This post is based on assuming the truth of a certain hypothesis concerning the attitudes of parents to their children. If the hypothesis is false, then my argument collapses. You'll have to read on, however, if you want to see what's what. The post is prompted by the following observation from Helen Rumbelow:
OK, now here's my hypothesis: if, late on in their lives, you were to ask the parents of children whether they would prefer not to have had any, most of them would assert a preference for the choice they in fact made by having them. How to square this with the research showing that people become less happy after having children?Although they could not ask directly, the statisticians were left wondering if increasing numbers of people are actively opting out of parenthood.
If so, they would be doing it for profoundly rational reasons. Study after study on happiness levels shows that while marriage is excellent for mental wellbeing, having children is not. Happiness levels dip after the first born, and are not restored until the last child leaves home.
One (reconciling) possibility is that having children only diminishes happiness temporarily, and that over a lifetime the happiness levels of people with children show a net gain from their having had children. This would seem to be a permissible inference from the conclusions of the books referred to here. Or, secondly, if having children diminishes the happiness of parents even when this is assessed over their (the parents') lifespan, and yet my hypothesis about their late-on preference is true, then it may be that these people value something else more highly than happiness. A subsidiary suggestion, in this connection, could be that most people having children may start out, before they have them, by thinking it will make them happier to do so, find that it doesn't, but decide that their children are more important to them than their level of happiness is. Finally, it's hard to measure the counterfactuals. Even if people with children are less happy after having them than they were before, it doesn't follow either that they would have remained as happy without them over the long term as for a while they were, or that they will be as happy as people without any children but who never wanted children in the first place. Not every person without children will be as happy in that state, and on account of being in that state, as everyone else. To put the same thing otherwise, some will be made unhappy by the fact of not having children where others won't. And, irrespective of happiness, some may feel that, through not having had children, they've not lived the kind of life they had hoped to.
If my hypothesis is true, therefore - and I'd be willing to bet on its being true - Rumbelow is wrong to suggest that not having children is rational and, by implication, that having children is not.
I end by saying, though this is merely anecdotal rather than the product of research, that I've come across a lot of people who appear to have been made happy by having children, and that from the word go.
