Does having children make you happier? Apparently not, according to a new study published in Evolutionary Psychology which, despite involving more than 5,000 participants in 10 countries, including Britain, could find no strong evidence that parenthood led to a measurable increase in positive emotions. The researchers, led by Menelaos Apostolou of the University of Nicosia, looked at both hedonic wellbeing (day-to-day emotional states such as joy, sadness and loneliness) and eudaimonic wellbeing (a feeling of purpose and meaning). With the exception of mothers in Greece, who felt a greater sense of the latter, there was no statistically significant difference between parents and non-parents, suggesting that becoming a parent leaves your emotional wellbeing largely unchanged.
There’s rather a lot of study of this which suggests that humns have a pre-set happiness level. Not wholly, not exactly, but some folks are happy, some ain’t. And while those levels can change fairly drastically given events – losing a leg say – they do seem to gravitate back to that pre-set level over about 6 months.
Pity a column about all of this didn’t include all of that really, no? Just the usual navel gazing – “but am I happier?” – plus the nod to correctness – but of course people can be happy if they decide not to have children. Sigh.
Most women have an irresistable urge to have children. Some don’t. Move over Albert, 21st century thinking needs the room…
Why would it make her happier when her job description In ‘Whinging columnist at national newspaper’
Ha very good point! just like Garbage some people are- ‘only happy when it rains’.
Looked up the actual Science™ article and the author…. No…Don’t … Save your sanity…
Let’s just say that if you proudly present “UN Goals” towards Gender Equality etc.. on your professional profile , one can safely assume a certain…Niche…
As to the conclusion…. Unsurprising…
Thing is… There’s plenty of actual physical evidence the psychology of parents *changes* by having kids.
Actual physical changes in the brain in chemistry and actual wiring. And different for males and females.
Because otherwise the helpless egoïstic little parasites wouldn’t survive past their first week. It’s Nature’s way to ensure that next generation actually has a chance to survive by literally pre-programming and brainwashing us to care for them.
(all within the usual variance, so you do get everything from outright child-haters to the constantly pet-afflicted.)
The logical error in this Research™ is that they looked at *perceived* happyness/wellbeing. And took it at face value.
The whole *point* of the whole mind-trickery is that we *are not* supposed to notice it.
The new state becomes the new “Normal”, pretty rapidly, with “ups and downs” experienced from that altered state of mind.
So asking Questions the way they did is pointless, and will give that “not significant” answer, because it doesn’t correct for that rather important biological fact: the baselines between the two states are fundamentally different..
Thing is… There’s plenty of actual physical evidence the psychology of parents *changes* by having kids
Anecdotal and all that but I can’t certainly vouch for that change and remember it happening like it was yesterday. Stood outside a shop in Platres, Cyprus, just after we’d brought him home when it hit me like a bolt from the blue that I had some serious responsibility on my hands and had better start taking life seriously.
100%. Best thing I ever did was becoming a dad.
“ psychology of parents *changes* by having kids.”
My psychology certainly changed and so did that of my wife…
The logical error in this Research™ is that they looked at *perceived* happyness/wellbeing. And took it at face value.
Good point, though it’s a conceptual rather a logical error. Also, there’s no attempt to distinguish between the concepts of happiness, well-being, contentment, fulfilment, satisfaction, etc. If you haven’t done your conceptual plumbing and made the relevant definitions, then you’ll end up in a muddle…
Having children didn’t make me happier, obeying God’s standing orders makes me happier. Because I know at least I’m doing something good for a change. That eases the mind.
He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke
The children are my warrant. I shall tell St Peter about them in my defence.
Except Maria, she’s a problem.
“The purpose of life is not to have children. It is to have grandchildren.”
John Maynard Smith.
I’m looking forward to having a purpose in life.
Our purpose is to follow His standing orders. Children and grandchildren are blessings that come from living in faith.
When we were baptised, and then confirmed, that was our names being put down for the lists. We don’t have to enter the tourney, free will and all that. We can slink away to the potter’s field if we wish.
