Parenting adds two years to your life

New research out of Sweden, has found that having children adds as much as two years to your life expectancy. Author of the study, Dr Karin Modig from the Karolinska Institutet, calls the years “payback time”. The research, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, showed that men and women with at least one child will have an increased longevity in their old age because of support from their adult children.
As part of the study everyone born in Sweden between 1911 and 1925 was identified, as were their children. Age-specific death risks were assigned to the cohort of parents and to the cohort of older Swedes who did not have children. 
“Men and women having at least one child experienced lower death risks than childless men and women. At 60 years of age, the difference in life expectancy was 2 years for men and 1.5 years for women,” the authors of the study concluded.