There was a moment a few weeks ago when i found my two and a half year old son sitting on the doorstep of our house, porn video tube - sexfanstube.com - and waiting for me to return home. He spotted me as i was turning the corner and the scene that followed was unspeakably beautiful, straight from the tape, i played it with myself before having a baby, in case he jumped out of his nanny's arms and raced down the porch . Street to greet me. However, that happy moment was about to be cut short, and looking back, it looked more like a serene lull in a slasher movie. When i opened the door to our apartment, i discovered that my son had broken part of the wooden garage that i spent about an hour putting together this morning. This would not have been a problem in and of itself, except for the phenomenon that when i tried to fix it, he lost patience and started throwing many parts of it against the walls, with one plank almost hitting me in the eye. I quoted the rules of the cottage - do not throw, do not hit). He took another large wooden board. I ducked. He reached for a screwdriver. The scene ended with a timeout in such a crib.
As i shuffled back into the living room, i remembered what a friend of mine once said about the manhattan children's museum: "good place." , However, exactly what he really needs is a bar and regretted that when the same could be said about my apartment. Two hundred and forty seconds ago i had the opportunity of couples bliss; now i was guided by my nerves, rummaging through the shelves for alcohol. My emotional life now looks something like this. I suspect that for many parents this is a reality - a high-amplitude and high-frequency sinusoid, along which we are entitled to make hourly surfs. However, this is exactly what most of the guys click on. In fact, most people would say that we would have been miserable without it.
From the point of view of the species, it is not at all a mystery why so many people have children. However, from a trader's point of view, this is a bigger puzzle than you need to think about. Most people claim that having children will make them happier. However, a wide range of academic research shows that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in most circumstances even less. This conclusion is suspiciously consistent, appearing across a range of disciplines. Perhaps the most cited data comes from a 2004 study by nobel laureate in behavioral economics daniel kahneman, who surveyed 909 working texas women and found that babysitting was ranked sixteenth among nineteen hobbies that were pleasurable. (Among the activities they preferred were cooking, watching tv, exercising, talking on the phone, napping, shopping, cottage activities.) This result also "is found regularly in relationship studies: children invariably reduce marital satisfaction. Economist andrew oswald, who compared the many britons who have children to those who don't, is at least inclined to view his findings in a more positive light: in other words, he tells me, if you personally have more than one. “Then the studies show a more negative impact.” More often than not, most studies prove that mothers are less happy than fathers, that single parents are even less happy, what is the hardest thing with babies and toddlers and what is the useful thing, each successive child brings diminishing returns.However, some studies are darker others. Robin simon, a sociologist at wake forest university, would argue that parents are even more likely to be depressed than those without parents, whether they are single, married, or have one of your children. Or four.
The idea that parents are less happy than the ones we each are parents has become so popular in academia that it was big news in 2019 when the journal of happiness studies published a scottish article claiming the opposite is true. "Contrary to more than half the literature," the introduction stated, "our results are consistent with the effect of children on life satisfaction being positive, significant, and increasing with the number of children." Alas, the euphoria was short-lived. A few months later, the poor author discovered a coding error in his information and a typo was found in the publication. “After correcting the problem,” it said, “the main results of the article are never correct.The effect of children on the life satisfaction of married people is small, often negative, and never statistically significant.”
It is, at the very least, easy to see why so many people supported this article. The results of the various rests violate the parent's deepest intuition. Daniel gilbert, a harvard psychologist and host of pbs's this emotional life, wrote less than three pages on compromised parental well-being in stumbling on happiness. But every time he lectures, skeptical questions about the page he's describing come up more often than anything else. "I've never met anyone who doesn't argue with me about this," he says. “Even those who believe in the data are under the impression that they feel sorry for those for whom it is true.”
So what exactly is going on here? Why is this conclusion repeated over and over again, despite the fact that many parents consider it to be incorrect? Which is often for us, however, is not masculine and women precisely. Gilbert, a proud father and grandfather, might have said the same. He made a name for himself by showing that we humans are pretty pathetic predictors of your happiness buying us, and in his opinion, longing for children, clearly the mother of all aspirations for many, was and remains a very good example of this. He suspects that children actually do, but offer moments of superiority rather than general improvement in health.
Maybe. But there are also less fatalistic explanations. And there is a high probability among all that parents do not like being parents at all, since the experience of raising children has changed dramatically.
“I will count a few.”
