Are Parents Really Happy?
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It has been re-inforced over and over again by my friends who have children, that having the little ones, is the greatest pleasure in life. But is it, really? The readers of this blog who are parents, might be surprised (or maybe not) by a study published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior which states, rather authoritatively, that parents are more depressed than non-parents. For those of us thinking about crossing over to the other side, this is a depressing find.
The data set was 13,000 American adults. Are children really becoming an economic burden rather than the economic advantage they were (extra hands to work in the farm) in previous generations? The study contrasts between western and eastern cultures. Some people say that their children will take care of them when they are old–a rather selfish reason to have kids, but then again, why shouldn’t that be a goal considering the investment? Though I am not sure how true that assumption will be going forward, in these days of nursing homes and retirement communities. The Washington Post article above is quite enlightening. What do you parents think about this?
Thanks to fellow blogger kinnum for sending this link along.
I’m not very surprised by the study. If you have young kids you are lucky to get more than 15 minutes to yourself at a stretch, so the answer to the question ‘How often were you distracted’ in the last week will most likely be high in the case of parents. As for the ‘depressed, sad’ part I’m probably more concerned about my financial well being because I have kids - but not sure if it translates to being depressed or sad. And definitely the whole nuclear family thing and lack of overall family support is an issue, but I would contend that is an issue in general, not just with child rearing.
The study doesn’t ask (or at least is not reported to have asked) questions such as how many times in the last week did you feel extremely happy, feel you were a loving person, feel you were loved, etc. Being a parent can be more of a roller coaster ride - one could see that as a bad thing. Even if the study did ask these questions, what would those answers mean really? Judging our lives by summing the times we were happy and subracting from that result the number of times we were sad/depressed/distracted, doesn’t quite make any sense to me (at the risk of launching a side discussion, call me a sadist, but I think ‘happiness’ is overrated).
In short, I agree with the article to a point. It is good that such articles educate people about what they are getting into if they plan on having children. On the other hand, I also don’t think it tells the whole story. If you plan on having kids, be prepared to strap on your seat belts and have a ride of a lifetime.
Good points, vinod. As has been previously pointed out on this blog, these types of studies and surveys should be taken with a few grains of salt. The study (at least from the WP article) also does not go into a comparison of old childless people vs. old (grand)parents. Who is happier then? As for your comment about financial well-being, I don’t think the average childless person is any less worried.
Please talk to me. : )
As for having children becoming more of a financial burden than an advantage, that depends on how you raise them. For example, you could easily teach a baby to mix a drink.
I am with vinod on this one. It is definitely a roller coaster ride with extreme highs and lows. I, for one, have wondered myself about how you can possibly love someone so much and at the same time want to just toss him/her out of the window and forget the whole thing ever happened!
I think what aggrevates this problem for me is the constant pull between career ambitions (or wanting to maintain certain lifestyle) and my own expectations for a good parent and spouse. I love my job, I certainly enjoy the pay, but I also want to be there for my hubby and my child, maintain a (somewhat) clean house and treat them to home cooked meals (at least on major holidays).
Thus the major area of stress for me is my own guilt factor about the number of hours my child spends in a daycare, the state of disaster in my house and the constant diet of frozen dinners. Oh yeah, and the lack of sleep…
Last night I took my son to the park and we jumped in the puddles and ran around the park pretending to be airplains and he gave me a great big hug and a slobbery kiss. I would not trade that for anything.
my son is old enough to do that. Unfortunately he has developed the opinion that anyone who has a drink is a drunk. so i have to mix my own drinks until he gets wiser.
yes there are frustrations; but it is well worth it.
you cannot answer the why until you experience the joys.
