Ha!

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Got to disagree with one, but I'm all for the rest :).

I might be an outlier on the first one though.

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If you're going to post Wilkinson's child-free stuff, you really ought to post Bryan Caplan's counter-arguments too.

Personally, I always find "research" which contradicts a broad-based experiential attitude to be highly suspect. Having children certainly results in its moments of frustration, but in the vast majority of cases I've seen, having kids makes people happier. This gets more true the older the kids get, too.

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Personally, I find that a lot of things described as "broad-based experiential attitudes" are in fact no such thing when you can get people to respond anonymously to questions about them. Peer pressure is a powerful force, and the taboo against a parent saying that they have any regrets about having children is one of the strongest in our society.

I have a hypothesis, not strongly tested, to the effect that perhaps my own childfree status encourages people to open up about that taboo topic to me. They know I'm not going to go all "THE HORROR! THE HORROR!" on them if they do.

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You might want to look at some of the stuff in those Caplan links before getting all up in my sh*t because I dared to present an alternative analysis that doesn't mesh with the child-free advocacy agenda. In particular, the "negative" impact on happiness caused by having children shown in the studies is minimal, while the positive impact of marriage, etc. is not. Caplan points out (following from the same studies that are linked here) that you would have to have 19 children to offset the positive happiness outcome of being married, and that simply gets you back to the same baseline happiness level you'd have if you were single. Adult children bring with them large positive happiness outcomes later in life, though since that's a future outcome you could insist on discounting it for present value. It's still not trivial. Wilkinson has chosen to ignore the magnitude issue here.

Maybe people unload on you about their kids because you don't have any and wear that on your sleeve. Complaining about the stupid things kids do can be very cathartic. What they've done, though, is just dumped the negative on you, and gone back to the happier parts of their lives.

(Which, incidentally, is why I don't listen to people when they complain at me about their lives. Not my problem, nor should their angst become a negative externality in my life. You'd be well advised to take any such complaining, regardless of what it's about, with a few buckets of salt.)

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The fabulous thing about having children is that they grow up and leave home.

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I could have told not having kids = happiness! Just ask my uterus!

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By casual observation, I think there's a smallish proportion of parents and kids who are good for each other. They're the ones worth studying.

Edited at 2008-05-07 11:46 am (UTC)

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This explains so much about why I'm so happy all the time. :)

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If that's the case, then why is Dick Cheney always so grumpy?

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It's good to have your life choices validated by SCIENCE. :-P

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It's been done to death, but that has to be one of the better lolcats I've seen.

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...and yet, my telling someone "You really shouldn't have kids. Why don't you go buy a gun?" is taken so negatively!

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We can but try to spread joy; we cannot always succeed.

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