But why would we ever want to run away from a fight? Wha sae base as be a slave, eh?
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires:
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
The purpose of [human] life…is to have grandchildren is the banal reductionism of a Marxist mathematical geneticist who believes that altruism = rb>c. Human lives can have many purposes – eg music, crime, family, exploration, religion, science, poetry, gardening, an occupation/profession… There are more possible purposes than could ever be achieved in a single human life, which is why liberty and pluralism are so important for human thriving.
I have grandchildren: they are a very great joy, and a high priority. While I am pleased to know that my genes will travel on and that I am not an evolutionary dead-end (like the childless), the having of grandchildren was never the purpose of my life.
“and that I am not an evolutionary dead-end (like the childless)”
Ummm…. That’s *your* bit of “Marxist reductionism”….
I may not have children, my brothers, nephews, nieces and cousins *have* them, and they’re within genetic probabilities *nearly* the same.
So there’s no evolutionary “dead end” simply because my particular *teensy* difference in my blueprint set doesn’t get passed on to the next generation.
In fact, with the way male gametogenesis works, the chance of actually passing on the particular combination set that makes me “me” is the next thing to zero.
The way we produce those wrigglers is *designed* that way. In addition to some pretty nifty copying/prep mechanisms during gametogenesis in both males and females that actually further inhibit that possibility.
Actual genetics does, Very Much, not work the way anyone got taught in highschool, and the mechanics involved, and the Math that goes with it to describe the processes involved tend to give the average person headaches and/or nightmares.
A single person not having children does not “end a line”. You’d need to get into genocide territory to even start getting close and make enough of a dent in the genepool to make a noticeable difference.
To Mother Nature™ ( Bitch That She Is..) you’re but a single dice, and she throws buckets at a time..
That’s *your* bit of “Marxist reductionism”….
Eh? Not Marxist or reductionist or Marxist reductionist.
And while parts of your genetic make-up are not limited to your direct offspring, the DNA you share (ie often imperfect copies) with first cousins can be as low as 8% and as low as 17% with nephews/nieces. The unique DNA of the childless dies with them, as do any specific (potentially beneficial) mutations particular to the childless individual.
Ummmm… Nope … Marxist reductionist.
Marxist because the way you think about genetics is about as outdated and wrong as the 19thC “Thoughts” of that worthy and his followers.
Reductionist, because he did, very much, simplify Reality to make his “Theories” sort-of-work.
Which famously didn’t stand the test of time against actual Reality.
Fact of the matter is that humans ( or for that matter any species of Eukaryote ) are between 99.5-99.99% exactly the same.
The lower number for actual DNA sequence, the higher number for the functional result of that sequence, since not every mutation gives rise to a change in physiology or function. In fact, most mutations don’t.
So the numbers you quote for close family are actually impossible… Unless you use the definitions used by the Marxist Reductionists…
Eukaryote DNA transcription and expression is vastly different from the stuff you get taught in highschool, or even advanced courses.
The basics is based on how prokaryotes do it, which *is* to a point the same as us.
It just leaves out the cutting room, the swappy bits, the cuttings that can and do have their own regulatory functions, either in directly related loops, or somewhere else entirely, either as quite biologically active bits of RNA or in conjunction with proteins ( which may not be produced by that particular gene..) , etc….
And there is actually no such thing as “Junk DNA”, that’s just Scientists™ not willing to admit they don’t have a clue what something does. Of which there’s actually a *lot*.
It is, in fact, perfectly possible to have two physiologically “different” humans ( within that bell curve of probability ) with them having *exactly* the same DNA sequences for the relevant bits.
Which *seems* to be the entire point and “advantage” of why Eukaryotes make things so complicated.
More variance and environmental flexibility for the same “library”.
Like Quantum Mechanics, anyone claiming to Grok molecular genetics in its fullness is talking out of hir hairy arse.
And that’s before you even get to the point of actual biological function, which is another and different ballpark, with *at least* as many pitfalls and roundabouts..
