Are You Happy? Are You Sure?
Parents claim to enjoy their kids; researchers say they're deluded.
by Elizabeth Mitchell
December 21, 2006
But let's take another look at those original happiness findings. Parents interviewed for this story agreed that raising children at times brings a decline in marital satisfaction. If a spouse would rather read the paper than talk, it's quiet time. If a father would rather read the paper than answer the question of his child posed repeatedly and at ever-increasing volume, it's a sign of extreme selfishness.
An intense power struggle ensues over almost every aspect of childrearing and it's not usually about what's best for the child but what's best for the parent. With many of us giving birth later in adulthood, we are accustomed to sleeping late after a night on the town, or taking an uninterrupted shower. But young children don't like those things. When a child calls, parents have to decide who's up. "It's who is doing what. 'Your turn,' 'my turn,'" Rabhan says. "'I did it last time,' 'you do it this time.' 'Well, I took out the garbage.' Then you really start grasping at straws. Like, 'I paid for dinner six months ago' and 'I changed your tire.' You grasp at everything, especially when it's four in the morning. You will take anything you can get your meat-hooks on." 
Marital fights in the early stages of parenthood are a healthy diversion.
Pre-existing conflicts stand out in sharp relief with a child in the picture. "I realized I was parenting my husband," says Darcey Steinke, who is now divorced. "All the main ways we weren't alike came out. The party-boy stuff that I was willing to put up with when we were married, I just wasn't willing to put up with. You know how there are these certain species that after they have a child they just kill their husbands? I wonder if I might not be like that. It didn't seem all that crucial for me to have a husband after I had my daughter, or at least the husband I had, even though he's turned out to be quite a fantastic father."
Personally, I think marital fights in the early stages of parenthood are an extremely healthy biological diversion. When the baby is screeching after being fed, diapered, burped, rocked, Bjorned, and slung, it's better to suddenly recognize your extreme irritation at your spouse's inability to put away his toothbrush than to take out your frustrations on your helpless baby.
Parenting a teenager probably falls into the same category. "It's hard. All of a sudden when it's out of your control, but it really can't be, because they are still your responsibility," says Gail Rose, mother of two teens.
Or people blame their spouse for the fact that their child has gone off the deep-end. "You go from a very responsible thirteen year old who wants to be with you," Steinke says she has heard, "who was learning how to make cakes, and studying the Civil War, to a nightmare, a giant toddler."
Couples despair when they can't get along like they used to with children in the mix, but Tony Karon points out that probably isn't the goal. "It's the realpolitik view: What you're looking for is not the absence of conflict. You have to basically be able to manage conflict in a way that you both can live with, and recognize that it has some objective sources — that you're just taking on something that is an incredible strain."
Perhaps too, the marital dissatisfaction, which looks so bleak on its own, is not so troubling when compared to the arc of human happiness. For many decades, that arc has been smile-shaped over the course of a lifetime. People start out happy, curve down toward the low point around their mid-forties and climb upward into the happiest time: old age. If we overlay the marital satisfaction study on the happiness study, matching the forties to the parents of teenagers (probably roughly true in 1974), marital dissatisfaction might not look so bad. Maybe instead of suffering children, we are merely going through the usual arc. The dips in marital satisfaction that look so bad on the chart might just be bad in contrast to slight lift we receive when the children are in their grammar school years.
©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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