Last Christmas I wrote a tongue-in-cheek paper on the economic research of happiness. Happiness research has become quite a sizeable field of scientific enquiry and there are many things that can be learned from this research that will help you enhance your life. One thing that tends to irk people, however, is that this research is pretty unanimous in its finding that having children does not make you happier. In fact, the evidence points to a clear deterioration of happiness for people who have children vs. people who don’t have children. Thomas Hansen has compiled the evidence and its contradiction to common beliefs in a paper in 2012. The chart below shows the example of British households in the years before and after having their first child (year 0). The steep drop in life satisfaction in the first two years after having their first child is hard to overlook and cannot be explained by other factors. The funny thing is that if you ask people if their children make them happy, they all say yes, but if you actually measure it in real time, you get the miserable outcome shown below. It remains a taboo in all societies to claim that your children make you miserable and that people without children are happier than people with children.
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The J-curve of parenting
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Last Christmas I wrote a tongue-in-cheek paper on the economic research of happiness. Happiness research has become quite a sizeable field of scientific enquiry and there are many things that can be learned from this research that will help you enhance your life. One thing that tends to irk people, however, is that this research is pretty unanimous in its finding that having children does not make you happier. In fact, the evidence points to a clear deterioration of happiness for people who have children vs. people who don’t have children. Thomas Hansen has compiled the evidence and its contradiction to common beliefs in a paper in 2012. The chart below shows the example of British households in the years before and after having their first child (year 0). The steep drop in life satisfaction in the first two years after having their first child is hard to overlook and cannot be explained by other factors. The funny thing is that if you ask people if their children make them happy, they all say yes, but if you actually measure it in real time, you get the miserable outcome shown below. It remains a taboo in all societies to claim that your children make you miserable and that people without children are happier than people with children.