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Strollerderby
Study after study shows that parenting decreases people’s happiness, at least in the early years of doing it. No surprise there. Changing poopy diapers stinks. Power struggles with preschoolers are exhausting, and no fun for anyone.
Parenting soaks up all your extra time and money. It leaves you too wiped out for sex, hobbies and work. You learn to long for sleep. Of course you’re less happy than you were before your bundle of joy came along.
Yet few parents express any regrets about having kids. In fact, many of us like having a baby so much we go on to have more babies.
Are we just lunatics? Nope. Happiness just isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Parents are chasing something more compelling than happiness. We’re opening ourselves up to an elusive state of well-being that Martin Seligman, father of happiness studies, calls flourishing.
Is happiness worth all the trouble?
The pursuit of happiness may be an inalienable right, but some psychologists are coming to believe it’s worth the bother.
For me as a parent, happiness is one of the big things I want for my kids. It’s right up there with health and safety. I strive to give them joy in all kinds of ways, ranging from a loving bedtime ritual to special mother-daughter trips to the corner coffeeshop.
So the new research suggesting that joyful moments may be no better than ordinary ones is a little disturbing. Am I chasing the wrong star in aiming to raise happy kids?
What makes kids happy?
A friend’s toddler vigorously waved a comb at his mama this morning and said, “This makes me happy!” Then he waved the same object and said, “This makes me mad!”
Which is to say, kids don’t always communicate clearly about their emotions. We can see their giggles and smiles, but how do we know what makes kids happy? One British group asked 1000 kids what made them happy, and the answers are a bit surprising.
Computer games ranked 8th, well below more wholesome activities like spending time with family and friends and celebrating holidays.
Here’s the complete list of answers to the British survey asking kids “What makes you happy?”: Continue reading »
There’s been no shortage of research recently “proving” that little bundles of joy aren’t really all that joyful. Last summer, New York magazine caused a stir announcing that parents hate parenting.
Research seemed to back that up, leaving moms and dads wringing our hands and talking about how satisfying parenting can be, even if moment to moment it makes us miserable.
Now a new large-scale study shows some promise for parental happiness. While young people are happier without kids, parents over 40 are happier than their child-free peers. They’re also much happier than younger parents.
The Understanding Society Study is an ongoing look at individual, social and family life in the UK, following 40,000 families over several years. In early findings—culled from a sample of men, women and children aged 10-15, the study’s authors report that a child’s happiness seems to directly correlate with how happy his or her mother is in her marriage.
In families where the mother described herself as “perfectly happy” with her marital relationship, almost 3/4 of children surveyed described themselves as “completely happy” with their family situation.In families where mothers said they were unhappy in their marriages, that number dropped to 55 percent.
Interestingly, while children’s family happiness seemed to directly align with their mothers’ marital happiness, the same was not true for fathers.
Happiness is hard work
“All happy families are alike,” Tolstoy wrote. That may make for boring reading, but a happy family is the Holy Grail of domestic living: something everyone wants and most of us struggle to achieve.
We’ve all had our moments of domestic bliss: those periods where things just flow, and laughter bubbles up from the kids while you blissfully do your thing. The house is clean, the bills are paid, dinner is taken care of and somehow you have the energy left to just be with your family.
Good work when you can get it, but for a lot of parents those moments are fleeting. We spend too much time snapping at our kids – and each other. We rush from place to place, more focused on getting to the end of the day than enjoying the middle of it. Too few of our hours are spent relaxed and happy.
How can we turn that around? Here are some ideas:
Continue reading »
Do children really cause us to become less happy than our childless counterparts? Or are we allowing our offspring to make us unhappy?
Economist Bryan Caplan, writing in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, says its not our progeny themselves that are making us miserable, but instead it’s the cult of parent perfection that’s turning us into a generation of maternal and paternal killjoys.
If you believe that every single action you take has the potential to impact your children for good or ill, Caplan argues you will never be satisfied with your accomplishments as a parent. Luckily, Caplan sees a solve. Back off, he says. There is precious little evidence that our actions vis-à-vis our kids make as big an impact as we believe they do. Continue reading »
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