Male
39 years old
Married
Household income between $150,000 and $200,000
In a senior management position
1 young child at home
A wife who works part-time
Female
42 years old
Unmarried (and no children)
Household income under $100,000
In a professional position (doctor, lawyer, etc.)
They say the second profile, the one who has no family and focus only on their career is the least happy profile in America. I’m not too surprised about that.
Society has sold the idea that you can be single your entire life and be happy about it, but I think it gets very tiring to do everything yourself, without ever having support, especially when you’re older and established. Not saying nobody can succeed, but for the most part, that’s how it is.
I’m not sure this article proves that having children makes you happier. There’s no category for married people who do not have children. Seems to me the main point is that having a family benefits men more than it does women, since women often do more of the child-rearing and housekeeping even when both partners have full-time jobs.
Um, what society are you looking at? The society I live is constantly preaching about the magic and wonder that is Marriage and Family. By sheer statistics alone, you are a strange bird if you live alone, don’t date, don’t have children, and are not actively trying to acquire these things. Of course people say there’s nothing wrong with being single and childless. But the behavior of most people would indicate the opposite attitude.
Based on just what you’ve shared with us, there’s not enough information to conclude that children make people happier. Causality can’t be determined. It makes sense that people who want to have children but can’t have them for whatever reason, will be less happy than people who want children and have them. Most people want children, or at the very least are fine with having them. Not getting want you want ==> unhappiness. Furthermore, it also makes sense that a person who does not have children may be in this situation for pitiable reasons. Like, that they are emotionally, physically, or socially impaired. I’m gonna bet that an emotionally, physically, or socially impaired person is probably less happy, on average, than a person without these problems.
Indirect benefits of parenting also need to be accounted for. People with children receive more positive attention than people without children. I’ve observed that the number one conversation in the office breakroom is what everyone’s kids are up to. Too bad if you don’t have your own story, you loser. You’re pregnant? Let’s throw you a baby shower! And ask how you’re doing every five minutes and give you maternity leave. And if you die tragically, your obituary headline will identify you as a “Mother of X”. Society rewards parents in a million different ways for being parents. These perks alone could explain the disparities in happiness.
I’m with monstro - how on earth did you get the idea society has sold the idea you can be single and happy? I’m not familiar with those movies. Sure we tell everyone you can do what you want and be happy, but I really don’t think that is the case with children.
I don’t have the stats on hand, but studies I have seen have shown that when asked about happiness at any single point in time (I think one used beepers and they had to record what they were doing and how happy they were) people with children were LESS happy spending time with their children vs other activities or those without children.
That being said - when asked about overall life satisfaction - those with children scored higher and ranked raising their children as being part of the reason for this.
Also if they are comparing those two profile - the woman isn’t just childless - she is unmarried (maybe she has a boyfriend). Not really a good way to tease out a single variable.
I would personally be pretty pissed as a 42 year old doctor that still had a household income <$100,000 no matter what other factors are going on.
That said, I do agree with some of it. I have never been convinced about the wisdom of sacrificing most other parts of your life for a “career” (whatever that means). A career just translates into ‘long term job that requires some skill’ and ‘job’ translates directly into ‘work’. One of the definitions of work is something that is done for money and not voluntary pleasure. I don’t know about you but I don’t like working that much even though I have about the best position going for my situation in a field that is also my hobby. It still isn’t fun or especially rewarding though and I plan to drop it as soon as I can and retire very early.
I don’t think the overall point is that you have to get married and have kids to have a happy life. It is that you just don’t want to pile all your eggs into the ‘career’ basket and try to give it a personal purpose that it was never meant to serve. Anyone’s job or career can disappear in an instant with barely a whisper of (metaphorical) smoke. You also need to do other things that make you happy and cannot be taken away arbitrarily. What those are depend on the person but they can include friends, kids, travel, hobbies volunteer efforts or even just carving out time to spend on things like message boards away from your official job.
This is soooo true - I know women who absolutely have a hard time with this - and others if you ask if they regret having kids who seem to think you mean “would you kill your kid if you could?”
The seem to have a problem envisioning themselves - as you are asking them to imagine little johnny or whatever no longer exists, but if you ask them if they’d advise someone else in their situation to have kids - they’d have no problem saying no.
That being said, I know other women who have a tough time, but really do love it - they have more kids (on purpose) and don’t really seem to get flustered. Nothing seems to phase them.
Yeah, I don’t agree that our society promotes being single, mostly single adults are presented as somehow broken; single women are often portrayed as neurotic and a threat to family happiness.
