Parenting and the Case Against Happiness

Tony Woodlief commenting on those surveys that show children don't make people happier:

Any parent will tell you children are difficult, and they wear you out, and they likely will just break your heart in the end. And who knows -- maybe when we believe we are feeling deep joy from parenthood, we are simply sentimentalizing the whole ordeal to keep ourselves from rooting out our unused passports from the sock drawer and dashing off to Europe, never to be heard from again. . . .

And here's where I wonder if we ought to re-examine our commitment to happiness. It seems to me that there's possibly some merit -- if we persevere and have the sense to learn from it -- in the other-orientation that is (good) parenting. It's fine to go through life happy, in other words, but I suspect we also want to go through life without becoming big fat self-absorbed jackasses. Children really help in that regard.

To be sure, there are too many parents who, despite their children, remain narcissistic nimrods. But the nature of parenting is to beat that out of you. There's just no time to spend on ourselves, at least not like we would if we didn't have babies to wash and toys to clean up, usually in the middle of the night, after impaling our feet on them.

People are inherently self-centered, and especially in a peaceful, prosperous society, this easily leads to self-indulgence that in turn can make us weak and ignoble. There's something to be said for ordeals -- like parenting, or marriage, or tending the weak and broken -- which push us into an other-orientation. When we have to care for someone, we get better at, well, caring for people. It actually takes practice, after all. I'm still trying to get it right.

"Happiness" is a slippery term. If it means how you feel in the moment, then surely the stress of dealing with children will probably depress your score. But if it means how you feel about your life as you look back over its course, and how you feel about your eventual death, then having children may move your score in a different direction. You can think of raising children as something like a long Outward Bound adventure, grueling and painful but ultimately deeply satisfying.

I have noticed that in our world the main goal of life is to accumulate experiences -- as in those BMW ads about the ten things you should do before you die, or movies like "Bucket List." It seems to me that people contemplating parenthood should consider it this way: if you have two children three years apart and live to be 80, then you can fit most of the work of parenting into a quarter of your life. Is having a family worth a quarter of your life to you?