Particularly so when they are aged under ten.
FOR THE past twenty years or so, social scientists have affirmed what parents think when they are at their most exasperated and dyspeptic: children make you miserable. In 2004 Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University and others discovered that parents thought that looking after their children was about as enjoyable as doing the housework. Two meta-studies (studies of studies) in 2012 found that, in most of the research, self-reported “life satisfaction” (a measure of happiness) was a bit lower when there was a child in the house.
The effect was not large. But there is something odd about these findings. In rich countries at least, people decide to have children. A few children are doubtless unplanned but only a few. If children make parents unhappy, why do they keep having them? The puzzle, says Letizia Mencarini of Bocconi University, is why isn’t fertility even lower in countries where people have a choice? Parents far outnumber the childless at every stage of adulthood. A new generation of research helps answer that question, and suggests that children are more likely to make parents happy than was once thought.
The new research is based on longer, more detailed statistical series measuring happiness—usually defined as “subjective well-being”—along with new techniques to analyse links between it and parenthood. To see the importance of this, remember that the point at which a parent’s happiness is measured makes a big difference, whether it is just before birth, just after or long after. Previous data sets were often too imprecise to measure this accurately. The new ones can.
So what do they show? First, that in rich countries, happier people are more likely to have children. It has long been known this is true for countries such as Denmark and Sweden, which have higher fertility rates than average, between 1.8 and 1.9 (fertility rates measure the likely number of children an average woman will have during her lifetime). They also report unusually high levels of life satisfaction. Bulgaria and Hungary, on the other hand, have lower fertility rates (1.5 to 1.6) and lower levels of happiness. But that does not necessarily mean that happiness causes people to have children or vice versa: both low happiness and low fertility may be the result of being poorer, or worse educated, or of many other things.
Ms Mencarini and three co-authors show that what is true for countries as a whole is true within countries too. They combed through the numbers for seven rich nations to isolate the impact of life satisfaction. They found that everywhere, happier people are more likely to have children. They also found that the influence of happiness was greater on the decision to have a second or a third child than it is on the first. This has significance for public policy in countries which want to increase very low fertility: they need to work out how to persuade couples with one child to have another.
Sadly, a second finding of the research, shows why that is not easy. Though happier people are more likely to have children, it does not follow that children necessarily keep them cheerful. That depends on other things. Whether parents are married is one. Single parents are usually less happy than married ones. The age of the child is another. Children under ten seem to bring more joy than those over that age. And money matters a lot. David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College and Andrew Clarke of the Paris School of Economics managed to isolate the financial strain of raising children as an influence on parental happiness. They argue that it is the cost of raising kids, rather than children in the abstract, that reduces pleasure.
But the most important influence seems to be the pressure of work. It has long been known that the difficulty of balancing the demands of work and home life increase exponentially when children arrive and this results in a significant amount of stress, especially for the mother, who is usually the main caregiver. Some parents also suffer a decline in well-being soon after a child’s birth, presumably as the reality of nappies sets in. This fall is consistently largest among parents who also report conflicts at work or (which has the same effect) family tension. So a work/life imbalance gets in the way of the pleasure parents feel in their children.
Intriguingly, a study by Francesca Luppi, also of Bocconi University, finds that parents who report a good balance between life and work are more likely to have a second child and more likely to have one soon after the first.
This has policy implications too. For governments which want to get their birth rates up, or simply put grins on the faces of their citizens, providing better child care seems to work well, certainly in France, for instance, and the Nordic countries. It increases both people’s happiness and their desire to have children. Children, in short, do seem to bring about happiness. And happiness brings about children.
Source: we have found this article on the website of The Economist.