Are You Happy? Are You Sure?
Parents claim to enjoy their kids; researchers say they're deluded.
by Elizabeth Mitchell
December 21, 2006
"There are those moments of companionship of the two of you each on your own journey in that moment, that feeling of contentment," Karon says. "They're not needing your attention at that instant, but you're both just reveling in each other's company. I'm sort of intrigued by the co-dependency emotionally that arises. My daughter, for example, will not go to sleep unless I'm lying there next to her. And we have started to try to change that. I'm putting her to sleep and I'm sitting rather than lying down, trying to avoid falling to sleep with her. And she's kind of miserable about that, but it's working too. I have to say, I feel kind of sad about it too. As much as I need the time, there is something great about having that moment of, there's nothing else to do in the day but lie and chat and go to sleep." 
Are you fulfilled? How about now? Now?
"It's all about finding your pocket of happiness, your window of happiness," Rabhan says. "For example, my parents come to visit. We know that window of happiness begins Thursday evening on the last flight in and it ends Monday morning on the first flight out. And that's our pocket of happiness. It's the same as, say, Saturday morning, you take your family out to breakfast, you go to the local diner, then you go to the park and you run around, people get tired, they come home. Around 2:30 the naptime kicks in, and you want to kill them. When they're screaming, they're crying and really all you want to do is have a moment to yourself. And when you go into the bathroom, you close the door, your child knocks on the door and says, 'Daddy, are you making a poo-poo?' You realize that moment of happiness is past."
Again, the research backs him up. Daniel Gilbert explains that humans have particular trouble remembering mixed events correctly. We can identify purely happy occasions, and purely awful ones, but ones with highs and lows tend to distort in our thinking. "How do [the experiences of parenthood] balance out?" Gilbert asks. "It turns out that if you average all the moments, they balance out a little on the negative side. Being a parent lowers your average daily happiness. But average daily happiness isn't all there is to be said about happiness. Indeed one could make the case that average happiness across a day isn't what we're trying for. As human beings, it's not our aim. It shouldn't be our goal. What we should be looking for is special transcendent moments that may even come at the cost of a lower average. In my own experience that's probably not a bad description of a day with a kid. You know, lots of 'no's,' 'not yet,' 'not now,' 'ask me later,' punctuated by brief moments that are sublime. As social mammals, these are the moments that give us great, great pleasure. That moment when the kid looks up and says, 'I love you, Daddy.'"
I believe the 'I love you, Daddy' moment is accurately described, but it is also where the myth of joy-inducing children begins. Because what's enjoyable about the 'I love you, Daddy' moment is not, as you suspect before you have kids, that you will have a little super-fan in the universe, but because you have entered into a relationship with another human being that is equal — which sometimes expresses itself as affection and sometimes as frustration. He has feelings about you; you have feelings about him.
The child will likely know you better than anyone else, and you without question — at least until he or she becomes a teenager — know him or her better. "Romantic relationships have so many tensions and complications," says Steinke. "At least in my relationship with my daughter, she gets mad at me, but if only I could forgive my boyfriend as fast as I can forgive her. There's not any particle of residue after we make up. That's a good lesson."
"The pleasure of having children doesn't come in the backbreaking physical labor," says McKelvey. "It's because of the funny things they say. If I didn't have funny kids, I'd be really unhappy."
Not many people enjoy bench presses, but they like the results. As Gilbert points out, if children bring us fulfillment, that's not a moment-to-moment pleasure. Are you fulfilled? How about now? Now?
Children eliminate a great deal of angst, too, simply because there's no time to sit around contemplating your place in the universe. They confirm your choices. "One could ask oneself, why do we want to be together?" Karon says about marriage. "In some ways there is an arbitrariness — not that you could be with just any old person — but we are the most mobile generation. There are essentially 7,000 scenarios in which we could live our lives and [having children with someone] helps almost to take the tyranny of that wide open choice away."
©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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