“With the exception of mothers in Greece, who felt a greater sense of the latter, there was no statistically significant difference between parents and non-parents, suggesting that becoming a parent leaves your emotional wellbeing largely unchanged.”
This is such a flawed study. You’re comparing parents and non-parents, not people before they are parents, and people after.
Some people don’t want to be parents. Doing work, having fun, travelling makes them happy. And you also have to consider people at different ages. Lots of young people are happy travelling, screwing around for a few years. As they get to around mid-20s, they want children.
“And, crucially, having a support system. I can’t help but feel the study’s results would be very different if the participants were all given back the village that humans are historically supposed to have. Perhaps that is why Greek mothers are happier and feel a greater sense of purpose. Because when the vertigo and the exhaustion hits, there are people there to hold the baby.”
The village was never taken from women. Women chose to abandon it for wanky degrees, bright lights, big city, and meaningless jobs where most of the money is burned on childcare and transport.
But ain’t this a thing? Rhiannon realising that the old neighbourhoods with women at home had some value. It’s not a whole lot of steps from there to a moment of clarity and becoming a trad con wanting to do the church flowers.
If you look at what’s happening across the world, with suicidal fertility rates everywhere except Africa and Muslim countries, the cities are clearly behavioural sinks.
Urbanites have lost the ability to breed and replace themselves. In place of family formation, they have a variety of silly and worthless distractions, from LEZ zones to Free Palestine. The tendency of urban bugpeople to vote psycho Left is not a result of educated preferences, it’s a symptom of social and possibly genetic dysfunction.
My modest proposal: barricade the cities and nuke them. Leave their silent charred ruins as a warning to anyone thinking of voting Liberal Democrat. Heroes are born in the countryside.
I generally hate cities now and most of the reason is that what value they used to provide has been disappearing for 30 years.
Cities used to be the pinnacle of art, culture, commerce, cuisine. To hear great music, to access books, to get fine wine or clothes, for science, to trade. They were elite, and truly aspirational in terms of improving your life. You went to London and you got rich, lived well.
The internet and a few other things have rather fucked with all that. Amazon will deliver you any book under the sun. Turnbull and Asser will get you nice shirts, various people will deliver Barolo to you. You can stream Korean movies. Buy stocks with your phone, do online meetings. Read papers coming out of Oxford University. There’s very good, diverse cuisine 30 minutes from everywhere. You don’t need to be in a big city to do this. You can live in Devizes or Huddersfield with countryside, cheap housing and friendly neighbours.
Cities are now more about tossers showing off that they live there, and pretending it’s good. People from Bristol love to say how it’s “arty”, which really just means a load of Modern Wank at the Arnolfini and Banksy’s stupid graffiti. Why live in North London to crank out this shit, instead of Cirencester, which is lovely and cheaper? Does Rhiannon’s copy go by horse and cart to the Guardian offices? I know a novellist that lives in the cheap bit of Northamptonshire and is currently number 263 in the Kindle chart, about 17000 spots above Rhiannon.
The great modern art is in every town with 50,000 people or more. And it’s showing at Cineworld or Vue. People will be watching Dune or Inception long after Damien Hirst’s spin paintings have been dumped in skips.
You can stream Korean movies.
Apart from Parasite, let me recommend No Other Choice, which I’ve watched twice now on MUBI. Excellent, funny, and not woke.
I meant to see it at the cinema. Park Chan-Wook is one of my favourite directors. Decision to Leave, The Handmaiden, Thirst, Oldboy.
Cos that’s the place to be for that shit, not Cirencester. I don’t know what the Modern Wank scene is like in Cirencester, but I’d guess that if it exists, it is tiny. There are still benefits to living in large cities and one of them is the likelihood of finding decent-sized groups in small niches.
Most people still want to gather in person. The big concert halls etc are still in the big cities. Worldwide, most people are back in the office.
