Married With Children Paves Way to Happiness
Satisfaction with life goes up as family size increases, study finds.
(HealthDay News) — Want to be a happy married couple? Consider having kids.
A new study found that having children boosts happiness. And the more, literally, the merrier.
But unmarried couples shouldn't expect to find greater happiness through child-raising. The study, published in the Oct. 14 online edition of the Journal of Happiness Studies, suggests that having children has little or no effect on boosting happiness among couples who aren't hitched.
The findings contradict previous research that suggested that having more offspring doesn't lead to greater happiness and might even make people less satisfied with their lives. One theory behind the conclusion is that parents don't receive many rewards in return for the hard work of raising children.
The new study, however, notes that parents say children are one of the most important things in their lives, if not the most important.
The study found that life satisfaction for married people—women especially—goes up the more kids they have. Single, separated and co-habiting people, by contrast, report negative experiences.
"One is tempted to advance that children make people better off under the 'right conditions'—a time in life when people feel that they are ready, or at least willing, to enter parenthood," Dr. Luis Angeles, of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, said in a news release from the journal's publisher. "This time can come at very different moments for different individuals, but a likely signal of its approach may well be the act of marriage."
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Every time I see an article basically encouraging humans to be rabbits I am disgusted. The author of this piece should have looked into the expansion of population in the past two centuries and realized that the last thing we need on this earth is 10 kids (even 3+ kids) each.
The only reason people used to have an abundance of children has nothing to do with loving them so much they wanted more, it's because before modern medicine you didn't know if your offspring would last ten years or ten months. We live in a society now where you can pretty much rest assured, aside from freak accidents or genetic defects, that one child will most likely live a full, healthy life and continue the biological imperative to spread its gene pool.
It is only a selfish, uneducated person in an industrialized nation who has more than two kids. Maybe it makes your life a little more enjoyable, but if you cared about future generations of your gene pool, you would know better. The implications of people having more children than what the replacement TFR calls for in their respective region are unimaginable.
Were you aware that the replacement TFR for industrialized nations like the US is 2 children?
Thanks for contributing to global overpopulation. I'm glad you are having a great time with it.
This is queer bull jive. Good talk, easy said. Is science part of the twenty first century? Not from what I have read.
i'm almost some 45 yr old... and lemme tellya... still feels just as precious! lol....
What this article fails to note is that in the original study, parents did in fact say that they were happier with children than when they were child-free...but it also noted that they were lying about their happiness.
This article relies on parents reporting honestly on their own happiness. Few parents are willing to lay the blame for being unhappy on their children. Sometimes this is out of guilt, after all, you don't blame the dog you adopt if it turns out you're not a dog person (You can give a dog back though). Or, parents feel shame, due to their perceived failing to live up to society's expectation that children = fulfillment.
It's interesting to me to read comments on articles like this that read, "I feel like my life has meaning/purpose now that I have children." I think that's really sad, and wonder about the circumstances of a person's life that reproduction is the last resort for fulfillment.
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