http://nymag.com/news/
http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/
As a rule, most studies show that mothers are less happy than fathers, that single parents are less happy still, that babies and toddlers are the hardest, and that each successive child produces diminishing returns. ...Robin Simon, a sociologist at Wake Forest University, says parents are more depressed than nonparents no matter what their circumstances—whether they’re single or married, whether they have one child or four.
...all parents spend more time today with their children than they did in 1975, including mothers, in spite of the great rush of women into the American workforce. Today’s married mothers also have less leisure time (5.4 fewer hours per week); 71 percent say they crave more time for themselves (as do 57 percent of married fathers). Yet 85 percent of all parents still—still!—think they don’t spend enough time with their children.
...Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist, who surveyed 909 working Texas women and found that child care ranked sixteenth in pleasurability out of nineteen activities. (Among the endeavors they preferred: preparing food, watching TV, exercising, talking on the phone, napping, shopping, housework.) This result also shows up regularly in relationship research, with children invariably reducing marital satisfaction.
Well that's a bit of a loaded question, since what kind of masochist enjoys child care? They enjoy playing with their kids, showing off their kids, and watching them do cute things, succeed, and grow up. But who would like the maintenance? You may love driving your sports car, but that doesn't mean you like getting dirty to change the brake pads. But personally, I will always prefer napping to anything involving a kid. Also, I'm sure many single or child-less people also wish they had more personal time (I surely do).
LOL:
It was big news last year when the Journal of Happiness Studies published a Scottish paper declaring the opposite was true. “Contrary to much of the literature,” said the introduction, “our results are consistent with an effect of children on life satisfaction that is positive, large and increasing in the number of children.” Alas, the euphoria was short-lived. A few months later, the poor author discovered a coding error in his data, and the publication ran an erratum. “After correcting the problem,”it read,“the main results of the paper no longer hold. The effect of children on the life satisfaction of married individuals is small, often negative, and never statistically significant.”
Any why is this happening?
Before urbanization, children were viewed as economic assets to their parents. If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store. But all of this dramatically changed with the moral and technological revolutions of modernity. As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed. (Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes this transformation of a child’s value: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”) [me: raising a kid in the US from age 0 to 18 now costs $250,000 on average] Kids, in short, went from being our staffs to being our bosses. [me: this of course affects parental discipline]
This is especially true in middle- and upper-income families, which are far more apt than their working-class counterparts to see their children as projects to be perfected. (Children of women with bachelor degrees spend almost five hours on “organized activities” per week, as opposed to children of high-school dropouts, who spend two.) Annette Lareau, the sociologist who coined the term “concerted cultivation” to describe the aggressive nurturing of economically advantaged children, puts it this way: “Middle-class parents spend much more time talking to children ...and treating each child’s thought as a special contribution. And this is very tiring work.” Yet it’s work few parents feel that they can in good conscience neglect, says Lareau, “lest they put their children at risk by not giving them every advantage.” [me: isn't that a sad reflection of our competitive, me-first, never-enough society?]
Even more surprisingly, they found that parents’ dissatisfaction only grew the more money they had, even though they had the purchasing power to buy more child care. “And my hypothesis about why this is, in both cases, is the same,” says Twenge. “They become parents later in life. There’s a loss of freedom, a loss of autonomy. It’s totally different from going from your parents’ house to immediately having a baby. Now you know what you’re giving up.” (Or, as a fellow psychologist told Gilbert when he finally got around to having a child: “They’re a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit.”) [me: if only it wasn't so true]
It wouldn’t be a particularly bold inference to say that the longer we put off having kids, the greater our expectations. When people wait to have children, they’re also bringing different sensibilities to the enterprise. They’ve spent their adult lives as professionals, believing there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing things; now they’re applying the same logic to the family-expansion business, and they’re surrounded by a marketplace that only affirms and reinforces this idea. “And what’s confusing about that,” says Alex Barzvi, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU medical school, “is that there are a lot of things that parents can do to nurture social and cognitive development. There are right and wrong ways to discipline a child. But you can’t fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others and constantly concluding you’re doing the wrong thing.”