I wish my son would be like that…better than a son who is a drunk himself. I don’t agree with the study at all. How you feel is not something we can measure quantitatively. The parents who were asked the question may have been people who had a sleepless night when the question was posed. The childless people might have just returned from a nice vacation. I personally think having a family support system is good for your long term health unless you are someone like Thoreau and can live alone for years at a time. People who don’t want to have children (knowingly), and who think they are better off, are kidding themselves (pardon the pun). I have read somewhere that such people are often people who have more than one sibling and had a happy social childhood. I agree, however, that the financial burden is there. But in the end, it’s all worth it. I would rather have a nice loving family than be rich.
I agree that the joys of parenthood need to be experienced to be understood, but this may be a little harsh. Strong rational arguments can be made for the case of not having children - we just have to admit that none of us (with or without kids) make our decisions as rationally or rate the outcomes of those decisions as objectively as we would like to. A necessary part of maintaining one’s sanity, in my view.
I read a book some time ago called The Paradox of Choice, and in part, it dealt with how imperfectly our mind thinks about various experiences, what are the type of things we tend to regret, etc. In fact, many of these foibles are successfully exploited in various kinds of marketing practices. It was very enlightening to me.
I confess that the assertion in the WP story that “her study validates that their choice might just be the healthiest one of all” is about the most moronic sentence I have ever had the misfortune to read in the Washington Post. We are talking about Parenting here, not whether to eat broccoli. By definition it involves selfishness, anguish, commitment, hope, despair, compassion, rage, joy, frustration, happiness - just to name a few. I must also add that if Dr. Spock taught all that is practised today by these 13000 parents, he is moron too.
Who the f**k were these 13000 parents they interviewed? A bunch of overly molly-coddled me first generation whiners? Contrary to Dr. Spock’s teachings, my daughter (who is 5) is NOT the center of the household, she is a part of our household, and no we did not make an appeal to Santa - hell we had a small war on Christmas of our own and did not even put up a lousy Christmas tree. (Our daughter asked and we took it as an opportunity to explain why Jews don’t do Christmas trees). Our music system normally plays NPR or adult music, and my television mostly broadcasts my sports programs and my wife’s beloved “The Daily Show” by John Stewart. My daughter’s Blues Clues and Dora have to compete with the above - and since they are available on DVD - she loses frequently. When my wife or I talk on the phone, our daughter knows that she needs to find ways to occupy herself (I have been on hour long conf. calls with my daughter hanging around me). And yes, my daughter is expected to put her shoes away when she returns from Kindergarten and put her toys away too.
From all this one might get the impression that our 5 year old is deprived child in the cruelest household since Oliver Twist asked for more gruel. - but in my unbiased opinion I believe she is one of the smartest, funniest, healthiest, cutest and most playful 5 year old I know, really, she is.
As mentioned in the later part of the WP story (it is amazing that the article mentioned it at all), it is critical to ‘have a life‘ independent of spouse and child. My wife and I managed this even before our daughter was born and we consciously sought to maintain it after she was born. A few fellow bloggers will attest to the fact that I periodically go out on the town with my friends (sans wife and daughter) including backpacking for a couple of days. Similarly my wife periodically goes on ‘girls night out’ with her friends or visits friends in other states (sans daughter and husband). It is suicidal to give up your life just because you got married or had a child. BALANCE and COMPROMISE skills become critical and it works if one uses the brains that we are born with.
I know couples (many Indian) who will both skip a party or any event just because their little one is sick. At our place in a scenario like that, one of us will stay with the little one and the other will go and party it up. Similarly when we have to take her to the many birthday parties kids go to - only one of us takes her, giving the other person time to do whatever they wish to do. Yes my little one gets her fair share of birthday parties, parks, museums etc. but sometime we say enough and just bail - explain to her why we can’t go and do something to keep our balance.
Perhaps we should start complaining like the 13000 parents did that we are tired (I am not), we are overworked (far from it), we are over extended (Nope!, and we are irritated (only when we read these silly stories in the WP). ..but then someone has to have all the fun in parenting, glad it is us.
