Some of the highlighting is mine.
Having Kids Makes You Happy
Lorraine Ali
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 5:43 PM ET Jun 28, 2008When I was growing up, our former neighbors, whom we’ll call the Sloans, were the only couple on the block without kids. It wasn’t that they couldn’t have children; according to Mr. Sloan, they just chose not to. All the other parents, including mine, thought it was odd–even tragic. So any bad luck that befell the Sloans–the egging of their house one Halloween; the landslide that sent their pool careering to the street below–was somehow attributed to that fateful decision they’d made so many years before. “Well,” the other adults would say, “you know they never did have kids.” Each time I visited the Sloans, I’d search for signs of insanity, misery or even regret in their superclean home, yet I never seemed to find any. From what I could tell, the Sloans were happy, maybe even happier than my parents, despite the fact that they were (whisper) childless.
My impressions may have been swayed by the fact that their candy dish was always full, but several studies now show that the Sloans could well have been more content than most of the traditional families around them. In Daniel Gilbert’s 2006 book “Stumbling on Happiness,” the Harvard professor of psychology looks at several studies and concludes that marital satisfaction decreases dramatically after the birth of the first child–and increases only when the last child has left home. He also ascertains that parents are happier grocery shopping and even sleeping than spending time with their kids. Other data cited by 2008’s “Gross National Happiness” author, Arthur C. Brooks, finds that parents are about 7 percentage points less likely to report being happy than the childless.
The most recent comprehensive study on the emotional state of those with kids shows us that the term “bundle of joy” may not be the most accurate way to describe our offspring. “Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers,” says Florida State University’s Robin Simon, a sociology professor who’s conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. “In fact, no group of parents–married, single, step or even empty nest–reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.”
Simon received plenty of hate mail in response to her research (“Obviously Professor Simon hates her kids,” read one), which isn’t surprising. Her findings shake the very foundation of what we’ve been raised to believe is true. In a recent NEWSWEEK Poll, 50 percent of Americans said that adding new children to the family tends to increase happiness levels. Only one in six (16 percent) said that adding new children had a negative effect on the parents’ happiness. But which parent is willing to admit that the greatest gift life has to offer has in fact made his or her life less enjoyable?
Parents may openly lament their lack of sleep, hectic schedules and difficulty in dealing with their surly teens, but rarely will they cop to feeling depressed due to the everyday rigors of child rearing. “If you admit that kids and parenthood aren’t making you happy, it’s basically blasphemy,” says Jen Singer, a stay-at-home mother of two from New Jersey who runs the popular parenting blog MommaSaid.net. “From baby-lotion commercials that make motherhood look happy and well rested, to commercials for Disney World where you’re supposed to feel like a kid because you’re there with your kids, we’ve made parenthood out to be one blissful moment after another, and it’s disappointing when you find out it’s not.”
Is it possible that American parents have always been this disillusioned? Anecdotal evidence says no. In pre-industrial America, parents certainly loved their children, but their offspring also served a purpose–to work the farm, contribute to the household. Children were a necessity. Today, we have kids more for emotional reasons, but an increasingly complicated work and social environment has made finding satisfaction far more difficult. A key study by University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Sara McLanahan and Julia Adams, conducted some 20 years ago, found that parenthood was perceived as significantly more stressful in the 1970s than in the 1950s; the researchers attribute part of that change to major shifts in employment patterns. The majority of American parents now work outside the home, have less support from extended family and face a deteriorating education and health-care system, so raising children has not only become more complicated–it has become more expensive. Today the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that it costs anywhere from $134,370 to $237,520 to raise a child from birth to the age of 17–and that’s not counting school or college tuition. No wonder parents are feeling a little blue.
Societal ills aside, perhaps we also expect too much from the promise of parenting. The National Marriage Project’s 2006 “State of Our Unions” report says that parents have significantly lower marital satisfaction than nonparents because they experienced more single and child-free years than previous generations. Twenty-five years ago, women married around the age of 20, and men at 23. Today both sexes are marrying four to five years later. This means the experience of raising kids is now competing with highs in a parent’s past, like career wins (“I got a raise!”) or a carefree social life (“God, this is a great martini!”). Shuttling cranky kids to school or dashing to work with spit-up on your favorite sweater doesn’t skew as romantic.
