The Internet’s abuzz over an article in New York Magazine about why having children won’t make you happier, and might make you less happy. The article, “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting,” is by Jennifer Senior, who has been one of my favorite journalists for years (she’s a humorous writer while tackling weighty topics).
The foundation of Senior’s article is a litany of scientific research concluding that kids don’t make parents happy.
There apparently is a lot of scientific material out there supporting the article. Here’s an excerpt:
From the perspective of the species, it’s perfectly unmysterious why people have children. From the perspective of the individual, however, it’s more of a mystery than one might think. Most people assume that having children will make them happier. Yet a wide variety of academic research shows that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases are less so. This finding is surprisingly consistent, showing up across a range of disciplines. Perhaps the most oft-cited datum comes from a 2004 study by 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. The economist Andrew Oswald, who’s compared tens of thousands of Britons with children to those without, is at least inclined to view his data in a more positive light: “The broad message is not that children make you less happy; it’s just that children don’t make you more happy.” That is, he tells me, unless you have more than one. “Then the studies show a more negative impact.” 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. But some of the studies are grimmer than others. 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.
Senior’s point about the species v. the individual is an interesting one — we always heard in biology that animals are born with an innate urge to “propagate the species.” But as humans, that consideration doesn’t play a conscious role in the decision to have kids. Yet given these studies, does the unconscious urge perhaps play a larger role than we think?
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Oh, to have children or not to have children. It wasn’t until recently that any baby I saw made me smile uncontrollably. It wasn’t until recently that I could honestly see putting my strongly-rooted career trajectory on hold to be a full-time mom. Something, above and beyond considerations for the financial, emotional, social, and professional aspects of my life, has become a significant part of my feelings on starting a family.
What that something is, or whether it’s based in hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary guarantee for the survival of our species, I don’t know. What I can say is that my husband-to-be absolutely refused to take me to see “Babies” because, as he puts it, he can hear my ovaries pinging like sonar. :)
Very well said.
Also — Netflix or demand Babies when it comes out. It’s so interesting — and cute, of course. :)