Tonight is broad daylight and the mama in this video, a fit brunette with hairline organized in a bun and glasses on her head, has already worked a full day and cooked dinner. Now she approaches her acting 8-year-old son, the older of the two, who is sitting at the computer in the office, absorbed in the movie. We are talking about his homework, which he still has not done.
“One. Two…”
This video is drawn from a study by the ucla center for family habitat, which hit the front page of the sunday times in late spring this year and sparked heated discussion among parents. . In this section, the researchers collected 1,540 hours of footage of 32 double-income middle-class families with at least 2 of you, and all of the goods going about their normal business—in their los angeles homes. The mission of this study was not in the least to prove that parents are unhappy. But one of the postdoctoral fellows who deals with it, himself a father of two, nevertheless described the video data to the times as “the purest form of birth control ever devised. Someday.”
“I have to get to that part and then pause it,” the boy says.
“No,”— his mother says. “You do it after you've done your homework.”
Tamar kremer-sadlik, research director for your study, has seen this scene often. The reason she thinks this sort of thing is powerful again is because it predicts how painfully parents feel pressure to get their kids to do schoolwork. They seem to feel this pressure even more than their children themselves.
The boy starts to scream. "It won't take long!"
His mother stops the movie. “I tell the user not available,” she says. "Do not you hear me. I won't let you watch it, now.”
He turns the movie back on.
“No,” she repeats, her voice rising. She puts her hand firmly under her son's arm and starts tugging. “I will not allow this…”
Before urbanization, children were considered an economic asset for fathers and mothers. If you had a farm, they worked at the same time as you to maintain it; even if it was a family business, the children helped look after the store. But all this has changed dramatically with the moral and technological revolution of modern times. As people have prospered, childhood has increasingly been seen as a protected, privileged moment, and as a completed education has become useful for moving forward, children will not only be a big expense, but also objects for sculpture, stimulation, learning, education. (Princeton sociologist viviana zelizer describes this transformation in the value of children in five ruthless words: “economically worthless, but emotionally invaluable.”) In other words, children have gone from our workers to our bosses.
have you seen babies?Asks lois nachami, a permanent couples counselor who has run parenting workshops and addiction groups on the upper west side for decades. It refers to a recent documentary that compares the lives of four newborns - one in japan, one in namibia, one in mongolia, and one in the united states (san francisco). “I don't want to idealize the lives of namibian women,” she says. “But it was hard to miss how calm they were. They embroidered the ankles of their beloved kids and decorated them with sienna, obviously enjoying it because they just sat and played with them, and we on this resource always perceive it as work.
This is especially true . True of middle- and pleasant-income families, who are much more inclined than their working-class counterparts to view beloved heirs as ribbons to be perfected. (Children of women with a bachelor's degree allocate almost five hours a week to "organized activities" in contrast to high school dropouts, who allocate two hours to mindless pastimes.) Raising economically secure children, formulates it as follows: the thought of the child as a special contribution. And it's a very tedious job." But few parents believe they can legally neglect this work, says laro, “so as not to put their natural heirs at risk without leaving them all the benefits.”
But the intensification of family long time does not end only privileged classes. According to the changing rhythms of american family life, a pornographic compilation of time use and family statistics compiled by three sociologists named suzanne m. Bianchi, john p. Robinson, and melissa a. Milkey, all parents spend more than a minute in modern times. With their children than in 1975, including mothers, despite the rapid influx of women into the labor market in america. Modern married mothers also have less free time by 5.4 hours a week less); 71% say they seek more minutes for themselves, as do 57% of married fathers.) However, 85% of all parents are still - yet! — Believe they spend little time with individual children.
These conflicting statistics reminded me of a conversation with a woman who was in one of nahami's parent groups, a professional who had children at a later age . "I have two very wonderful children" - nine and 11 years old and i'm in my heart to do a lot of things with them, "she said to me. “It’s such a hard chore: damn, don’t you have matching pants? There is just like that. A lot of. Cottage activities." This woman, it should be mentioned, is divorced. But even if her duties were shared with a partner, the turmoil in high school, gymnastics, piano playing, sports life and homework would still require an extremely large amount of administrative work. " The craziest thing, the note continues, is that by new york standards, i don’t even plan ahead of time.”
I ask what she does on the weekends when her ex-husband "i'm working," she replies. "And get your nails done."
Generations ago, clients never thought about whether growing up a child would make them happy. , What we've done, and now we're lucky to have a directory here, in gardening, but the plethora of suggestions - whether to have children, when, and how many - can be one of the things that makes parents less happy.
