Asking if kids will make you happy is the wrong question
Happiness is a collateral benefit
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This week, Vox published a new video called “Do I want kids?” The piece explores host Cleo Abram’s struggle to decide if she wants kids, and it hits on a lot of worthwhile issues like the gender pay gap, childcare, economics, etc. It’s a good video.
But the first topic it tackles is happiness and, in Abrams’ words, “that big assumption that kids make you happier.” (The comment comes just after 2 minutes in.)
So, two thoughts on this “big assumption.”
First, the idea that this is a widespread assumption strikes me as a straw man argument. While there are of course many people who individually claim kids make you happier, I question just how widely shared this assumption is among people of childbearing age in the US. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a millennial — who are today’s main cohort of parents — make this claim. Most I know are pretty open about how kids have made their lives quite a bit more harried.
The Vox video itself also shows a series of rapid-fire sitcom clips to demonstrate how people feel pressure to have kids. One of those clips comes from an episode of Seinfeld where a group of women is pressuring Elaine to have a baby. But, significantly, the episode’s thesis isn’t pro-procreation; in fact it’s the opposite, and the scene is meant to mock the banality of Elaine’s mom friends. The dialog is pro baby, but the message is that babies actually suck1.
Much of American pop culture still descends from Seinfeld and similar shows like Friends2. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if we’re using pop media as a metric of what assumptions define American culture, it’s hard to find overwhelming evidence that everyone thinks “kids make you happier.”
Although anecdotal, my experience as an older millennial bears this out. As I’ve written before, I resisted having kids for a long time because (among other reasons) I feared they’d sap all the joy out of my life. I didn’t just randomly come up with that idea. I absorbed it from my environment. Sure, when I went to Thanksgiving dinner grandparents would urge me to have kids. But the culture I existed in day-to-day was closer to Seinfeld’s Elaine than that of Elaine’s mom friends 3.
This matters because a society that goes to war with a kids-equal-unhappiness straw man risks over correcting. In other words, are today’s Elaines (eg people like me up until recently) the underdogs? Or do they represent the dominant view, at least among the urban, educated, middle- and upper-earning people who set the tone for American culture? In my experience, the Elaine perspective is widespread.
My second thought on this “big assumption” is that the debate itself presumes that the point of having kids, or at least part of the point, is to make the parents happier. This is not going to be a popular position, but I think that’s wrong.
Though the “pursuit of happiness” is one of America’s most foundational ideas, it’s worth noting that this was a fairly novel idea until around the time the United States was being founded. For example, historian Stephanie Coontz has written about how this idea rose along with the similarly new concept of marriage for love, and that as it was being “enshrined” in the Declaration of Independence “conservatives warned that ‘the pursuit of happiness’ […] would undermine the social and moral order” 4.
Even into the 1850s, author Nathanial Hawthorne was advising people not to pursue happiness, because it can only be achieved “incidentally” via the pursuit of other things5.
Obviously that doesn’t mean people prior to the 1700s and 1800s didn’t feel happiness. They did. But the idea here is that for most of Western history, happiness wasn’t the primary objective of big life decisions like having kids. If you were a citizen of ancient Rome, for instance, the question of having kids revolved around status, wealth, and influence6. Happiness, it seems, would’ve been a collateral benefit rather than an outright objective to be pursued at the cost of other things.
I find this idea that happiness comes incidentally, rather than through a frontal assault, compelling because I’ve seen it in action. I a long time pursuing things I thought would make me happy, with marginal success. I wasn’t miserable, but I constantly felt like I wasn’t quite getting where I wanted to be.
Then I sort of gave up on finding happiness, and to my surprise discovered I was actually happier. Giving up involved rethinking where I lived, how I viewed my relationship with work, what my expectations were for friend relationships, etc. But a major part of that was saying “oh well, I’m out of time so I guess I’ll have some kids now.”
Of course I still hoped to feel happiness in the future, but I deprioritized it as a factor in major life decisions. So for example, when deciding where to live I didn’t ask myself “will I enjoy this place” or “will it make me happy.” Instead, I asked, “will this be an advantageous place for my kids to live in 30 years.” I know this isn’t revolutionary and lots of other people have come to similar conclusions. But in a world that prioritizes personal fulfillment over almost everything else, it wasn’t initially obvious that this perspective might work.
