On children and happiness

I have previously blogged about the fact that I'd put my odds of wanting children at incredibly low. I have occasionally worried that despite this reasonable and long-standing decision, it might someday make me bitter and sad... well, um... more bitter and sad than I would have been otherwise. So it was reassuring to see studies comparing the happiness of parents vs. non parents: e.g., the Pew Research Center's survey on happiness among Americans, as referenced in the Atlantic Monthly's Primary Sources:

Overall, parents are happier than adults who have no children, but this gap disappears once a person's marital status is considered. That is, married people with children are about as happy as married people without children. And unmarried people with children are about as happy as unmarried people without children.

I found these results a bit curious, but probably explicable. For each person whose child who is their pride and joy, the center of their life, and source of support, I have to imagine that there are contrary cases. For instance, I have to imagine that there are many for whom children can be a source of heartbreak--either by a tragedy befalling the child, or that the kid just didn't turn out all that well (or as they 'wanted' it to).

For instance, they might end up with a child who grows up, makes a perfunctory phone call with negligible content every other week, stops by once a year to have a tense few days at home, and largely shuts his parents out of his life. Nah... I don't know anybody like that.

Also, I wonder how many parents there are who have a 'happiness neutral' view of parenting--it was assumed that this was the path to take, and that raising a family was something to take for granted, that you grind through. This stands in stark contrast to most of my peer group: carefully deciding that they will have children and when to have them. It's unfortunate that the awesome body of genetic potential of my friends have is so carefully self-selecting. [grin]

In addition, there are the financial pressures that come with having a family--not just providing for more people and saving for college educations, but the need to push earning potentials to the edge in order to afford a house in a desirable school district--the thesis of The Two-Income Trap. Not to mention the time/energy pressures of raising children--I could see all these factors pushing down the relative happiness metric.

In a marginally-related digression, there was a quote on an NPR show by Andrew Oswald, an economics prof at the University of Warwick (The Connection “Money Can Buy Happiness”); it resonated with me strongly enough that I transcribed it:

You start happy in your early twenties, and then if you’re a typical person, you systematically become less happy... that bottoms out in your early thirties, and then you start getting happier again. So there’s a sort of U-shape or J-shape in happiness and mental health through the average person’s life cycle. We don’t completely understand why that is, but we think there’s a sort of adaptation that goes on where you begin thinking you’re going to conquer the world, then you realize that it’s hard to do that, you gradually come to terms with yourself, and then you can start getting happier again.

It’s good news is that the older one gets, the happier one gets, partly because you come to terms with yourself, you can accept yourself, and you don’t set impossible goals any longer.

It matches the patterns of my life, to some degree. A good chunk of my late twenties were pretty depressing, but that probably had to do with where I was in my life and career. But now, things seem relatively up; I'm am comfortable and pretty well valued in my field. I don't know quite where my life is going, but hey, it's encouraging to know that I'm supposed to be getting happier.