Actually, Kids Make You Happy

180 alert!

Less than a year ago, parents were buried under an avalanche of studies that concluded kids don’t make you happy. In fact, these studies showed that people raising kids reported lower levels of happiness — life satisfaction, marital satisfaction, and mental well-being — than their childless counterparts.

Oh, and that lower level of happiness? Never. Goes. Away.

Okay, but now out of the U.K., the Journal of Happiness Studies reports that not only do kids not lower their parents’ level of happiness, they actually raise it — a little bit with the first kid. Even more with the second. And (I’m looking at you, Baby Earl!) significantly more with the third!

There’s a catch, though. Continue reading »

Redshirting Might Not be Magic After All

As a mom who’s feeling just a bit sniffly today after I dropped off my daughter at kindergarten this morning, I’m liking one of the latest entries on the Nurtureshock blog. Namely, that “redshirting” kids or keeping them out of kindergarten an extra year so they’ll do better actually doesn’t help much at all.

Two new studies found that at most, there’s a 4-percentage-point difference in how well the oldest kids do versus the youngest, and much of that can be explained away by who has babies when. Kasey Buckley and Daniel M. Hungerman of the National Bureau of Economic research recently looked at detailed birth certificate data from every child born in the United States from 1989 to 2001. Surprisingly, poor women and wealthy women Continue reading »

Book Sifts Through The Studies

We’re all bombarded with studies, every day, that tell us this thing or that about children’s behavior and our effect, as parents, on what they do. A new book by Po Bronson and Ashley Merriman called NurtureShock sifts through all the conventional wisdom out there and looks at the social science behind it.

Some of the findings are pretty interesting – for example, Continue reading »