Parenting & pain

Fascinating article at http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/67024/ on the joy (or lack thereof) of parenting. Well worth a read.

Some interesting snippets

Before urbanization, children were viewed as economic assets to their parents. If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store. But all of this dramatically changed with the moral and technological revolutions of modernity. As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed.

[...]

Fathers, it turns out, feel like they’ve made some serious compromises too, though of a different sort. They feel like they don’t see their kids enough. “In our studies, it’s the men, by a long shot, who have more work-life conflict than women,” says Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute. “They don’t want to be stick figures in their children’s lives.”

And couples probably pay the dearest price of all. Healthy relationships definitely make people happier. But children adversely affect relationships. As Thomas Bradbury, a father of two and professor of psychology at UCLA, likes to say: “Being in a good relationship is a risk factor for becoming a parent.” He directs me to one of the more inspired studies in the field, by psychologists Lauren Papp and E. Mark Cummings. They asked 100 long-married couples to spend two weeks meticulously documenting their disagreements. Nearly 40 percent of them were about their kids.

The conclusion seems to be that while raising kids takes some of the joy out of your (old) life, it is highly rewarding and gives you a sense of purpose- so much so that if you don't have kids you're more likely to get depressed and ultimately regret it. Common sense, I'd say.