The only peer-reviewed study that uncontroversially concluded that kids improve parents' happiness was conducted in - you guessed it - Northern Europe.
The researcher, Hans-Peter Kohler, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says he originally studied this question because he was intrigued by the declining fertility rates in Europe. One of the things he noticed is that countries with stronger welfare systems produce more children—and happier parents.
Of course, this should not be a surprise. If you are no longer fretting about spending too little time with your children after they’re born (because you have a year of paid maternity leave), if you’re no longer anxious about finding affordable child care once you go back to work (because the state subsidizes it), if you’re no longer wondering how to pay for your children’s education and health care (because they’re free)—well, it stands to reason that your own mental health would improve. When Kahneman and his colleagues did another version of his survey of working women, this time comparing those in Columbus, Ohio, to those in Rennes, France, the French sample enjoyed child care a good deal more than its American counterpart. “We’ve put all this energy into being perfect parents,” says Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, “instead of political change that would make family life better.”
I'm not so sure about the strong welfare-more children link, because some data suggest the reverse. Birth rates are still quite low in strong social welfare states like Japan and Germany, but also low in poor welfare nations like Russia and Bulgaria. Sometimes people in rich nations decline to have kids not for the stress reasons, but because they're interested in other stuff, especially in their "prime years". They go to graduate school, have busy jobs, travel, buy things, volunteer, and maintain hobbies/friendships/online life. And before they know it, they're 40 and can't conceive even if they wanted to (except for Palin). When teens basically "need" smartphones and laptops to manage their relatively simple lives, us adults have even more chores/distractions, so there's no void/need to fill with a baby. So I suppose the self-centered Western lifestyle can motivate some couples to have kids and others to not. Third World families are bigger partially due to lack of education and access to family planning tools. But they also willingly birth a lot of kids as insurance against infant mortality, but also as a labor source and for material support in old age. A strong pension system precludes the need for many kids to support you.
But it's very true that strong social support makes parenting so much easier, as a previous email described (http://worldaffairs-
What about a couple's romantic life? You guessed it.
This is another brutal reality about children: They expose the gulf between our fantasies about family and its spikier realities. They also mean parting with an old way of life, one with more freewheeling rhythms and richer opportunities for romance... Healthy relationships definitely make people happier. But children adversely affect relationships. ...Psychologists Lauren Papp and E. Mark Cummings asked 100 long-married couples to spend two weeks meticulously documenting their disagreements. Nearly 40 percent of them were about their kids. “And that 40 percent is merely the number that was explicitly about kids, I’m guessing, right?” This is a former patient of Nachamie’s, an entrepreneur and father of two. “How many other arguments were those couples having because everyone was on a short fuse, or tired, or stressed out?” This man is very frank about the strain his children put on his marriage, especially his firstborn. “I already felt neglected,” he says. “In my mind, anyway. And once we had the kid, it became so pronounced; it went from zero to negative 50. And I was like, I can deal with zero. But not negative 50.”
... The amount of time married parents spend alone together each week: Nine hours today versus twelve in 1975. Bradbury, who was involved in the UCLA study of those 32 families, says the husbands and wives spent less than 10 percent of their home time alone together. “And do you think they were saying, ‘Gee honey, you look lovely. I just wanted to pick up on that fascinating conversation we were having earlier about the Obama administration’? ” he asks. “Nope. They were exhausted and staring at the television.”
A possible silver lining and what it all means for your decision for children:
We know that having kids increases stress/fatigue and reduces happiness/freedom. On the other hand, the married women were less depressed after they’d had kids than their childless peers. And perhaps this is because the study sought to understand not just the moment-to-moment moods of its participants, but more existential matters, like how connected they felt, and how motivated, and how much despair they were in. ...Parents, who live in a clamorous, perpetual-forward-motion machine almost all of the time, seemed to have different answers than their childless cohorts. ...Technically, if parenting makes you unhappy, you should feel better if you’re spared the task of doing it. But if happiness is measured by our own sense of agency and meaning, then noncustodial parents lose. They’re robbed of something that gives purpose and reward.
