Alpha Mummy: What do you mean by 'happy'?

Like many couples our age, my girlfriend and I are thinking about the future. I’m 30, she’s 25 and we have two things on our to-do list. First is to get married. Second is to have two children, hopefully one boy and one girl.

The case for marriage looks good. According to research, there is a huge hit in happiness for both husband and wife in the first year of marriage that tends to last for many years. On the other hand, the case for having children does not look so wonderful. Over the past few decades, social scientists such as me have found consistent evidence that there is an almost zero association between having children and happiness. My analysis in the Journal of Socio-Economics is a recent British example of parents and non-parents reporting the same levels of life satisfaction, on average.

But the warnings for prospective parents are even starker than “it’s not going to make you happier”. Using data sets from Europe and the United States, numerous scholars have found evidence that parents often report statistically significantly lower levels of happiness, life satisfaction, marital satisfaction and mental wellbeing compared with non-parents.

There is also evidence that the strains associated with parenthood are not limited to the period during which children are physically and economically dependent. For example, research indicates that those older parents whose children have left home report the same or slightly less happiness than non-parents of similar age and status. Thus, these results are suggesting something controversial; that having children does not bring us joy and can even make us less happy than if we were childless. There is a widespread belief in every culture that children bring happiness. When people are asked to think about parenthood — either imagining future offspring or thinking about their current ones — they tend to conjure up pictures of healthy babies, handsome boys or gorgeous-looking girls who are flawless in every way.

This is the case even when the prospective parents know that raising a child will be painstakingly difficult. Why do we have such a rosy view? One possible explanation for this, according to Daniel Gilbert, an American psychologist and author of the bestseller Stumbling on Happiness (Random House), is that the belief that “children bring happiness” transmits itself much more successfully from generation to generation than the belief that “children bring misery”.

The phenomenon can be explained further by the fact that people who believe that there is no joy in parenthood — and who stop having children — are unlikely to be able to pass on their belief much further than their own generation. It is a little bit like Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest. Only the belief that has the best chance of transmission, even if it is a faulty one, will be passed on.

In a seminal paper, Dr Andrew Clark and his colleagues at the Paris School of Economics found that there is a significant increase in life satisfaction for men and women one year before the birth of their child, which is also present in the year of the child’s birth, before dropping below zero within one year of the new arrival. Men and women then go on to experience significant unhappiness for the next four years.

Yes, you might find yourself thinking, being a parent is really hard work, but surely, there must be some positive experiences to offset all the negative ones? I find it hard to accept the findings that children bring only overall misery. This is simply because I (along with most people) believe that all parents experience a 50-50 ratio of positive and negative things about raising a child. Seeing my first-born smile for the first time would more than compensate for dirty nappies and constant whining, even if the former experience is rarer than the latter. In other words, shouldn’t the wellbeing hit from a higher but less frequent quality experience with our children be larger than, or, at the very least, equal to, the small but more frequent misery that raising children can bring?

How we allocate our attention to different things in life can help to explain this. For example, we tend to believe that rare but meaningful experiences, such as seeing our children smile for the first time or graduating from university or getting married, would give us huge increases in our happiness. And indeed they do, but these boosts in wellbeing, often to our surprise, tend not to last for long.

One explanation for this lies in the nature of these experiences. How often do we think about these rare but meaningful experiences daily, that is, if we are not prompted to think about them? It is like winning a lottery. We may be incredibly happy at first if we win £1 million, but soon that money will go into our bank account or into spending sprees in the form of nice cars or a big house in the country, most of which, after having got them, we do not spend a lot of time thinking about everyday.

However, because the experience of winning the lotteryis so strong — perhaps partly because it is such a rare event — if we are asked to think about it again, we are likely to exaggerate the value that it brings.

It is, on the other hand, much more likely that as parents we will end up spending a large chunk of our time attending to the core process of childcare such as, “Am I going to be able to pick up David from his school in time?”

Most of these negative experiences are a lot less powerful than the positive experiences we have with our kids, which is probably why we tend not to think about them when prompted with a question of whether or not children bring us happiness.

Nevertheless, it is these small but more frequent negative experiences, rather than the less frequent but meaningful experiences that take up most of our attention in a day. It should, therefore, be no surprise that these negative experiences that come with parenthood will show up more often in our subjective experiences, including happiness and life satisfaction, than activities that are, although rewarding, relatively rare.

These findings are, of course, extremely depressing. Yet perhaps they represent something that we know deep down to be true: raising children is probably the toughest and the dullest job in the world.

Children give us many things — raising them can be both rewarding and meaningful — but an increase in our average daily happiness is probably not among them. Rather than deny that, we should celebrate it. In the words of Daniel Gilbert: “Our ability to love beyond all measure those who try our patience and weary our bones is at once our most noble and most human quality.”

The fact that children don’t always make us happy, and that we’re happy to have them nonetheless, is why we should be so grateful to our parents and our future self for taking on the task.

Dr Nattavudh Powdthavee is a lecturer in the Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York

This article first appeared in The Psychologist (www.thepsychologist.org.uk)

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