This is, at least in part, the conclusion of psychologists w. Keith campbell. And jean twenge, who in 2003 conducted a meta-analysis of 97 studies on child and marriage satisfaction dating back to the 1970s. Not only did they suddenly realize that couples' overall marital satisfaction goes down if they have children; they noticed that any subsequent generation upset their norms of life more than the previous one, and most of all our present generation. Even more surprisingly, they realized that parental dissatisfaction only grew as more money arose among them, and despite the fact that they had the purchasing power to buy more child care money. "And my hypothesis about that, why it's extreme, is the same in both cases," says twenge. “They will be parents later in life. It is a loss of freedom, a loss of autonomy. It's not all about leaving the parental home and having a baby right away. Now you know what you're giving up." (Or as a fellow psychologist told gilbert, in that case he finally decided to have a baby: “they are a huge source of pleasure, but they turn any other source of joy into crap.”)
does not exist it is too bold a conclusion to say that the longer we put off having children, the higher our expectations.“Now that’s all the building up - after i finish this, i will have a child, all this will be a great reward!” Says ada calhoun, author of instinctive parenting and editor-in-chief of babble, an online resource for parents. "And then you're like, 'wait, is that my reward? This nineteen year old routine?”
When people languish in anticipation to have children: they also bring different feelings to the enterprise. They spent their mature existence as professionals, believing that there is the wrong way to do things; now they are applying the same logic to the family extension business and these girlfriends are surrounded by a market that only confirms and reinforces this idea. “What's embarrassing,” says alex barzvi, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the new york university school, “is that there are many things parents can do to promote social and cognitive development. There are right and wrong ways to discipline a child. But you can't fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others and constantly concluding that you're doing something wrong.”
But that's exactly what dads and moms are doing today. “In the beginning, it was especially bad,” said a young woman who recently attended a parent-teacher group led by barzvi on 92nd street. Napping three,” i thought, “oh shit, i screwed up my sleep training.” Her parents - immigrants from large families - could not clearly understand her plight. “They didn’t have academic reference books on sleep,” she says. (She read three.) "For my parents, that's what it is."
So, how much do they explain your suffering? I ask.
“They just think that americans are too confused about absolutely everything.”
I don’t want to mention scandinavia in stories about raising the younger generation, while it's no coincidence that the only superbly designed study that stated unequivocally that having children makes you happier was conducted with danish subjects. Researcher hans-peter kohler, professor of sociology at the university of pennsylvania, claims that he first studied this issue because he was intrigued by the declining birth rate in european states. In particular, he saw that more children and more happy parents are born in areas with a stronger social security system.
Of course, everything should not be a surprise. When you are no longer worried about everything that you spend not enough time with individual children after they are born (because anyone has a year of paid maternity leave), if you never worry about it, how would you find affordable babysitting child as soon as you apply for a position (for this reason that it is subsidized by the state), if you no longer wonder how to look for and health care for your babies (because the stories are free) - well, it goes without saying that your own mental health will improve. When kahneman and colleagues conducted the next version of their survey of working women, at this point comparing women in columbus, ohio, with women in rennes, france, the french sample enjoyed caring for their offspring far more than its american counterpart. “We put every energy into it to be the perfect parents,” says judith warner, author of total madness: motherhood in an age of anxiety, “instead of political change that would make family life better.”
Moms: have you ever felt lonely in every perception of these roles? I swear i feel like i'm surrounded by females who were once smart and intriguing, but there were zombies who only talked about football and coupons.
This was the first gambit on urbanbaby in april of this year. This could escalate into a heap of holy mothers. It's not like that.
I totally think so.
I f/t wohm-work out of the house mom-have a career and i don't feel smart anymore or interesting! I don't talk about football or coupons, but in general i'm too tired to talk about anything so interesting.
I openly admit that i gained “more than i lost by becoming a parent. , But i still miss certain aspects of my old life.
More generous government policies, a healthier economy, a less pressured culture that values good but not perfect children—it's all would definitely make parents happier. . But even in the most most glorified profitable circumstances, raising children is an extraordinary activity, in both senses of the word extra: beyond the ordinary and especially the ordinary.While children deepen your emotional life, they reduce your outer world to the size of a teacup, at least for a while. (“All joy and no fun,” as an old friend with 2 small children likes to say). She was particularly struck by the girls who made the conscious choice to remain childless. This allowed them to travel or live abroad for activities; take physical risks; so that in the case of the novelist, to dwell in his own fictional characters, without being distracted by the demands of the real. “There was so much richness and texture in that workday of our day to be envied,” she says. (Leibovich has two children.)
