We attempt to answer a simple empirical question: does having children make a parent live longer? The hypothesis we … offer is that a parentś immune system is refreshed by a childś infections at a time when their own protection starts wearing …, and 2001, we are unable to reject this hypothesis. By contrast, we find in our key result that women with children have a …

reduction in parental time devoted to children, which modifies their human capital accumulation process. We show that the result … critically depends on the assumptions on the altruistic motives behind the choice of devoting time to children. …