Parenthood breeds unhappiness

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Parenthood seems to make us unhappy. So why do we keep doing it?

By Sheril Kirshenbaum

Not long ago, my toddler, Atlas, bounded into the kitchen exclaiming, “Mommy, come see the river!”

I cringed, recognizing that a river might have several meanings to a 3-year-old who loves playing with faucets and still hasn’t perfected potty training. When he pointed toward the hallway where we have a map, a wave of relief washed over me. Maybe I ought to trust this kid more.

Then I saw it — two long black wavy lines of indelible marker coursing down the wall.

“I made a river,” he announced sweetly, “just for you!” as I realized I now had a new painting project.

Parenthood isn’t easy, but lately it seems to be getting an unnecessarily bad reputation. One widely cited study of 22 countries recently reported that parents tended to be unhappier than non-parents. And they attributed this “parenthood gap in happiness” to the financial and other stress of raising children “in countries that do not provide public assistance,” such as subsidized day care and paid parental leave.

The Department of Agriculture estimates that Americans spend an average of $245,000 per child between birth and age 18. And then there’s the stress of small stuff like sharing my house with a three-foot-tall graffiti artist.

Children can be exhausting, isolating and expensive. So if they truly make us unhappy, why do we keep having them?

[It turns out parenthood is worse than divorce, unemployment — even the death of a partner]

Our ancestors required big families for hunting and farming, but that’s not necessary in the 21st century. As a mother, I know I wouldn’t trade the experience for the world, but my years as a scientist made me curious about what research can tell us. I dug into the findings, and it turns out there’s a lot of evidence for how children affect the physical and emotional life of their parents and a myriad ways in which they can boost both our health and happiness.

Parenthood certainly doesn’t start as a cakewalk: Friends and I jokingly refer to the first three months as “100 days of darkness” while on call 24/7 in an endless cycle of feed, wipe, bathe, repeat. Yet we persevere, and that’s in part because of the way that nature tricks parents into adoring their tiny new minion.

Early on, we enjoy a kind of natural high by staying close to and caring for a baby. A newborn’s scent triggers an increase in a mother’s brain of dopamine, a chemical associated with anticipation and reward. This neurotransmitter brings about feelings of intense pleasure and is associated with addiction. Dopamine essentially makes us crave being with the baby. Long after infancy, moms can experience the same dopamine-reward response simply by seeing their child smile. In a sense, when our kids are happy, we feel it.

Dopamine isn’t the only chemical working on parents. Yale University scientists have found that both mothers and fathers experience a rise in levels of oxytocin when a baby enters the family. Often called “the love hormone,” it promotes attachment, a sense of euphoria and intense love while decreasing stress. It also helps to buffer against challenges like sleep deprivation.
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Moo- and Duh-hood, like apple pie, is overrated in America. The media really needs to stop encouraging women to make more babies and engaging in irresponsible behaviour.

Quote inspired by....hormones?
Obviousmoo:
The act of raising children is an exercise in taking the exceptionally long view - there are so many potholes along the way.....But in the very (very, very, very) long-run, there is nothing more gratifying and glorious than having children.

The exceptionally long view would mean overpopulation, mass extinction of wildlife, etc.

Well, at least she acknowledges that breeding isn't for everyone.

Still, it could be a lot worse, I would rather smell a magic marker than smearing a river of shit on the walls.

I'm glad some women are still defective enough to respond positively to this shit, otherwise our species would have died out long ago.

Also, ATLAS?

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"[GFG's pregnancy is] kind of like at the stables where that one dumb, ugly-ass mare broke out of her corral one day and got herself screwed by the equally fugly colt that was due to be gelded the same afternoon."- Shiny

Of course, there's a lot of butthurt in the comments and a lot of bingos in the article but here's a good one:

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Oh please. Becoming a parent rarely imbues people with any kind of generalized selflessness, it's just that instead of focusing on themselves, they're focused on their own children. Not necessarily anyone else's children, not necessarily on the betterment of society and/or the world.