Fathers, it turns out, also know that they made serious compromises, although of a different kind. It seems to them that they do not see their offspring enough. “According to our research, men, in general, have more conflicts between work and individual life than women,” says ellen galinsky, president of the family and work institute. "People don't crave to be figures, in the lives of their own descendants."
And couples probably pay the highest price of most. Healthy relationships definitely make people happier. But children are negatively reflected in relationships. As thomas bradbury, father of two and professor of psychology at ucla, likes to say, “a good relationship is a risk factor for becoming a parent.” He directs me to some of the most inspiring research in the field, by psychologists lauren papp and e. Mark cummings. They asked 100 spouses to spend 14 days carefully documenting their disagreements. Nearly 40% of them were about children.
"And the 40% data is just a number that was clearly about children, i'm thinking, right?" This is a former patient of nahami, an entrepreneur and a father of two children. “How many other quarrels did these couples have because everyone was quick-tempered, tired or nervous?” This representative of the stronger sex is very frank about the tension in his marriage that his children put on, especially his firstborn. “I could already feel forgotten,” he says. At least in this mind. And as soon as we had a son or a daughter, this fact became so pronounced; it went from zero to minus 50. And i thought i could deal with zero. And not minus 50.”
This is the harsh reality of children: they are such strong stressors that small breaks in relationships can turn into deep fault lines. “And my wife has become more demanding,” he continues. "Don't do this, don't do that." We had an idea about how it should be: the family should be ellipsis, the man should be ellipsis, the young girl should be dot dot dot.”
This is another cruel truth about children: they reveal a gulf between our fantasies of living together and its more poignant realities. They also mean parting with the old way of life, with the freest rhythms and richer prospects for romance. “Nothing sexual or intimate was invented between us, depending on the old model,” he says. “The new design, something i certainly accepted, is that every energy has shifted towards the children. The simplest one that makes me happy to be with my wife is that i love our family.”
Most studies show that marriages improve when offspring enter a latency period or in the age range from 6 to twelve years. They make another sharp dive in the war zone of adolescence. (As a friend with older children once told me, “teens can be casually violent.”) Today compared to twelve in 1975. Bradbury, who participated in a ucla study of these 32 families, says that husbands and wives spent less than 10 percent of their home alone time together. "And the visitor think, they said: well, and business, dear, you look great." I just wanted to continue the fascinating conversation that was here earlier about the obama administration." He asks. "Nope. They were made exhausted and stared at the tv.”
“I don't watch it,” the boy insists. Now we matched the videotape and that hangout in la. Mother and son are still arguing - tensely, angrily - and she is still pulling his hand. The boy reaches for the keyboard. "I'm pausing!"
"I want you to do your homework," his mother repeats. “You don’t…”
“I know,” whines the son. "I'll put him on pause!"
His mother won't buy him. She sees that its application stops. She pulls him off the chair.
"Absolutely not, not at all," his mother says. "You're still not listening!"
"Yes!"
"No, you're not listening!"
Children able to give unsurpassed moments of joy.But they also provide unsurpassed moments of frustration, boredom, anxiety, grief. This scene, which isn't even that gruesome or unusual, makes it pretty clear why parenting can be seen as less fun than having dinner with friends or baking a cake. Loving your own children and loving parenting are many about the same thing.
Nevertheless, here everything turns out to be more complicated. Obviously, this clip shows how difficult and frustrating parenting can be. What it doesn't specifically show is the love that this mother has for her personal son, which we can bet is unrivaled. This does not mean that this unpleasant task for which it is given has become an element of a larger project that pays off in thinner dividends than entertainment year after year. Kremer-sadlik says that she and her fellow researchers were well aware of these missing elements when they relentlessly met to discuss data accumulation. “All people remember negative things,” she says. “At a time when everything else was between the lines. That this has become our moral dilemma: how can we talk about the good times?” She pauses, and at the end sets the point that for the parent (she herself has two children) is probably the most interesting and in which case were the good moments so elusive?
The answer to this question directly depends on how we define "good". Or, more accurately, "happy." Do you feel happy? Or do you think so?
