What Becoming a Parent Really Does to Your Happiness about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Ffamily%2...

theatlantic.com

What Becoming a Parent Really Does

to Your Happiness
Paul Bloom
8-10 minuta

Research has found that having children is terrible for quality of life—
but the truth about what parenthood means for happiness is a lot more
complicated.

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Christopher Anderson / Magnum

Few choices are more important than whether to have children, and
psychologists and other social scientists have worked to figure out what
having kids means for happiness. Some of the most prominent scholars
in the field have argued that if you want to be happy, it’s best to be
childless. Others have pushed back, pointing out that a lot depends on
who you are and where you live. But a bigger question is also at play:
What if the rewards of having children are different from, and deeper
than, happiness?

This article was adapted from Bloom’s new book, The Sweet
Spot.(Ecco)
The early research is decisive: Having kids is bad for quality of life. In
one study, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues asked
about 900 employed women to report, at the end of each day, every one
of their activities and how happy they were when they did them. They
recalled being with their children as less enjoyable than many other

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activities, such as watching TV, shopping, or preparing food. Other

studies find that when a child is born, parents experience a decrease in
happiness that doesn’t go away for a long time, in addition to a drop in
marital satisfaction that doesn’t usually recover until the children leave
the house. As the Harvard professor Dan Gilbert puts it, “The only
symptom of empty nest syndrome is nonstop smiling.”
After all, having children, particularly when they are young, involves
financial struggle, sleep deprivation, and stress. For mothers, there is
also in many cases the physical strain of pregnancy and breastfeeding.
And children can turn a cheerful and loving romantic partnership into a
zero-sum battle over who gets to sleep and work and who doesn’t. As the
Atlantic staff writer Jennifer Senior notes in her book, All Joy and No
Fun, children provoke a couple’s most frequent arguments—“more than
money, more than work, more than in-laws, more than annoying
personal habits, communication styles, leisure activities, commitment
issues, bothersome friends, sex.” Someone who doesn’t understand this
is welcome to spend a full day with an angry 2-year-old (or a sullen 15-
year-old); they’ll find out what she means soon enough.
But, as often happens in psychology, although some research provided
simple findings—in this case, “having children makes you unhappy”
—other efforts arrived at more complicated conclusions. For one, the
happiness hit is worse for some people than for others. One study finds
that fathers ages 26 to 62 actually get a happiness boost, while young or
single parents suffer the greatest loss. And crucially, there are
geographic differences. A 2016 paper looking at the happiness levels of
people with and without children in 22 countries found that the extent
to which children make you happy is influenced by whether your
country has child-care policies such as paid parental leave. Parents from
Norway and Hungary, for instance, are happier than childless couples in
those countries—but parents from Australia and Great Britain are less
happy than their childless peers. The country with the greatest
happiness drop after you have children? The United States.
Read: It isn’t the kids. It’s the cost of raising them.

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Children make some happy and others miserable; the rest fall
somewhere in between—it depends, among other factors, on how old
you are, whether you are a mother or a father, and where you live. But a
deep puzzle remains: Many people would have had happier lives and
marriages had they chosen not to have kids—yet they still describe
parenthood as the “best thing they’ve ever done.” Why don’t we regret
having children more?
One possibility is a phenomenon called memory distortion. When we
think about our past experiences, we tend to remember the peaks and
forget the mundane awfulness in between. Senior frames it like this:
“Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the
dishes—or napping, or shopping, or answering emails—to spending time
with our kids … But our remembering selves tell researchers that no
one—and nothing—provides us with so much joy as our children. It may
not be the happiness we live day to day, but it’s the happiness we think
about, the happiness we summon and remember, the stuff that makes
up our life-tales.”
These are plausible-enough ideas, and I don’t reject them. But other
theories about why people don’t regret parenthood actually have
nothing to do with happiness—at least not in a simple sense.
One involves attachment. Most parents love their children, and it would
seem terrible to admit that you would be better off if someone you loved
didn’t exist. More than that, you genuinely prefer a world with your kids
in it. This can put parents in the interesting predicament of desiring a
state that doesn’t make them as happy as the alternative. In his book
Midlife, the MIT professor Kieran Setiya expands on this point.
Modifying an example from the philosopher Derek Parfit, he asks
readers to imagine a situation in which, if you and your partner were to
conceive a child before a certain time, the child would have a serious,
though not fatal, medical problem, such as chronic joint pain. If you
wait, the child will be healthy. For whatever reason, you choose not to
wait. You love your child and, though he suffers, he is happy to be alive.
Do you regret your decision?

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Recommended Reading

Read: How adult children affect their mother’s happiness

That’s a complicated question. Of course it would have been easier to
have a kid without this condition. But if you’d waited, you’d have a
different child, and this baby (then boy, then man) whom you love
wouldn’t exist. It was a mistake, yes, but perhaps a mistake that you
don’t regret. The attachment we have to an individual can supersede an
overall decrease in our quality of life, and so the love we usually have
toward our children means that our choice to bring them into existence
has value above and beyond whatever effect they have on our happiness.
This relates to a second point, which is that there’s more to life than
happiness. When I say that raising my sons is the best thing I’ve ever
done, I’m not saying that they gave me pleasure in any simple day-to-
day sense, and I’m not saying that they were good for my marriage. I’m
talking about something deeper, having to do with satisfaction, purpose,
and meaning. It’s not just me. When you ask people about their life’s
meaning and purpose, parents say that their lives have more meaning
than those of nonparents. A study by the social psychologist Roy
Baumeister and his colleagues found that the more time people spent
taking care of children, the more meaningful they said their life was—
even though they reported that their life was no happier.
Raising children, then, has an uncertain connection to pleasure but may
connect to other aspects of a life well lived, satisfying our hunger for
attachment, and for meaning and purpose. The writer Zadie Smith puts
it better than I ever could, describing having a child as a “strange
admixture of terror, pain, and delight.” Smith, echoing the thoughts of
everyone else who has seriously considered these issues, points out the
risk of close attachments: “Isn’t it bad enough that the beloved, with

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whom you have experienced genuine joy, will eventually be lost to you?
Why add to this nightmare the child, whose loss, if it ever happened,
would mean nothing less than your total annihilation?” But this
annihilation reflects the extraordinary value of such attachments; as the
author Julian Barnes writes of grief, quoting a friend, “It hurts just as
much as it is worth.”

This article was adapted from Paul Bloom’s new book, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures
of Suffering and the Search for Meaning.

The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for
MeaningPaul Bloom, Ecco
All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern ParenthoodJennifer
Senior, Ecco
Midlife: A Philosophical GuideKieran Setiya, Princeton University Press
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a
commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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