Few generations ago, people weren’t stopping to contemplate whether having a child would make them happy. Having children was simply what you did. And we are lucky today to have choices about these matters. But the abundance of choices, whether to have kids, when, or how many may, be one of the reasons parents are less happy.
The article “All Joy No Fun” the author Jennifer Senior explains how parents have children to make them happy. Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness says “We’ve put all this energy into being perfect parents.” Parents 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. The idea that parents are less happy than nonparents has become so commonplace in academia that it was big news last year when the Journal of Happiness Studies published a Scottish paper declaring the opposite was true. A few months later, the poor author discovered a coding error in his data. “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.”
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. There’s all this buildup “as soon as I get this done, I’m going to have a baby, and it’s going to be a great reward!” says Ada Calhoun the author of Instinctive Parenting and founding editor-in-chief of Babble. And then you’re like, ‘Wait, this is my reward? This nineteen-year grind?’ ”
Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Prize winning behavioral economist, in 2004 did a study about how parents are not happier than their childless peers. 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. The Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes this transformation of a child’s value in five ruthless words: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.” 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. The broad message is not that children make you less happy; it’s just that children don’t make you more happy.