When kahneman interviewed these texas women, he measured joy from the minute to the moment. It was a feeling, a mood, a state. The technique he first used to measure it, the daily reconstruction method, was designed to make people relive their feelings throughout the day. Oswald, in his study of british households, looked at a condensed version of the general health questionnaire, which could be better described as a basic measure of mood: have you recently felt that you can't get over your problems? Did you feel constant stress? Lost a lot of sleep due to anxiety? (What parent hasn't actually answered these questions, and god yes?) Regarding mood, it doesn't seem surprising that children make anyone's life more stressful.
But when research takes into account how beneficial parenting is, results tend to differ. In the year that ended, matthew p. White and laminat dolan, professors at the university of plymouth and imperial college london, respectively, developed a study that tried to disentangle these two different ideas. They asked the participants to rate their daily activities both in terms of pleasure and in terms of reward, and then plotted the results on a four-quadrant plot. On getting it worked out was a much healthier map of our feelings. In the quadrant of subjects that people also found to be both pleasant and useful, our countrymen preferred volunteering first, prayer the next, and time with the little ones the third (although the evening with the little ones barely moved into the "enjoyable" section). Work was the most pleasant and never very pleasant occupation. Everyone thought the trip to work was thankless and uninteresting. And watching tv was considered one of the ultimatemost famousmost famous pleasurable thankless activities, as was eating, although the least rewarding of the various was plain old "relaxation". (Which probably speaks to the unwavering strength of the protestant work ethic.)
Seven years ago, sociologists kei nomaguchi and melissa a. Milky conducted a study in which they cared for couples from age 5 to 5. Seven years, some had children, you don't. They realized that yes, couples who became parents did more building work, felt less scrutiny, and fought more (and by the way, only women thought they fought more often, but no matter what). On the other hand, married women were less depressed after having children than their childless peers. And perhaps this is because the study sought to read not only the momentary mood of its participants, but also more existential questions, such as how they are connected, how motivated and how desperate they were (differing because of this in how strong stress, where they were): are you reluctant to eat? Do you feel like you can't shake off the blues? Do you feel single? Like you can't go? Parents who lived almost continuously in a noisy, constantly moving car seemed to give different answers than their childless cohorts.
The authors also suddenly found that the most depressed people were single fathers, and milky suggests that perhaps it is because they wanted to participate in the lives of their beloved children, but did not participate.Robin simon finds something similar: the least depressed will be those parents whose underage children are in the home, and the most - those people where they are not.
This conclusion is perceived by a person as touching. Technically, if your upbringing makes you unhappy, you may feel better if you are spared that goal. But if happiness is measured by our own sense of agency and meaning, then non-custodial parents lose out. They are being robbed of their work and rewards.
When i say this to daniel gilbert, he doesn't actually dispute that meaning is important. But he wonders how markedly this should influence people's actions to have children. “When you pause to read what kids mean, they certainly put you in a good mood,” he says. “The problem is how 95% of the time you don't think what people mean to you personally. You assume you have to take them to piano lessons. Therefore, you need to think about what kind of wealth you plan to consume as a rule. Do you want to maximize what you feel most of the time—joy from moment to hour—or what you rarely feel?”
Which is fair enough. However, for a number of us, a mission is such a "pleasure", especially for people who find momentary happiness a bit out of reach from the start. Martin seligman, a positive psychology pioneer who is not known to be a born optimist, has always been of the opinion that well-being is better defined in the ancient greek sense: leading a productive, purposeful life. And such a fact, just as we pass the verdict of our life, finally, depends not on how much bliss we have, but because of what our company has done with it. (Seligman has seven children.)
About fifteen years ago, tom gilovich, a cornell psychologist, made an outstanding contribution to the field of psychology by showing that people are far more likely to regret things. They didn't do what the series can boast of. In one case, he followed the men and women of the terman study, a well-known collection of high-iq students from california who are still selected in 1921 for the great life. No one told him they regretted having kids, but ten told him they regretted not having a family.
"I guess it comes down to a philosophical question, not a psychological one," says gilovich. . “Should you value momentary happiness more than retrospective assessments of your existence?” He says he doesn't have an answer to this question, but the example he has suggests a bias. He recalls being interested in tv with all the guys at four in the morning when the movies were sick. “At the time, i wouldn't say it was too much fun,” he says. “But nowadays i look around in my free time and say: “ah, remember the time when we woke up and watched cartoons?” The very items of clothing that spoil our mood at this time, later become a source of intense satisfaction, nostalgia, delight.
This is a wonderful focus of memory, this gilding of hard times. Perhaps doing so is just the necessary alchemy that we need to keep the species alive. But for mothers and fathers, this dexterity of mind and charm of the heart is the very definition of charm.