So men with a wife that works part-time are pretty happy?
Color me surprised. I’d be pretty darn happy if someone hung out at my house 20 hours a week with nothing more to do than take care of the kids, wash my socks and cook me nice dinners. I don’t know about single women, but working women would be a good bit happier if more men started taking on half-- and I mean a real half-- of the household responsiblities.
It’s so hard to do comparisons, because the qualities and circumstances that lead someone to have or not have a family also have a massive effect on everything else. Presumably a 42 year old single doctor is a pretty drive person. Very driven people tend not to be very happy with much of anything, because it takes some level of unhappiness to have that drive. Even if they woke up Carol Brady, they’d probably still be unhappy.
I’d also be interested in seeing results when these people are in their 50s or 60s. 42 seems like an exceptionally rough age to be a single woman. Most of your social group has likely gone on to have children, if you do desire children, you are probably dealing with that, and you are likely to start bumping up against some ceilings professionally as the ranks to rise in to get smaller and smaller. But I would guess a lot of that rebalances as you get older, and especially as your social set emerges again from the intensity of raising kids.
It was written by a psychologist - it’s very important to their happiness to believe that anybody else in “a professional position” earns that little money.
Yeah, I’d be pretty unhappy if I were a 40-something professional doctor or lawyer earning under $100k.
I can wash my own socks. But it would be nice not having to pay a fortune for a nanny or have to worry about racing home at certain times. Or have my mother in law coming over several days a week to watch the baby.
Ask me again in 18 years.
We just had a baby and it’s actually a lot of fun. But it’s also a lot of work. And sometimes I do miss having an entire Sunday of not having to do anything but whatever I want whenever I want to do it.
I guess it makes sense if you’re career is really important to you and you don’t really care about having a family or friends outside of professional relationships. But CEOs, high powered lawyers, investment bankers and politicians all seem to manage to have families if they want them.
Part of the problem is that what parents enjoy about being parents are different things than what child free people enjoy about being child free. So while a parent might enjoy the work that goes into raising a child, the child free person isn’t necessarily enjoying the…work that goes into Not raising a child.
Each side is always going to feel validated with their choices because they don’t value what the other group really desires.
I think it depends on what you want. If I had wanted to be Mrs. Important, like say, my mother, then not getting married would have been terribly frustrating, but so would it have been to be married to someone not important enough. If I’d wanted to be a wife and mother, then staying single would have been terribly frustrating - actually, if I had wanted to be a wife and mother, I’m reasonably sure I wouldn’t have stayed single.
But since what I wanted to do was “go to places” (literally, physically) “on my own” (well, coworkers are OK so long as they don’t insist on having dinner together every night), what would have been terribly frustrating is the inability to get a career which, yep, involves not writing a value in my location field because it changes all the time. To me, becoming a wife and mother would have involved sacrificing the thing I wanted most - even if I hadn’t been terrified of being a bad mother for as long as I was, it just wasn’t what I wanted.
I think maybe we childless people might be happier when the kids are still young and the parents aren’t getting any sleep, or maybe when the kids are teenagers. Other than that, it’s all up to the individual. If you are not suffering from depression, I am of the opinion that happiness is a choice - learn to be happy with what you’ve got instead of forever yearning.
I mean, I’m pretty damn happy, with no kids and my SO, but I’m pretty sure I would have managed to be happy with a kid too - that is my personality and I’m glad for it.
But yes, that study is flawed. Compare a man and a woman, with the woman only working part time, and 1 child, compared to a woman alone? Why not a woman and a man, with no children?
I wonder, too, how do you know the woman focused her entire life on her career? Not all of us can find someone willing to marry us, and hell, maybe she was married, right? Divorce is a thing.
But yes, I have never seen anywhere that we are accepting of singles as a society. Maybe if we were more singles would be happy, if they weren’t sold LOVE LOVE LOVE everywhere they looked!
I would hate it if my Wife was always home doing ‘chores’. Even if she still worked 20 hours a week. I need my alone time too. I get about 3 hours a day, and usually at least one day on the weekends.
I’m perfectly happy doing most of the cooking, and more than my share of the cleaning while my wife does her 10 hour 4 day week thing. This is her choice as well. Every other weekend, she has Monday and Friday to herself. Thank God, we are not joined at the hip.
I don’t think we’re being presented with the literal happiest and least happy profiles of their data set, as directly compared. I think they built a model based on the survey responses and then generated the profiles that would reach the maximum and minimum values under that model.