It's no less selfish to focus 100% of one's altruistic energies on your own children. Few others benefit from that energy, it's all to the betterment of themselves, just in a less direct way. You don't solve world hunger by giving your own kids a decent breakfast.

I really dislike the whole selfish/unselfish dichotomy we try to establish on this subject, anyway. It's useless and nonproductive. People choose to have or not to have kids for a lot of reasons, it's not about selfishness or altruism.

I can't believe the idiots who think not having kyds is selfish. Seven billion miracles are enough!

Here's a good comment along those lines:

Having children is the ultimate act of selfishness. Overpopulation is already affecting the 750 million people worldwide who have no access to potable water sources, and 2.5 billion are without proper sanitation. Many believe we’ve passed or are in the throes of a peak-water situation, meaning voracious demand has outpaced renewable supply, and ecological costs outweigh benefits of extraction. Besides industrial pollution, much of the water crisis is due to intensive agriculture designed to feed a growing number of humans: the latter half of the twentieth century saw irrigation systems nearly triple worldwide, from 100 million hectares in 1950 to 280 million hectares in 2000, to feed the burgeoning population. To put Western water consumption into perspective: sustaining the global population on average European or North American water habits would require water from 3.5 Earths. Human pollution and overfishing is bringing oceanic devastation and the climate change we have caused is a main contributor to what is likely to be the sixth major extinction. Scientists are lumping the twentieth century’s unprecedented reduction of biodiversity into what they call the Holocene extinction, with as many as 140,000 species disappearing annually, according to the species-area theory.

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Miss Hannigan
Also, ATLAS?

Yeah, because they think the world of him.. get it?


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They are having children for selfish and narcissistic reasons, or are simply irresponsible. Funny... Those are the terms often used to describe the CF

~Live, Laugh, Love~

Hmmm....parenting breeds unhappiness? Ya don't say.

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creativelycf

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Miss Hannigan
Also, ATLAS?

Yeah, because they think the world of him.. get it?

I just shrugged it off.

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As a mother, I know I wouldn’t trade the experience for the world...

Yup, there it is, the obligatory It's All Worth It^TM line. Parents seem to feel like they need to be ashamed of themselves for not loving every single second of parenthood. Even though they know it sucks and other people know it sucks, they have to always throw in the detail that they wuv their kids and wouldn't want things any other way, lest someone think they're bad parents. When they say that on the heels of a 45-minute harangue about what rotten bastards their kids are, it makes me very reluctant to believe they're happy or that I'm missing out on something. Just complain about your fuckin' kids without feeding me the line of BS.

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Early on, we enjoy a kind of natural high by staying close to and caring for a baby. A newborn’s scent triggers an increase in a mother’s brain of dopamine, a chemical associated with anticipation and reward. This neurotransmitter brings about feelings of intense pleasure and is associated with addiction. Dopamine essentially makes us crave being with the baby. Long after infancy, moms can experience the same dopamine-reward response simply by seeing their child smile. In a sense, when our kids are happy, we feel it.

So if it weren't for a chemical trigger in people's heads fooling them into thinking having kids is worthwhile, they'd probably take those kids out back and kill them without a second thought. Same with oxytocin, the "feel-good" hormone that is released in parents' heads to keep them from taking newborns and killing them after a couple nights of siren-like screeching. Humans apparently have had to develop a coping mechanism which basically drugs them in order to find raising a kid tolerable until the child reaches an age where the parents may have developed enough of an attachment to the kids to not kill or abandon them. And many times, the dopamine and oxytocin just isn't enough - consider the tons upon tons of articles every year we see about kids dying in ways that are obviously not accidental. There's a reason why parents are the primary suspects when kids wind up dead.

Also, what is this bullshit about "new baby scent?" I hear it constantly, but I just don't get it, do you? Babies smell like shit, puke, sour milk and wet sickness. By that logic, working in a hospital, daycare or nursing home should give you the same rush of happy hormones that taking care of a loaf would.