“Cos that’s the place to be for that shit, not Cirencester. I don’t know what the Modern Wank scene is like in Cirencester, but I’d guess that if it exists, it is tiny. There are still benefits to living in large cities and one of them is the likelihood of finding decent-sized groups in small niches.”
Why is it? You can observe life and politics from Cirencester. You can find a group and chat on the phone, meet up now and again. It’s only 90 minutes by train from London. Jilly Cooper wrote her books from Stroud.
And no, there isn’t much Modern Wank around there but it isn’t great art or beauty.
“Most people still want to gather in person. The big concert halls etc are still in the big cities. Worldwide, most people are back in the office.”
How many people care about going to hear an orchestra live now? Tickets for some Vaughn-Williams in Manchester start at £18. That’s about the same price as an IMAX cinema ticket. Because once compact discs arrived, the quality difference between live and recorded classical music narrowed significantly. The value of live fell. Barely worth it. Would I move to London and stick £500K on my mortgage to go to hear classical music rather than £10/month for Spotify?
They’re part of a general thing about cities, that they are full of once-important stuff that is mostly redundant. Either propped up by tourists or taxpayers or showing off.
Ciren has the advantage of being beautiful in parts, and generally unstabby.
What price should people properly put on their kids being able to walk home from school with a reasonable chance that they won’t be accosted by taxi-driving rape gangs, or murdered by some third-worlder for their phone?
Unless you’re appearing in Cats, a Yeoman of the Guard or someone insists on you being at the Hedge Fund every day, why would anyone pick London over Cirencester? Most of London is like the not-so-good parts of Gloucester. Sure, there’s Kew and Chelsea, but then you’re into selling a kidney for the same experience as Cirencester.
At one time, sure. It was sheep farming and making woollen things. Even 40 years ago it was quite yokel. But it’s got ADSL, coffee roasters, a couple of decent wine shops, rare breed farm shops. If you want a night out of fancy dining, Cheltenham is only 30 minutes away . How often do you want Michelin star dining? Weekly or for birthdays?
A friend of mine lived there and used to tell us what was the headline in the newspaper. The biggest crime was about a fight in a pub leading to a broken window. Which the bloke paid for.
ADSL?!! How very…Noughty… of you….
Other cities are available.
Can we agree that by cities, we don’t mean lovely little town-sized places like Bath and Chester, but places at least as big as Reading?
Most of Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol are average. Cheadle Hulme, Edgbaston and Clifton are nice, Wythenshawe, Yardley and Stokes Croft are utter toilets. And there’s really fuck all that’s better about them than a reasonable size town. Bristol likes to talk about how bohemian it is, but all that really means is lots of graffiti in Stokes Croft.
There’s some benefit to agglomeration but it doesn’t really improve much beyond 100K people. You’ll have a good choice of pubs, shops, gyms, supermarkets, and a cinema or two. 200K you’ll get delis, independent cinema, Waitrose, Michelin dining, a wider choice of shops. Beyond that, you just get the problems of large scale like congestion, pollution, more crime.
There’s a fuck-off Waitrose in Crewkerne, pop. 7,333 according to the 2021 census, next to the decent Lidl. Suits me, sir.
Er, there’s also a hilarious mobility scooter shop in the miniature 70’s shopping precinct. And, it appears, absolutely fuck-all to do.
Waitrose is about MILFs. If a town is affluent, so you get lots of MILFs, or if it’s the most MILF town of a number of towns in an area, it gets the Waitrose. So, Marlborough has a Waitrose and lots of MILFs. It’s also serving villages around it.
Marlborough, Cirencester got a Waitrose before Swindon. They’re places people want to live in but cost more. Women who are married to executives live there. High MILF concentration in smaller towns. But when Swindon hit a large enough size, even though the MILF ratio is small, it meant that there were enough MILFs to support it. There are some desirable parts of town, some nice villages around it.
You can get smaller places with a Waitrose but there aren’t many 200K towns without one.
Also, is everyone from Somerset except me and BIS?
A town full of MILFs sounds good to me. Decorative.
I’m not from Somerset, but find I rather like the place.
