4 ms·
My wife did research for grad school related to this, so we went in to this eyes open. Her studies showed that people who have a kid 3 or younger were less hap
by citizenkeen 7y ago
My wife did research for grad school related to this, so we went in to this eyes open.
Her studies showed that people who have a kid 3 or younger were less happy than equally situated peers. Their first smile is nice, but it's a lot of poop and your peers are going to Europe.
If your youngest is 4 or older, there's literally no difference in happiness. Europe is nice. Their first play, them as actual human beings - also nice.
When the _parents_ are north of 60, then happiness _and_ health go up if you have kids, by a rapidly increasing margin with time.
So when we decided to have kids, we just knew that for the first few years... Well, that's going to suck. It's made it easier knowing what we signed up for.
- larnmar 7y agoIt’s not that hard to take young kids to Europe.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- soohyung 7y agoIf you have the money, sure. Not everyone is in the silicon valley tech bubble and can afford it.
- citizenkeen 7y agoThis was averages across all America, all income brackets. Privilege does make things easier, yes.
- ant6n 7y agoYoung kids go everywhere you go, so you can still go to Europe. It maybe take a cruise, that cash be pretty family friendly while allowing you to see a different city every day.
- raducu 7y agoKnowing what you're getting into and having the rest of your life in order are golden, I guess. I resent my wife for sort of slowly forcing it on me with promises of "nothing will change, my mother will help", I also resent myself for falling for it, but I wouldn't trade my daughter for anything in the world. I've come to terms with the duality of being a parent, loving your children and raising them sucking at the same time, something I see non-parents completely unable to understand. Great moments of being a parent, like 10% of the time, and sucking for the rest of 90% of the time. Whenever I tell this to non-parents, they take it like "what, then what's the hype of being a parent, you must be broken somehow" or "there, that's another reason for me not to have children" -- both of which are far, far of from any conclusion I would take.
- aniketpanjwani 7y agoYour wife's research is almost surely correlational, not casual - I'm assuming it's some sort of OLS using the NLSY or some similar dataset. The fact that happiness and health goes up dramatically when parents are north of 60 just reflects that in the past - if you didn't have kids - it's because you didn't get married. If you didn't get married, it was far more likely to be because you were somehow unviable as a marriage partner than because you didn't want to get married. So, you're going to get a spurious, strong correlation between happiness/health and the interaction between age > 60 and having kids. If you run the same regression among Americans in 30 or 40 years, that same relationship will not hold, since whether to get married and whether to have kids are to ever-increasing degrees explicit choices.