Happiness and Parenting

Some research about happiness and parenting has been in the news over the past year or so. See this article in Newsweek, for example, or this post at kottke.org. The central finding is that having children makes people less happy. While people often are told that having children leads to happiness, and even report that their own children make them happy, as Daniel Gilbert writes in Stumbling on Happiness,

“if we measure the actual satisfaction of people who have children, a very different story emerges… Couples generally start out quite happy in their marriages and then become progressively less satisfied over the course of their lives together, getting close to their original levels of satisfaction only when their children leave home.”

Most people when they read about this cannot believe it. Or if they do believe it, they consider themselves exceptions. Of if they don’t consider themselves exceptions, they will argue that the research is based on a mistaken conception of happiness. What makes the conception of happiness mistaken? It focuses on how people feel.

If it sounds strange to you that people would object to a conception of happiness that focuses on how people feel, then you haven’t spent much time hanging out with philosophers. Not many philosophers are on board with Jeremy Bentham, who had a simple hedonistic view that happiness just is pleasure. For Bentham, to ask whether you’re happy is to ask whether you are experiencing pleasant sensations, or the lack of unpleasant ones. Instead, many philosophers, inspired by Aristotle, think of happiness as a concept that refers to “a good life.” And since a life full of pleasure is not necessarily a good life—if it were, then wealthy heroin addicts would have the best life—then it is a mistake to think that happiness is just pleasure.

The thing is, even if pleasure is not the whole of happiness, it is a significant chunk of it, as Aristotle recognized. (A life largely filled with unpleasant experiences would not be a good one.) And since it is a significant chunk of our happiness, insofar as we care about our happiness, we should care about pleasure. And insofar as we care about pleasure, we should care about these findings.

Okay, so the findings are important. What should we think about them? Should learning this information cause us to regret having had children? Or to advise our friends not to have children? Other things equal, the fact that something will be unpleasant is a reason against doing it. So in the choice between having kids or not, what makes it the case that other things are not equal?

I’ll be returning to this question and related ones periodically.