Given that my previous post was celebrating the joys of (benignly) neglecting my children, it may seem incongruous that I’m now rushing to defend of the exhilaration of parenting in all its chaotic splendour.
But I’ve been saddened by the number of recent articles that have sought to somehow diminish or trivialise the overall happiness that having children brings.
With the exception of Josie Gagliano’s lovely post the other day, there have been a slew of parentally-negative pieces, ranging from this article in the British Psychological Society journal, to The Atlantic’s: ‘Selfish Reasons Not to Have More Kids’ followed by the New York Mag’s ‘All Joy and No Fun’, and then through to ‘Why Non-Parents are Happier than Parents’ in the US News.
The genesis for most of these articles is research done by Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus Daniel Kahneman (in collaboration with others) as to what influences both our day to day happiness and overall happiness.
The research found that day-to-day parenting is pretty low on the happiness radar for many people. The conclusion by many therefore is that parents are no happier than non-parents.
Here’s the thing though: when it comes to day-to-day stuff then human nature being what it is, we all love to bitch. And whinge and moan.
As seeing as parents spend much of their time with their children, it’s logical that they may well moan about their kids. Non-parents may be more likely to moan about their colleagues or their neighbours or their neighbour’s dog, or the state of the economy.
Point is, the non-parents probably don’t whinge any less than parents, they just whinge about different things. If those parents were suddenly childless would they whinge any less?
Probably not.
And then of course we have our global happiness. Another interesting (and subsequent) study by Professor Kahneman called ‘Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being’ looked at how effective it is to try to assess people’s overall happiness levels through self-reporting.
Questions such as: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days? Would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” are easy for people to answer – but how reliable is the data? To quote from the report:
In an elegant demonstration of the power of context, Schwarz (1987) invited subjects to the lab to fill out a questionnaire on life satisfaction. Before they answered the questionnaire, however, he asked them to photocopy a sheet of paper for him. A dime was placed on the copy machine for a randomly chosen half of the sample. Reported satisfaction with life was raised substantially by the discovery of the coin on the copy machine—clearly not an income effect. Other research indicates that reported life satisfaction is influenced by the current weather (higher on nicer days); although if individuals are first asked explicitly about the weather, the weather does not influence their reported life satisfaction (Schwarz and Clore, 1983). Reported satisfaction or happiness is also often strongly affected by earlier questions in a survey.
So – today, on a workday, I’m at home with two of my children, both of whom developed gastro at around 3am this morning.
Right now they’re both sitting in the back yard, in the sun, nursing buckets. I’ve just finished the fifth load of washing (neither of them made it to the bathroom before throwing up last night). In terms of what is making me happiest today … writing this! In terms of my global happiness – well, it’s okay now but at 5am this morning it was looking pretty shaky.
Does that mean I’m not happy being a parent? No way! I wouldn’t change it for the world!
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