Happiness and Parenting 2

In an earlier post I came to the conclusion that the findings showing that parents were in some sense less happy than non-parents were worth taking seriously. One question remaining was how to do this. What difference should these findings make to what I think or do?

Should I stop having kids? Hell yeah. Three is enough. But that decision had nothing to do with the recent happiness research. There is just so much energy, patience, time, attention, patience, money, room, and patience that Philosophy Dad and his wife have. Overdetermined, as they say.

Should I regret having had kids? In answering this, it is important to keep in mind what the research is measuring. Typically, it relies on subjective reports about how one feels. So the metric is subjective hedonic well-being. So I ask myself, does the fact that an act would reduce the amount of pleasure I experience imply that I will regret the act? Not necessarily. If the point of the act was to experience pleasure, then sure. But there are all sorts of other reasons for action besides "that it will give me pleasure." For these other acts, the fact that the act will be unpleasant, or will cause an overall reduction in my experienced pleasure, may be beside the point. I've done many unpleasant things I do not regret--for instance, undergoing a prostate exam.

So if the point of having kids was to feel good, then the data under consideration would clearly be important. It would show that in acting reproductively, I've acted counterproductively. That indeed would be regrettable. Further, it would be stupid, and while it is okay to be stupid some of the time, it's not when people's lives are at stake.

Luckily, for me, I didn't have kids to feel good, or at least not solely to feel good. I did expect that I would feel good as a dad. (I sometimes do, and not just when everyone is leaving me alone.) But feeling good was not the point of the project. What was the point?

Sometimes I wonder this myself. A bit of Darwin and Schopenhauer may convince you that there is no point, as in a "justifying reason," for having kids--that it is just a devious natural impulse, like when you scratch an itch. But I did have reasons for wanting kids:
- my wife wanted kids (this verges on circularity, I realize, but as any husband knows, that "wife wants X" is a fairly heavily weighted item in the "pro-X" column on the balance sheet),
- I thought it would be interesting,
- I would come to love them, and loving is good,
- Our dogs could not learn how to talk (we now know this is a virtue, not a deficiency),
- My wife and I are pretty decent people, and it wouldn't hurt to have more people like us around,
- We were curious what it was like to be parents,
- It would be fun.

This list seems kind of thin. Perhaps there was something else on the list at the time--something else besides the above and the biological impulse. I'll think about it some more. In any event, only the last one comes close to "it will cause pleasant feelings." So I don't feel like the pleasure and parenting data undermines my choice to be a parent, such that I should regret it.

This is not to say that pleasant feelings aren't valuable. Some of them are. They gain their value from context. So while the pleasant feelings one gets from floating in a pleasure-generating machine have little value, pleasure in the right context does. Parenting can be such a context. The pleasure we experience during parenting is valuable because parenting is a valuable activity. That needs more of an argument, obviously, but the great thing about this being a blog is that I can say that the post is long enough already and that I am going to end things right here.