Phew! Brilliant comment, riyer, and very, very valid points. I especially like the one about the need for BALANCE. This is true even for childless couples like my wife and I. We need to be able to do things of our own rather than being stuck to each other all the time.
Come on, riyer, don’t hold back. Tell us what you really think!
Very well argued comment; sounds like the rantlust parents are all sticking it to the WP.
For me, the reasons for having a child are rooted in fear. I actually enumerated every scenario possible of getting old and most of them appealed to me. My wife surviving me or kicking it before I got really old were all easy to accept, but when I evaluated my options of “What if I survive my wife into old age, (here I mean beyond the lusting-after-the-new-widow-in-the-retirement-home’ type of old age”). The very thought that I would die without anyone coming by to take me for a walk for a few days in a year, hear me talk of the good old days (and actually understand and connect with what I am rambling about) scared me shit-less.
I am hoping that if I do the right things my daughter will care enough for her old man to do all that. And if she ends up having her own kids, hell this old man might even have an audience for his ranting and reminiscing.
Another way of surviving a childless, spouseless old age would be to get filthy rich and marry a stripper.
Great topic Anup. Being a newbie parent (7 weeks and counting), I cannot say too much on the topic. However, few observations in no particular order:
- Holding, and calming our baby gives a true high.
- Seeing her smile and coo is awesome.
- Find myself worrying a lot more about if I’ll be a good Dad. Worrying a lot more about finances, etc.
- Feel more attached and closer to Shobha (my wife).
- I think the point that Riyer and others make about having a life is absolutely essential. I think it’s healthy for the kid and the entire family if the kid is part of the family as opposed to center of the family. I feel parents need to take time out for themselves and to be happy themselves. Only then can their spouse and children be happy too. (We’ll see as time passes, how much of this I actually follow).
- While writing this blog, I am wondering why do we want to have kids in the first place? I remember clearly telling friends about 10 years back, that I would definitely like to have kids. Not then, but at some point in my life. Why? Is it cultural? Is it because that’s just the way nature is? Is it because I didn’t want to be left out when it would be too late? Endless reasons… some soul searching to do between changing diapers this weekend…
This is a rather touchy topic for me though I am not the overtly sensitive type. Last year, I became pregnant and then lost the baby at a rather late stage which was traumatising, to put it mildly. (Visiting this blog and writing here frequently was part of the therapy.)
Having gone through that experience, I am scared to go through the process again soon but I am convinced that I want to have children. I love hanging out with them and I believe it’s important we carry on the fine work that our ancestors did in propagating the species. It’s animal nature to do this. On the other hand, we do have six billion and counting people on the planet… so in order to balance things out, we do need the no child people and one-child people. But whatever choice you make, don’t sit there and complain like the “molly-coddled me first generation whiners.” A lot of parents (including my own) are cool people who do have a life apart from raising their children.
A lot of people might have lives apart from their kids, but a lot of people don’t. People can think these people are stupid, but they obviously exist, according to the study. So why say the study and the article itself are stupid? People who say that are stupid, unless they find out more about the study itself, and find that the sample size was too small or was not part of the mainstream, etc. A study is a study, that’s all. Just because one doesn’t agree with a study, doesn’t always mean the study itself is stupid. For example, I don’t want to have kids, but I believe the other study some years ago, that said people with kids (or were they married people) were healthier or can expect to live longer. I didn’t ask whether they only did the study in Christopher St., NYC.
And the article actually talks about both sides of the coin, and quotes people on both sides, and also gives some advice which is apparently followed by some of the people who’re saying the article is stupid..
What a great discussion! Ever since I was married 14 months ago, we’ve posed the question of “why have kids?” to just about everyone we know. (It’s an especially great response to parents who keep bugging us about procreating.) No one has been able to give a rational answer, given that you no longer need ‘em to milk cows or pick cotton, nor can you rely on them in your old age (quite often the reverse).