Maybe this is a mental framework that’ll work for someone else, or maybe not. And I’m not here to tell anyone to have kids. You do you, it has no impact on my life.
But I do think its worth trying to sidestep the debate about whether or not kids will “make you happy”7. It’s the wrong question to ask. As Hawthorne said, we’re unlikely to find happiness when chasing it down.
Finally, I’m reminded here of a passage in Coontz’s book where she discusses marriage in the 1950s, when people were placing greater and greater emphasis on relationships, love, and individuality. At the time people “tried to find fulfillment in the home,” Coontz writes, “but when marriage did not meet their heightened expectations, their discontent grew proportionately”8.
In other words, people actually found less happiness the harder they searched for it.
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Headlines to read this week:
I'm Pro-Natalist But Don't Get the Moral Case for Pro-Natalism
“The simple moral pro-natalist case (as opposed to the economic case) goes like this: human beings are the source of happiness or, if you want to be fancy, utility. Humans create more happiness for other humans, and also experience happiness themselves, so expanding the stock of humans expands the amount of happiness/utility. To put it a little more elegantly, more humans, more human flourishing. It’s a pretty direct and simple stance that I find compelling.”
Births Are Back: Did Government Stimulus Fuel a Baby Boomlet?
“But there’s a plausible theory about why this birth rebound happened so fast. In this theory, the summer of 2020 was also a time when the country began to realize two key facts: first, that the pandemic was probably going to go on for a long time, with many, recurrent waves, and second, that some of the changes the pandemic brought were very helpful to families. Specifically, many people probably noticed that their bank accounts were doing all right, even if laid off, thanks to stimulus checks and generous unemployment benefits. These benefits created a unique opportunity for families to take a pause from working and have a long-delayed baby.
Moreover, as employers switched to remote work, and as remote work continued longer, more workers probably made a bet that remote work would last long enough to have a baby. In essence, in a country where generous maternity leave is rare, pandemic-related benefits and work changes created de facto baby bonuses and paid leave programs for a lot of (former) workers.”
We could get into a debate about whether or not the show itself was undermining that thesis and casting doubt on the characters’ life choices. The show’s finale definitely did make that case, and later shows like Arrested Development were explicitly about how terrible their characters were. But Seinfeld is an earlier evolution of the sitcom, and I don’t think it was going that far in this episode.
I’m thinking of shows like New Girl, Parks and Rec, Girls, The Office,Broad City, You’re the Worst, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Community and many many others. These are all very different shows and they portray families in different ways. But they have in common that they were to varying degrees discourse-defining shows in their day and that they generally didn’t push the idea that the way to happiness is via kids.
My perspective here is certainly colored by who I am. I’m a guy, for example, so I never find myself surrounded by, say, church ladies.
Marriage, a history: How love conquered marriage. Stephanie Coontz. 2006. Page 150
The American Notebooks. Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851.
Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family. Richard Saller. Page 225
Realistically, it’ll probably be a mixed bag in the short-term, though I suspect long-term happiness wins out on net. (The Vox video captures this idea quite nicely, when it concludes with Abrams talking to her mother about their mutually valued relationship.)
Marriage, a history: How love conquered marriage. Stephanie Coontz. 2006. Page 250.
Great article. As far as Mormon culture goes, the concept of eternal families reinforces this idea that children are needed for eternal happiness. But if we look at early sealing practice from the 1840s to 1880s, there were many people sealed to non-biological people. It seemed that the focus was more about building up "kingdom" or order of government in the celestial sphere. Not sure how much the concept of happiness was a factor. After Wilford Woodruff put an end to non-biological sealings, the "eternal family" phrasing became more prevalent and think it became attached to the promises of eternal joy that salvation/exaltation affords. Of course, doctrinally, this is bunk, but nonetheless has reinforced this idea that children are essential to happiness in this life.
I have five kids. As the video you shared said, absolutely they bring a lot of stress, frustration, and financial strain. But as Mormon doctrine also teaches, without opposition in all things, can you really have a focal point of what happiness even is?
So maybe the irony or the paradox is that you need all the strain and frustration of children to know a wider range of happiness in life? Maybe that strain and frustration can be experience in other ways, but there is something unique about children that makes it much more personal and possibly intense.