Having a kid hurts your happiness more than divorce or unemployment.
Research shows (over and over again) that having children reduces happiness, even though parents think it will make them happier.
You've heard all the clichés: Parenthood is a gift, it'll go by in an instant, it'll give you a sense of purpose in life. But cold hard science paints a different picture.
A new study found that parents, as a whole, are pretty miserable.
Researchers at the University of Western Ontario wanted to figure out why some families decide to stop at having only one child. So they analyzed data from a German survey that covered more than 20,000 people across the country, and tracked their reported well-being from three years before having kids to at least two years after their first child was born.
And they found that people are usually pretty happy before having kids.
That happiness goes up when anticipating the birth of their first child, and stays high during the year their first child is born. After that, everything goes downhill.
According to the Washington Post, 30% of parents stayed at the same level of happiness. But on a 1 to 10 scale, 37% of parents had a one-unit drop in "happiness units," while 19% had a two-unit drop and 17% had a three-unit drop.
To compare that to actual sad life events: Unemployment and the death of a partner usually lead to a one-unit drop in happiness, and divorce only causes a 0.6-unit drop.
On average, parenthood leads to a whopping 1.4-unit fall in happiness.
Why the long faces? The study, published in the journal Demography, found that unhappiness stemmed from three main causes: health issues before and after birth, complications during the birth, and the generally exhausting and physically taxing task of raising a child.
The researchers also found that parents' experiences and emotional states when they have their first child strongly impact whether or not they'll go on to have more kids.
If you stay happy more than a year after your first child is born, you're more likely to have baby #2.
Why keep doing something that makes you unhappy?) Older parents, and those with higher levels of education, were more likely to stop at one child if they had a bad experience.
So if countries want to boost the falling birth rate, there's an easy solution: Make things easier on parents. They're suffering enough as it is.
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