Ask most parents and they'll gush about the joy of having kids or that having children is the best thing they've ever done. But if you look deeper, parents with minors who live at home are angrier and more depressed than non-parents ... and the more kids they have, the angrier they get!
So why the disconnect? Are parents simply fooling themselves into thinking that they're happier with kids than if they were childless?
The answer is yes, according to psychologists Richard Eibach and Steven Mock.
The studies tested the hypothesis that “idealizing the emotional rewards of parenting helps parents to rationalize the financial costs of raising children.”
Their hypothesis comes out of cognitive-dissonance theory, which suggests that people are highly motivated to justify, deny or rationalize to reduce the cognitive discomfort of holding conflicting ideas. Cognitive dissonance explains why our feelings can sometimes be paradoxically worse when something good happens or paradoxically better when something bad happens. For example, in one experiment conducted by a team led by psychologist Joel Cooper of Princeton, participants were asked to write heartless essays opposing funding for the disabled. When these participants were later told they were really compassionate — which should have made them feel better — they actually felt even worse because they had written the essays. (More on Time.com: Five Things for the New Mom Who Has Everything)
Here's how cognitive-dissonance theory works when applied to parenting: having kids is an economic and emotional drain. It should make those who have kids feel worse. Instead, parents glorify their lives. They believe that the financial and emotional benefits of having children are significantly higher than they really are.
My two cents: If you don't like the study, refute it by making another study rather than getting into commenting wars, where no one can hear you scream.
But neatorama readers are too cool and smart to get baited into something like that... Right?
So, on any specific day, when a researcher rates your happiness level, it's going to be lower than someone who actually gets to go out in the evening or wear unstained clothing or have sex that involves personal pleasure more than making sure you're being as quiet as humanly possible. And maybe even averaged out, parents aren't as happy. But without those kids, you couldn't ever get that high.
It's kind of like giving birth: the memory of 30 second of birth trumps the 24 hours of labor pain.
I think Splint Chesthair is on to something: the joy of parenthood may just be an evolutionary mechanism. After all, the human race depends on people having children!
And I have struggled with anger and bi-polar problems my entire life that have greatly lessened since having children. Of course, that could possibly be attributed to being on medication since the birth of my son....lol.
Emotionally I'm fine with being a parent, but I'm not stupid. It's a bunch of grueling, hard work. But quantifying the emotional payoff for being a parent sounds more like a job for religion, not science.
I would never, ever advise anyone to be a parent. It's a ridiculous amount of work and heartache and it seem utterly stupid to try to convince other people that there are enjoyable parts of it. People enjoy a lot of ridiculous pursuits, after all, some noble, others self-destructive and greedy, and as it turns out parenting can be either one of both of those. But come on, this is like arguing about the existence of gods and ghosts and that there's a subjectively measurable best piece of music, literature of movie. It's all about the criteria you lay out to pretend that you can quantify and measure those things in life which are basically outside those boundaries.
I'm a hard core skeptic and pretty much a materialist at heart, but arguing you know about this kind of thing is quite silly.
Of course it's a evolutionary thing too - otherwise you'd smother the annoying brats and the species would die out.
And it's a money thing - we just haven't evolved as fast as society has changed. A mere century ago, your children were your retirement fund, your social security, and your nursing home all wrapped into one.
The psychological boost that children give to their parents is by a contingency in the evaluation of their self-worth. Through relationship with the child the parents ego gets boosted, by a crumpled up drawing of mom or dad at the bottom of the kids backpack, or by the kid depending on dad. It is the same reason we keep pets, being dependent on us, and adoring us, we feel good about ourselves, like we fulfill a positive role in reality. We may even elevate ourselves to divine heights and draft ourselves as some kind of unconditional lover, all-the-while, our love is wrapped up in this attachment to a specific child which has specific ego-boosting rewards for the parent.
If someone is willing to drop $200 on a jacket that makes them look good and wears out in a year. Why wouldn't they be willing to frame themselves as a parent, regardless of the costs. It opens the opportunity to dwell in all kinds of self-importance. Because now you actually have something important to do. But on the grande scale, you are still not an unconditional lover, you've just gained a new egotistical attachment, and hence a new bias.
I'm not a parent because I am not personally mature and responsible enough to guard against my own inclination to derive egotistical importance from parenting and thereby risk corrupting a child with my culturally obtained neuroses that I've yet to work out completely.
"A self is a repertoire of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies." -- B. F. Skinner
Realizing this subjectively is rather difficult, but by all means possible with the right guidance. And one will come to find that actually, one's whole concept of reality, self-hood and relationships and any other conceptions which reference them, are probably completely inaccurate. And that is why we find ourselves so confusing. We don't realize our absolute contingency. Rather, we will remain deeply biased in favor of our contingencies, because any threat to our contingencies is a threat to ourselves.
* Hot Dog: I don't know anything about being a father.
* Tyrol: It sucks... except the parts that don't.
The above sentiment is pitch perfect for me. Parenting is hard, but it's not without it's rewards.
Anytime our self-worth is evaluated in terms of a contingency, we will engage in cognitive biases supportive of that contingency. Confirmation bias, self-consistency bias, etc...
This is why "fundies" of religion will never understand evolution. They simply cannot see the value in it as long as it contradicts those which they are currently contingent on.
Likewise, secularists may never see the value of religious teachings and ancient wisdom, as long as they maintain that there is much more value attached to their particular domain within which their self is evaluated.
We see this on every side of an issue; from global warming, to 9/11, to abortion, to homosexuality, to everything. Humans do not have an inherent sense of self-worth, but derive that worth from evaluations within specific domains. When those are threatened, we are plunged into despair and depression, and remain there until we can establish our worth in a new domain or else become spiritually enlightened and realize exactly what is actually going on inside to make us feel that way; namely how we define and evaluate ourselves.
That's why there's the "biological clock" - basically an overwhelming need (mostly in women, though not all women have this) to have a child. It's biologically hardwired.
It is certainly important and we are programmed to do it, but I was remarking more on how we derive our self-worth. If we can imagine ourselves even inhabiting a universe within which procreation was important for the continuation of our species and perhaps existence itself, we'd be able to derive a great sense of self-worth in the act of procreation. Whether or not it was true. If I can imagine myself as a great parent, but neglect my kids, then my perception is without warrant. But perhaps due to the composition of my character my own self-evaluation is more important to me than my children. I may try to boost up my child's self-esteem and boast about how great they are compared to their peers. I may even resort to being devious to make sure my child does outperform. But if my child doesn't, I might scapegoat the child for the damage to my identity. All-the-while, I'm not focusing on what would actually help my child to perform. Parenting I suggest, could allow a person to overcome self-focus, or they could identify with their child and have varying degrees of bias, delusion and pride attached. In other words "how we "whitewash" the pain of raising kids and glorify the joy" and our "selective memory"
"It's kind of like giving birth: the memory of 30 second of birth trumps the 24 hours of labor pain."
Yet, I also believe it is true that it is a great thing, but a delicate thing. One has to be careful about self-evaluation as a parent [or a human]. IMHO
So, why not call your Mom and Dad tonight and thank them for not taking the money.
I must have DNA FAIL then. I have never had ANY desire to procreate. My DNA FAIL is probably helped along by my child obsessed bat-shit crazy mother has no personal identity... all she lives for is people recognizing what an AWESOME MOM she is (which she is not). She is so obsessed with this that 10 years after having her tubes tied, she took herself out of menopause (via drugs) to squeeze out another kid at 51.
She disgusts me.