Why didn't kids ruin my life?
Plenty of parents seem to regret having kids. Why am I not one of them?
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A lot of parents seem to regret having kids.
Or at least, there’s a lot of online content about parental regret. In August, for instance, the Atlantic reported that “a small but significant proportion of mothers and fathers wish they’d never had children.” That article came just days after a piece from BuzzFeed that compiled anecdotal tales of parental regret. On Facebook, there’s a community called “I Regret Having Children” that has more than 44,000 followers. Between the time that I wrote a first draft of this post a few weeks ago and the time I published the final version, the group grew by 3,000 members.
This topic has exploded during the coronavirus pandemic, for example with this recent Slate piece about how taxing it is to have kids under five in the era of COVID-19. But the genre predates the pandemic — here’s a pre-pandemic study showing 8% of US parents feel burned out — and my anecdotal experience supports the idea that a fair number of people feel like parenthood is kind of a bum deal.
Parenthood is definitely hard. But I’ve also noticed that I don’t necessarily share these feelings of regret over the choice to have kids. To better understand why that is, I’ve been reading research on parental burnout. Is there, I wondered, a recipe or playbook for parents to avoid feelings of regret and burnout? Why do kids seem to destroy quality of life for some people, but not others — especially among people with similar lives?
None of this is to say someone shouldn’t feel burned out by parenthood. Quite the contrary: I’m interested in why the experience plays out one way or another, and if there are ways for people — myself or anyone else who cares — to avoid having kids ruin their lives.
Obviously this is not comprehensive and parental burnout is a big topic with a lot of research. What follows are just a few of the things that stood out to me in the research I read, and which I saw as applicable to my own experience.
Having kids when I was older
The research on this point is mixed, but one 2021 study that looked at parents in 42 countries found higher levels of burnout among younger parents.
My experience seems to bear this out.
As I’ve written before, I waited to have kids until I was in my late 30s. That choice led to long-term drawbacks — for example being too old to help raise any future grandkids — but the upside in the short-term is that I don’t feel like I’m missing out at this point by having kids. I had time to build my career, live in different cities, and travel. For instance, my wife and I backpacked through both Brazil and Europe for several months when I was 28. By the time my dad was 28, I was already four years old.
I don’t mention this to imply everyone needs to do what I did. But the age thing did jump out to me while reading that study.
Stable finances
It will surprise no one that the research suggests socio-economic factors contribute to parental burnout. That 42-country study, for example, noted that burnout was higher among parents in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
This very obviously applies to my situation. I have a great job that allows my family and I to live more or less on one income1. We’re very fortunate.
But I would also add that our current degree of financial stability is a relatively recent development, and is largely the result of us leaving Los Angeles and moving to Utah2. We were lucky that we had the option to move and lots of people don’t get to make that choice. But my experience has been that living a cheaper place made a huge difference. My advice, then, is this: If you can move to a place where your money stretches farther, do it.
Personality
A French study from 20183 found that “neuroticism is of primary importance in determining parental burnout,” and that parents’ personalities had a bigger impact on burnout than the personalities of their children. The study also concluded that “the importance of neuroticism is not surprising. Many studies have highlighted the role of this personality trait in the study of emotional states.”
The pandemic seems to have offered a case study in this point, and to this day my social media feeds are filled with parents expressing fear about the dangers posed to them and their kids by COVID-19. This has been a source of perpetual curiosity for me because I… don’t really feel the emotion of fear about the pandemic, including with regard to my kids. And I’ve spent nearly two years now wondering why different people whose actions are basically the same (we wear our masks, got vaccines, etc.) have such wildly different emotional responses.
Someone is probably going to point out that lack of fear is a privilege (my kids are healthy, I have a job, etc.) and there’s definitely something to that. But a lot of the stress I see in my sphere comes from parents who are more or less my same age, in my same socio-economic group, often times from similar ethnic backgrounds, etc. I’m not suggesting one response is better than another — perhaps I should be more risk-adverse? I don’t know — but rather just that the pandemic has produced different amounts of burnout in people who on paper are relatively similar. That’s a strange and fascinating phenomenon to me, and the French study suggests personality may be one of the contributing factors.
Rejecting modernity, embracing tradition
“Reject modernity, embrace tradition” is a meme, but it also might as well be the thesis of this newsletter: The way we treat families right now is a historical aberration and we’d probably benefit from bringing back some of the things that worked for thousands of years in the past.
To that end, what most surprised me about the 42-country study on parental burnout was the finding of a relationship between individualism — which as we think of it today is a relatively modern phenomenon — and burnout:
Analyses of cultural values revealed that individualistic cultures, in particular, displayed a noticeably higher prevalence and mean level of parental burnout. Indeed, individualism plays a larger role in parental burnout than either economic inequalities across countries, or any other individual and family characteristic examined so far, including the number and age of children and the number of hours spent with them. These results suggest that cultural values in Western countries may put parents under heightened levels of stress.
It’s hard to escape the western, individualist mentality when living in western society. But I know my tolerance for the drudgery and challenges of parenting has increased the more I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of this Nuclear Meltdown project and reframed myself not as the protagonist of my story, but as one character in a tale that has had many chapters before me, and will have many more after4.
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Headlines to read this week:
The Bottom-Up Revolution is... Building a Cohousing Community
“Cohousing is a term that really applies to the way most humans live around the world today and throughout history: it’s living with extended family and friends in close proximity, rather than having individuals and single households all occupying private, separate dwelling places. In Lisa’s case, the cohousing community she helped found, Evans Oaks, is made up of several small homes, clustered together, with lots of shared space and a commitment to doing life together. This isn’t some socialist commune, it’s folks who want to live close to their neighbors, share some duties and expenses, and have a support system around them.”
My wife is technically a flight attendant, but has been on (unpaid) maternity leave for most of the last year, and will be on it for another year still. She’s also in a grad program, manages some real estate, and is serving as sort of a de facto general contractor on a project right now. She’s probably the busiest person I know, but she doesn’t have regular salary-based income the way I do. And that means my salary is mostly the way we pay for things like food, shelter, etc etc.
We were getting by in L.A. just fine, but we lived in a tiny house in a sketchy neighborhood. We could have traded that for a long commute, but that didn’t seem much better. Neither option would have made us happy parents.
It’s worth noting that the French study had different results related to parental age and burnout compared to the 42-country study. Like I said, the findings on this point are mixed.
A few final thoughts: Researchers also found that mothers are more likely to experience parental burnout, as are people who don’t work. I can think of plenty of reasons why that would be, but there’s no question that being a dad and having a job is probably what makes me less prone to parental burnout than some of the folks in my immediate sphere.