Are You Happy? Are You Sure?
Parents claim to enjoy their kids; researchers say they're deluded.
by Elizabeth Mitchell
December 21, 2006
Ask parents if they feel sorry for their childless counterparts, and the response is almost always yes. Parents know how annoying they sound singing the praises of parenthood, but they can't help it. "What is wrong with them?" one mother I know confesses thinking of non-parents. "How empty is your life? Why do you exist?" She's only half-joking. What childless people suspect about self-righteous parents is true: no matter how successful you are or how happy you claim to be, they pity you.
I was never particularly dewy-eyed about parenthood. I'd au-paired for a summer, seen eight nieces and nephews from their first day at the hospital to high school. I'd spent bleary-eyed afternoons monitoring toddlers negotiating the jungle gym with the speed of sloths, and nights rocking the high-strung no-sleepers until their parents returned. I liked kids. I loved some kids deeply. But I didn't understand the unabashed covetousness of the parental state.
But then I got pregnant, and I began to think maybe my old ambivalence was more the result of teenage antsy-ness or because the kids weren't my own. I began to expect a torrent of nonstop pleasure. I would never be bored or annoyed or frustrated. Acquaintances warned me that I wouldn't be able to just run out to grab a beer on a whim anymore, but that didn't seem like a calamitous loss of freedom.
According to this chart from Stumbling on Happiness, parenthood makes us miserable.
Andrew Oswald, a professor of economics at Warwick University in Coventry, England, has been studying human happiness for the past twenty years. He has written dozens of papers on the subject and reviewed the results of many thousands of individuals questioned. In his happiness studies, no one was asked directly about what made him or her happy, but enough detail was gleaned to estimate the person's joy. Some of the markers for increased happiness in life have not been particularly surprising. "We know marriage raises happiness a lot," he says. So does health. But there was one shocking conclusion:
"Children don't," Oswald says. "Most of the people who are parents in society have a strong feeling that children have brought them a lot of happiness. What our work seems to show is that it is just as easy to be happy childless. Those with children don't understand that fact. I certainly hadn't anticipated these findings and they're often viewed as some of the most surprising outcomes from this research."
In 2004, psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and his colleagues published a paper tracking the experience of 909 women going about their daily lives. The women were asked to give a general happiness assessment of their previous day and to reconstruct a diary of their activities. They were then questioned in detail about each event. "Intimate relations" brought women the most pleasure, followed by socializing. That would make sense: Women enjoy people. Well, they enjoy grown-up people. Way down at number twelve of sixteen in the rankings was "taking care of my children." Childcare was only slightly more pleasurable than "computer / internet / email." When ranked as a human interaction, dealings with those cherubic darlings rated only slightly higher than spending time with coworkers and clients. 
"We know marriage raises happiness a lot," Andrew Oswald says. "Children don't."
In a 1974 paper, marital satisfaction was tracked on a continuum of the aging of children in the household. In four different studies, the levels of marital satisfaction began declining after the wedding, dipped lower when the children were in preschool, climbed up a bit as the oldest child neared age twelve, then plummet precipitously during the teen years. Only when the children left the nest did the happiness numbers begin to rocket back to wedding-day bliss. Parenthood is clearly not all it's cracked up to be.
That study and others were collected this year in a bestselling book by Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert called Stumbling on Happiness. The book, which is already in its seventh printing, includes a chart [see page three] capable of instantly squelching the enthusiasm of a giddy parent-to-be.
My own moment of disillusionment came when I was e-mailing an old West coast friend, Jeff Rabhan. I happily let him know I was expecting. Did he, a father of an fourteen month old, have any advice? His reply looked awfully spare on the screen: "Get separate rooms. Ooops! Too late!"
©2006 Elizabeth Mitchell and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Elizabeth Mitchell, former executive editor of George and features editor of Spin, is the author of Three Strides Before the Wire: The Dark and Beautiful World of Horse Racing and W.: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty. |
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