So perhaps having children is simply irrational — why not leave it at that? Some people say they’re “fun” (but that’s been the well-off ones who get to outsource all the nasty tasks); others say they want to leave a “legacy” (I find that a very self-absorbing statement).
Happiness in a prosperous country (like the US) is largely a self-created state of being. I agree with Ravi in his wonderment about who exactly these 13,000 Americans are: I think these are average men and women who base their happiness on how much they have/own relative to their peers. There’s not enough hardship going on to appreciate what they’ve got, and it’s easy to blame the kids for it. I would surmise that if these same people had remained childless couples, they’d also find themselves unhappy.
Interesting observation. The Economist had a related article recently comparing poverty in the US and the Democratic Republic of Congo:
http://snipurl.com/lge4
A while back, there was a Time magazine issue dealing with this question of happiness in general in which it talked about happiness vs wealth in particular. Bottom line was that beyond the point where your basic needs are met, additional wealth does not add much by way of happiness.
Also relative wealth is an important thing to consider - most people prefer making 50k where the median income is 60k rather than making 100k where the median income is 200k. Some things like that seafront property are *always* in short supply and that is where the wealth differential comes into play.
Actually another article in the same issue as above, of The Economist might be worth mentioning here. Titled “Inconspicous Consumption”, this article talks about how the truly rich are flaunting their wealth in these days of mass market designer clothes and jets and ferraris for hire. The article states that being a millionaire is becoming commonplace (there were 8.3 million households worldwide with net assets of at least US $1 million in 2004).
This was a great read. Thanks for the pointer.
Another question to ask people when they bug you about when you’re having kids is to ask them when they’re going to die..it’s next in line in the list of things.
Be a kid, play, be a teenager, watch porn, be twenty-something, do X and go to Italy, get married, have kids, die.
Americans watch porn only when they are teenagers? Wow!
Why Italy?
“Why Italy?”
Why kids? Just kidding..
I’m not sure about Americans only porn-watching in their teens, but Italy seems to be a favored place to visit, according to my scientific survey comprising of conversations with girls while under different stages of being sloshed.
Yet another study to get people mad:
http://snipurl.com/lhz9
An article in the Guardian around the cultural influences causing people to have fewer children (at least in advanced countries). It is written for the UK and centered around women, but could apply to any advanced country and parents in general.
So after reading everyone’s blog, is there an answer to “should we have kids”? We are at a crossroads at the moment…my husband and I DO NOT want children…we think that we are being completely selfish-we enjoy what we do and like the spur of the moment-pick up and go attitude that we have about everything. We feel like we are the types to live life for ourselves and do not particularly want to sacrifice for someone else. Is this abnormal??? I understand that there needs to be a balance, but honestly, from those who are parents, can that really be done when you have children? And is the fear of being alone in old age worth having children when in reality, you don’t really want them??
You probably already know this, but in short nope. Nevertheless, I will attempt the hopeless and answer in two parts. The abstract and the specific.
In the abstract, the only way to come close to answering this question for you is you live two lives in parallel. One with kids and one without. At the end of the experience your two parallel selves come together and answer the question - which one was ‘better’. In some sense the whole exercise seems rather moronic because in the grand scheme of things, does it really matter? Maybe you’re just asking the wrong question.
In the very specific, I will speak about me - as a parent of two children. Some days after I shower my daughter she feels cold. I wrap her in her towel and cradle her in my arms. In those moments, could I possibly yearn for a BMW instead of a `94 Corolla and a college fund? Yes. If I were offered the choice of experiences - driving out of the dealership in my new beamer or warming my child in my arms, would I choose the latter? Every time.
There is nothing inherently selfish about being childless or selfless about choosing to have children. Don’t sweat that part
If selflessness is what’s motivating you, perhaps you could consider adopting a child. There’s not all that much selflessness in following one’s natural selfish instincts in adding yet another individual to the world’s population.
thanks to all those who responded..i do feel a lot better..