't.
Apart from their being depressed because of their being childless, men are bound to also experience feelings of isolation and even anger, the specialists go on to argue.
However, it appears that the reason for which men and women wish to procreate are somewhat different, Daily Mail reports.
To put it in a nutshell, men are quite keen on fathering children because of their being pressured into doing so by both their families and the cultural norms they are exposed to on a daily basis.
On the other hand, women feel the need to become mothers because of biological urges and only become pregnant if they experience a personal desire to do so.
Robert Hadley, a researcher working with the Keele University in Staffordshire, England explains that, after he and his colleagues asked several volunteers to complete an online survey, they found that roughly 59% of the men between the ages of 20 and 66 wished to father one or more children.
They also discovered that 63% of the women who took part in this research wanted to become mothers at one point in their lives.
Still, 50% of the childless men who completed this survey admitted that they felt isolated because they had no offspring.
Just 27% of the women said that their not being mothered fostered feelings of isolation.
Furthermore, 38% of the childless men felt depressed because of this, as compared to 27% of the childless women.
“My work shows that there was a similar level of desire for parenthood among childless men and women in the survey, and that men had higher levels of anger, depression, sadness, jealousy and isolation than women and similar level of yearning,” Robert Hadley says.
Furthermore, “This challenges the common idea that women are much more likely to want to have children than men, and that they consistently experience a range of negative emotions more deeply than men if they don't have children.”