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Why having kids won't make you happy

Many believe being a parent is a rewarding experience. Think again. According to evidence, the slog outweighs the fun.

Many believe being a parent is a rewarding experience. Think again. According to evidence, the slog outweighs the fun. This article was from the Saturday Times:

The case for marriage looks good. According to research, there is a huge hit in happiness for both husband and wife in the first year of marriage that tends to last for many years. On the other hand, the case for having children does not look so wonderful. Over the past few decades, social scientists have found consistent evidence that there is an almost zero association between having children and happiness.

But the warnings for prospective parents are even starker than “it’s not going to make you happier”. Using data sets from Europe and the United States, numerous scholars have found evidence that parents often report statistically significantly lower levels of happiness, life satisfaction, marital satisfaction and mental wellbeing compared with non-parents.

Yes, you might find yourself thinking, being a parent is really hard work, but surely, there must be some positive experiences to offset all the negative ones? I find it hard to accept the findings that children bring only overall misery. This is simply because I (along with most people) believe that all parents experience a 50-50 ratio of positive and negative things about raising a child. Seeing my first-born smile for the first time would more than compensate for dirty nappies and constant whining, even if the former experience is rarer than the latter. In other words, shouldn’t the wellbeing hit from a higher but less frequent quality experience with our children be larger than, or, at the very least, equal to, the small but more frequent misery that raising children can bring?

How we allocate our attention to different things in life can help to explain this. For example, we tend to believe that rare but meaningful experiences, such as seeing our children smile for the first time or graduating from university or getting married, would give us huge increases in our happiness. And indeed they do, but these boosts in wellbeing, often to our surprise, tend not to last for long.

It is, on the other hand, much more likely that as parents we will end up spending a large chunk of our time attending to the core process of childcare such as, “Am I going to be able to pick up David from his school in time?” Most of these negative experiences are a lot less powerful than the positive experiences we have with our kids, which is probably why we tend not to think about them when prompted with a question of whether or not children bring us happiness.

These findings are, of course, extremely depressing. Yet perhaps they represent something that we know deep down to be true: raising children is probably the toughest and the dullest job in the world.

Children give us many things - raising them can be both rewarding and meaningful - but an increase in our average daily happiness is probably not among them. Rather than deny that, we should celebrate it. In the words of Daniel Gilbert: “Our ability to love beyond all measure those who try our patience and weary our bones is at once our most noble and most human quality.”

Read the full story in The Times Online

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