As If You Haven’t Done Enough: New Research Finds Childbirth Can Impact How Fast You Age

Remember all those times—an infant who wouldn't sleep through the night, an eight-year-old who fell from a high tree branch, a teenager who stayed out WAY past curfew—when you were sure the stress of being a mom was subtracting years from your life? Well, it turns out there is a connection between having kids and aging, but maybe not in the way you thought. A new study finds that the number of times a woman gives birth may affect the body’s physical aging process.

Researchers at Penn State examined several different measures that represent how a person’s body is aging and found that people who had few births — or many — seemed to have aged quicker than those who had given birth three or four times. However, these effects were found only after a person had gone through menopause.