Are You Happy? Are You Sure?
Parents claim to enjoy their kids; researchers say they're deluded.
by Elizabeth Mitchell
December 21, 2006
And maybe having children never actually promised happiness. We misunderstood all those cooing grandparents when they said they were so happy for us. They truly meant that they were happy, not you. They were happy you were finally going to be broken of your tenacious selfishness.
But let's assume that we really are miserably unhappy as parents, whatever we convince ourselves to the contrary when we kiss our children goodnight. One detail I failed to mention about my daughter's car seat tantrum is that I was double-parked. I double-parked because there were no more parking places on the block. I would only be running in and out of the school, I thought, and it was starting to rain.
One could say the original sin was mine. If I hadn't been in that questionable position, I could have allowed my tired child all the time she needed to want to get in her car seat. If I had been entirely able to live in her moment, we probably would have been able to depart without tears and she wouldn't exactly have been spoiled. (Getting into a car isn't like feasting exclusively on lollipops.)
Of course it's unrealistic to live the cadence of a toddler when an adult, but it points directly to why people cite children as their greatest source of happiness, even when they don't enjoy actually taking care of children.
"Who wants to 'take care of children'?" McKelvey says. "I don't want to take care of my children. I love my children, but it's a hassle. It's a pain. I would rather drink a latte." 
When you're busy, your child doesn't even need to do anything wrong to annoy you.
Taking into account this gripe with the terminology, one could suspect that study of 909 women was flawed because a wrongly termed category was included. But another set of results calls that would-be loophole into question. "When they replicate this study in France," says Gilbert, "women in France are not quite as unhappy when they are interacting with their children as women in the United States. We could imagine in some cultures it's not true at all. The differences aren't genetic differences. They are cultural differences, and one cultural difference is that in most of Western Europe people are not living lives that are quite as — what shall we call them — professionally frenzied? Running to the job in the morning, coming home at night, both parents working night and day. People in Europe are a little more relaxed and are able to spend more time with their families. And if children were really a source of agony, then the more time you spend with them the worse you would feel. But it turns out that people who have a little more time to spend with their kids are happier with them. Which once again points to the problem being conflict, which is not that children make us unhappy it's that doing too much makes us unhappy."
When you're busy, your child doesn't even need to do anything wrong to annoy you. Our brains as parents are trained to think of what could go wrong — the glass will break; the pajamas will catch fire; the pen will write all over the wall. We're inclined toward the negative view as a way to protect our child and our home. But that gets in the way of living in the moment.
I'm working and my daughter is quietly looking at books next to me, but my tension is growing. Pretty soon she's going to interrupt me. Where is my husband? He's supposed to be watching her. How would he like it if I let her wander into his office during his work time?
But if we watched the event from on high, it's really a pretty nice situation: My sweet daughter is enjoying a quiet moment with me, interjecting only a few concentration-breaking asides. She's certainly providing less distraction than I would get in an office setting and she's considerably more charming than most officemates. But my rat-like brain is making it a burden.
"Sometimes I have those moments when I'm sitting at home looking after the kids," Karon says. "I'm thinking about something I'm trying to write. I suddenly realize I'm just not going to be able to do it. There's that moment of surrender that is actually quite pleasurable." There are many benefits to being on the kid clock — lingering on a walk, seeing a beautiful park at dusk. "I really noticed things," says Steinke about the time when her daughter was a baby. "I remember one time — I was so tired — but sitting with my daughter and looking at this bird and thinking, 'I don't know if I've ever seen a bird before.'"
©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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