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Children can be exhausting, isolating and expensive. So if they truly make us unhappy, why do we keep having them?

Because humans are fuckin' stupid. They buy into the horse shit about how having kids is a wonderful and fulfilling life choice, or they're too thick to get abortions when they get pregnant. I'm talking about more developed countries, not shit-world nations where most babies are born HIV positive and are the result of rape. People go on having kids for tons of reasons and none of them are good:

• They want to take care of something (why does it automatically have to be a kid?).
• They want to ensure their family name or genes continue (unnecessary pride, nothing is special about anybody's surname or genetics).
• They want to do something meaningful with their lives (translation: they're too dumb or lazy to do anything genuinely meaningful).
• They want someone to take care of them when they're old (trust me, nursing homes won't go extinct by the time today's parents become senile old sacks).
• They want someone to love them (kids can't love - they just depend. And there's no guarantee your kids will love you when they're old enough to comprehend what love is anyway, especially if you were a shitty parent).
• They just plain they got knocked up and were too dumb to abort.

Having kids is the only thing you can do in life that's insanely easy (conception, not raising them) and that you'll get LOADS of attention for doing, not to mention they're a great way to mooch off government benefits for your whole life if you're too special to get a job.

Parunthood is definitely a great way to get attention, especially when one has no other talents or abilities. But apparently it isn't enough for some folks. Just for the helluvit, I started reading about some famous criminals and hey--quite a few of them were parents! Some truly sick bastards like H.H. Holmes and Albert Fish were dads. Diane Downs, Marybeth Tinning--two doting moms. But what the hey, that endorphin rush makes everything great!

It takes a child to raze a village.

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the noodler

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creativelycf

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Miss Hannigan
Also, ATLAS?

Yeah, because they think the world of him.. get it?

I just shrugged it off.

Did you just reference Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged"?
Well done! You win the Internet today.

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article
Our ancestors required big families for hunting and farming, but that’s not necessary in the 21st century

Not quite true, parent lady.

Yes agricultural families tended toward larger families, but pre-agricultural humans lived in pretty small tribes. They were nomadic, with fairly small families. Research has shown that their populations were pretty stable. Human populations didn't start to increase hugely until the advent of settled farming communities. (Humans actually became less healthy at the point they started settling and having more children, but that's a whole different subject.)

As for why people still do it...societal head-pats + no other plans + lack of genuine comprehensive sex/birth control education + pro-life religions + misery loves company = lots of people still having lots of kids.

If cultures were genuinely objective about kids, religions stopped stigmatizing birth control/abortion, and parenting wasn't glorified, fewer people would have them.

Two points I have to make here:

1. I am going to have to read this Atlas Shrugged. I must have missed it going to school in Breed Hills. I though it was a book about fitness.

2. Well, I guess my mother saying "there was no birth control back then" for why she grew up in a farm family with 12 kids in Kansas was partly right. But I also have a theory that the Great Depression would have been over with much sooner if a farm family did not have so many kids. Farmers might be forced to (gulp!) hire people, even if they could only barter for food or products. But with 12 kids in a family, there are plenty of "slaves" to bring the crop to harvest.

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mr. neptune
Well, I guess my mother saying "there was no birth control back then" for why she grew up in a farm family with 12 kids in Kansas was partly right.

Birth control has been around since before 1850 BCE. Abstinence has been around longer. As soon as the human race figured out what made babies, there's been no excuse for having more children than you want or could take care of.

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mr. neptune
Two points I have to make here:

1. I am going to have to read this Atlas Shrugged. I must have missed it going to school in Breed Hills. I though it was a book about fitness.

2. Well, I guess my mother saying "there was no birth control back then" for why she grew up in a farm family with 12 kids in Kansas was partly right. But I also have a theory that the Great Depression would have been over with much sooner if a farm family did not have so many kids. Farmers might be forced to (gulp!) hire people, even if they could only barter for food or products. But with 12 kids in a family, there are plenty of "slaves" to bring the crop to harvest.