For the childless, all this research must certainly feel redeeming. As for those of us with kids, well, the news isn’t all bad. Parents still report feeling a greater sense of purpose and meaning in their lives than those who’ve never had kids. And there are other rewarding aspects of parenting that are impossible to quantify. For example, I never thought it possible to love someone as deeply as I love my son. As for the Sloans, it’s hard to say whether they had a less meaningful existence than my parents, or if my parents were 7 percent less happy than the Sloans. Perhaps it just comes down to how you see the candy dish–half empty or half full. Or at least as a parent, that’s what I’ll keep telling myself.
Answer: False
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/143792
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This article confirmed what I suspected all along, having witnessed numerous and varied, and by far mostly negative, interactions between parents and kids when I worked a clerk in Lakeforest mall’s now defunct Drugfair from age 17-19. This experience was one of the major factors in my deciding to be childfree. I read this article when it first came out and posted comments, along with thousands of others, it seemed; it obviously hit a nerve. The comments are among the most vicious–on both sides–I’ve ever come across in a major news story blog. Anyway, I posted two comments under the name Lysistrata.
I like children, but I don’t want to be a parent.
Ha!
I just got “Stumbliing on happiness” in the mail today! Looking forward to reading it. I also got Sagans “Demon-hunted world” thanks to the Here be dragons film that you pointed to. I got “World made by hand” because DV read it.
It’s an inspiring crew over at VBB&F 🙂
I amazoned those titles and read the descriptions. They look like interesting books, let me know what you think of them. I picked up two books at AR 2008. One for free, on global warming by some physicist activist dude. The other is by a professional communication/persuasion expert and AR activst.
Hopefully, I will be able to get to those after I finish two Albert Ellis books I have been working on.
Random thought: Do these studies actually track individual couples and find that they’re happier before they had kids than after? Or do they just find that people without kids are happier on average than people with kids?
If it’s the latter, I wonder how much of the causal relationship is the other way around. People who are childfree by choice have to be confident enough to stand up to a good deal of societal pressure, and to think hard about what they actually want for themselves, rather than blindly going after the sort of life they’re told they’re supposed to want. Those seem like characteristics that would lead to being happier than average. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself. 🙂
Interesting point Buzzard (ha, what a name!), re: a causal relationship–that could be. I’d have to read the survey methodology. However, I disagree with your central point about how independent-thinking people are happier than those who follow the mainstream path. I think the opposite is true: people who follow mainstream society are more content than people who don’t.
In regards to marriage and children, I think mainstream people, particularly women just keep a lid on their dissatisfaction.
I am not sure that all acts of following mainstream society can really be lumped together. Following the trends in, say, clothing or music, as opposed to striking out on your own to find the style you like best for yourself, is probably not going to make or break your happiness. (Plus, it seems that a lot of people who break from the trends in those areas do so in order to conform to some non-mainstream group, so that further complicates things.)
But the bigger decisions – choosing a home, a career, or a partner based on what you feel you’re supposed to do rather than what you actually want to do – have more power to make you really miserable. So does having kids when you don’t really want them.
To put what I was trying to say before another way: Suppose that there are two kinds of people, those who want kids and those who don’t. My guess is that there are more people who don’t want kids but have them anyway than people who do want kids but don’t have any. The people who don’t want kids and don’t have kids are reasonably happy, as are the people who want kids and have kids, but the people who have kids and don’t want them are deeply unhappy, and that brings down the average happiness for all people with kids.
But this is just amateur speculation on my part. I have no sociological expertise whatsoever.
This is an old post, but I was thinking about it today, and I realized that it’s possible to simplify the mumbo-jumbo I was trying to argue earlier: What if people have kids *because* they’re unhappy? It makes sense to me that people who are generally happy already would be less likely to shake up their whole lifestyles by having kids. The people who are unhappy with the other aspects of their lives, and who are looking for something else to fulfill (or distract) them, are the ones who are more likely to go and have kids.
Happy childless couples decide to have children all of the time. Sometimes to the effect of increasing their happiness or other times, decreasing it.
Unfortunately unhappy couples often to decide to have children under the erroneous belief that it will fix their marriage. It doesn’t work.
Many people “want” to have kids because they simply never thought about it and are just going with the momentum of what everyone else does.
I think that is the core issue. Many people don’t seriously know and think about what will be involved in being a parent. The responsibilities, the change in their lifestyle and if the rewards are worth it to them.