“When you pause to think what children mean to you, of course they make you feel good,” [Gilbert] says. “The problem is, 95 percent of the time, you’re not thinking about what they mean to you. You’re thinking that you have to take them to piano lessons. So you have to think about which kind of happiness you’ll be consuming most often. Do you want to maximize the one you experience almost all the time”—moment-to-moment happiness—“or the one you experience rarely?”
“I think this boils down to a philosophical question, rather than a psychological one,” says [Cornell psychologist] Gilovich. “Should you value moment-to-moment happiness more than retrospective evaluations of your life?” He says he has no answer for this, but the example he offers suggests a bias. He recalls watching TV with his children at three in the morning when they were sick. “I wouldn’t have said it was too fun at the time,” he says. “But now I look back on it and say, ‘Ah, remember the time we used to wake up and watch cartoons?’ ” The very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification, nostalgia, delight.
Dan Ariely, who wrote those behavioral economics books on irrationality, studied how people tend to value the exact same item more if they possess it than if they don't and others do. Part of that is egotism, and no one wants to regret what we've already committed to as a good idea at the time. We're so glad that we didn't buy that blue house that turned out to have termites, but we love our beige house even though it has wiring problems. No one wants to admit that having their kid was a mistake, especially to his/her face. But humans err. Maybe having kids was a mistake for many couples out there (post-children divorce rates may suggest that, even though the couples may cite other excuses for their split). But they're trying to make the best of it and derive as much purpose as they can (forget pleasure). They may know deep down it was a mistake, and maybe wish for another crack at life, but in the meantime they want to make something good out of their "mistake", so the sacrifice was not in vain. Like how some families of soldiers needlessly killed in wars of choice still force themselves to believe that their child died a hero to "protect freedom".
No one is saying that people should only engage in activities that are guaranteed to produce 100% satisfaction and zero regret. That's impossible, and makes life boring frankly. But at least for kids, we have to be realistic. For many middle-class Americans, having a kid means decades of stress, fatigue, zero to uninspiring sex, unhappiness, and maybe divorce/poverty. But is that "sacrifice" worth it to gain the special pride, "joy", and nostalgia at the beginning and in the end - if you survive it - that child-less people can never know? For some people, it's a resounding "yes". For others, they have kids without contemplating it, or have kids unplanned. Though to be fair, it's not like we get to have a preview of what our future parental life will be when we're deciding. At best, we can just examine the case studies of our friends and relatives, and see if that type of life would be appealing.
But we also need to temper expectations. We can get some of the benefits of parenthood for a smaller blood sacrifice. So what if we don't dote on our kid 24-7, and he/she doesn't go to Space Camp and Harvard? Even if everyone on our block is doing it, and looks down on us as "bad parents", who cares? The kid probably won't become homeless or Charlie Manson if you skip ballet lessons. As long as there's love, morals, and common sense, no one else needs to "approve" of your parenting methods and limitations. And there's no need to kill yourselves trying to give your kid stuff that he/she may not even need or want. You have a life to live too, and a worn-out parent may be worse for kids than a "less committed" one. Forget about the Joneses, do less, buy less, don't take the promotion if you can't handle the extra workload, and maybe you'll have time to actually enjoy family life. Quality, not quantity. On the other hand, people with kids should realize that they can't perfectly maintain the single or couple life anymore. There's another term in the equation, and each spouse will get less attention now. Yes couples can and should spend time and money on themselves, but obviously if the choice is piano recital or poker game, you have to do the grown-up thing. And loving spouses can't be so demanding and expect their partners to keep off the love handles and do all the little romantic things they did during dating, while also performing well on the job and as a parent. It doesn't mean he loves you less, but now the relationship is different. We give up some stuff to get other stuff. Flexible, realistic, and understanding spouses and parents have a better chance in the minefield of child rearing. Those who "want it all" and won't take no for an answer are setting themselves up for a life of misery and disappointment, which will reflect on their kids as well.
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