Ayn Rand. Google Philosophy Objectivism . Despite it's very Anti Catholic tenets it is very closely associated with Rick Santorum.

Rand (and in Atlas Shrugged) advocates the the weak are unworthy of love. This resonates back the concept of "Lebensunwertes Leben" or Life unworthy of life as defined by the Nazi Party. ( The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide by Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, 1986, ISBN-13: 978-0465049059 )

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“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”

I don't think anyone who hasn't read Rand is missing much, since everything she writes is thinly disguised polemics. I'd much rather read someone like Orwell, who knew how to put his opinions down as a good story.

Atlas could easily be a reference to the mythological figure who held the world on his shoulder, which is of course the figure Rand referenced in her title. Many breeders do think their children are essential to the world.

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yurble
I don't think anyone who hasn't read Rand is missing much, since everything she writes is thinly disguised polemics. I'd much rather read someone like Orwell, who knew how to put his opinions down as a good story.

Atlas could easily be a reference to the mythological figure who held the world on his shoulder, which is of course the figure Rand referenced in her title. Many breeders do think their children are essential to the world.

I'll admit I got half through it. It's a little above my intellect but I figure its always good to stretch one's mind.

I worked for a paperback manufacturer a few years back in the invoicing department so I was able to collect her entire collection of works. I mean the whole shebang. I did peruse The Virtue of Selfishness and found it quite interesting.

I'm no professor so I can't speak of the philosophy aspect, however I greatly admire a woman who came to the US with little English skills and yet managed to write screenplays. Cecil B DeMille actually took her under his wing and called her Caviar.

Hey. I could be reading 50 Shades of Grey, right? But then I'd have to eat a bullet.

She was also childfree to the best of my knowledge.

But her stuff is in no way a beach read.

Fwiw.... DO NOT bother with the recent films they did. I have the part 1 on DVD and the production values reminded me of cheap lifetime movies. On the plus side, Hank Rearden was played by my favorite kiwi, Grant Bowler. Oh, and I have no idea with what they were thinking putting the Francisco d'Anconia actor in a toupee/wig that looked like a dead ferret.

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yurble
I don't think anyone who hasn't read Rand is missing much, since everything she writes is thinly disguised polemics. I'd much rather read someone like Orwell, who knew how to put his opinions down as a good story.

I would recommend, if you're interested in Rand's philosophy, just skipping her books and playing Bioshock instead.

Btw, yurble, I agree with you on Rand vs. Orwell, and breeders' opinions about their kids.

Sounds like I would rather read a book about fitness.

As for my mom, she is from the Midwest, and out there, they are into denial (we couldn't help but have all those kids) and very much into gossip, because you have to admit, Kansas is rather boring.

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kittehpeoples

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yurble
I don't think anyone who hasn't read Rand is missing much, since everything she writes is thinly disguised polemics. I'd much rather read someone like Orwell, who knew how to put his opinions down as a good story.

I would recommend, if you're interested in Rand's philosophy, just skipping her books and playing Bioshock instead.

Btw, yurble, I agree with you on Rand vs. Orwell, and breeders' opinions about their kids.

I'm not interested in her philosophy, I strongly disagree with it. I just remember her books as being badly written (I had to read two in school).

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yurble

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kittehpeoples

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yurble
I don't think anyone who hasn't read Rand is missing much, since everything she writes is thinly disguised polemics. I'd much rather read someone like Orwell, who knew how to put his opinions down as a good story.

I would recommend, if you're interested in Rand's philosophy, just skipping her books and playing Bioshock instead.

Btw, yurble, I agree with you on Rand vs. Orwell, and breeders' opinions about their kids.

I'm not interested in her philosophy, I strongly disagree with it. I just remember her books as being badly written (I had to read two in school).

There are some great youtube videos of her interviews with Mike Wallace. It exposes her to the light like a vampire in the sun.

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“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”