Parenthood makes you mentally tough, immune to cold

LONDON: Parenthood not just makes you happy, it seems to be good for your health as well, for a new study has found that parents are 52% less likely to catch a cold due to their mental toughness than those with no kids. And the more children you have the strong the affect, the study from the Carnegie Mellon University in the US found.
While parents with one or two children were 48% less likely to get sick, those with three or more children were 61% less likely to develop a cold, it found.Surprisingly the scientists don’t think this is because parents have immune systems that have been strengthened by constant viral attacks. Instead it comes down to “mental toughness” , they claimed.
This explains why parents with children living at home and away from home showed a decreased risk of catching a cold, said Prof Sheldon Cohen who led the study. “Although parenthood was clearly protective, we were unable to identify an explanation for this association,” Cohen was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.
He said: “Because we controlled for immunity to the virus, we know that these differences did not occur just because the parents were more likely to have been exposed to the virus through their children.
“Moreover, parents and nonparents showed few psychological or biological differences, and those that did exist could not explain the benefit of parenthood. We expect that a psychological benefit of parenthood that we did not measure may have been responsible.”