Also, lots of the girls from Marlborough College are easy on the eye 😉
I only really know Bath, Bruton and Wells in Somerset. A mate of mine lives in Wells.
It’s nice around Marlborough, Avebury, Devizes. I live in South Swindon and pop down there sometimes. Rural but it gets almost no tourists.
IME, a lot of what you’re describing is girl-driven. Like how wine bars and night clubs are designed to bring in women, on the sensible assumption that men will then follow. Thus and therefore: London. The girlies, or many of them, want to be in London. Can hardly stand the place myself and restrict my presence there to the bare minimum. It’s the epicentre of the enshittification of Britain. Not merely the Great Wen of yore but now the engine-room and spawning ground of traitorous swamp-dwellers and pious perverts.
How many times over the decades have I heard from the gentler sex the question, ‘but what would I do in [insert provincial town here]?’ and thought, ‘you’ll do exactly what you’ll do everywhere else. Go to zumba at the gym. Natter with the girls. Browse the shops. Complain that there’s nothing you want to buy, then go home, tsk at the state of the bathroom and then fall asleep. Rinse and repeat.’
London is the All Bar One of places to live.
Right. One of my observations with London people I know is that nearly all of them do Swindon-level stuff. They aren’t going to see La Boheme or a Kurosawa retrospective at the BFI or dining at Murano. They go and watch multiplex films and eat at Pizza Express.
And this whole thing of birds going to London is women who can’t figure out that Sex and the City isn’t real. You’re not going to knock out a column a week and get to live in a huge apartment and buy luxury shoes. If you’re a 6, you’re not going to have your choice of tall bankers with huge cocks. The blokes that asked you out at school are the level you are going to get. So they go to London, waste a lot of years, and ultimately get a 6, just like if they’d stayed in Chippenham.
The biggest success story right now are Deanos. Lots of snobbery about them but they live in cheap places doing useful jobs that earn money. Buy houses, raise families. While the media types are all “why can’t I afford a place doing a useless job and living in Camden”?
Another flaw in such studies is that they don’t consider the stages of parenting: 0-2 involves poo, puke and sleeplessness; 3-4 less poo and puke, and the development of language; then there are the school years…; then puberty and the teens….Satisfaction, happiness and fulfilment vary considerably during those stages. For fathers, having a menopausal wife and a teenage daughter can be grim; but all things pass…
Oh yeah. Taking little girls to the zoo is an absolute pleasure. Dealing with them pushing at boundaries is absolutely not. Then they come out of the other side of it and it’s fun teaching them to drive.
As usual with social “science” studies, the sample size is far too small to draw the conclusions they do.
Maybe the conclusions are true, maybe they’re not. This study doesn’t have the power it needs.
You’ve got 10 countries, so (I assume) 500 per country. Men and women, so it’s down to 250. There’s at least two different questions, so 125.
And it’s likely on a 5 point scale because can you say how happy you are on a 10 point one? Are you at 7 or 8? Shrug, and flip a coin.
[edit]Oh yes, and you’ve got parents and non-parents. So 75 per box. At least hopefully. Given the usual difficulties getting subjects in studies, I suspect the “parents” box is rather smaller. Since many “studies” are actually studies mostly of first-year university students taking a psychology course, and parents are thin on the ground for that population.
This “research” sounds like desperate cope from childless women who have condemned themselves to decades of loneliness.
Gamecock chooses to be happy.
It’s easy if you try.
Been happy. Been miserable. Happy is better.
Could that be rewritten as
“could find no strong evidence that quitting their non-job to start to raise a family led to a measurable increase in negative emotions”?
“No strong evidence means” (apart from *just that*) that no conclusions should be drawn from the data.
Rhiannon, showing typical Grauniad disconcern for reality, immediately draws an unjustified conclusion.
Prefer the term “content(ed)” to “happy”. I’m content.
Cannot abide children, noisy, self-absorbed and selfish creatures that demand far too much of one’s own valuable time. I have three, somewhere.