THAT'S MEN:The pursuit of happiness is not our primary concern as human beings, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN.
A LECTURER at the University of York has a dilemma which he has written about in the latest issue of The Psychologist magazine.
Nattavudh Powdthavee and his girlfriend are planning to get married and are thinking about having children – two children to be precise, a boy and a girl. His problem is that he is very well read on psychological research and knows there’s a ton of evidence to show the arrival of children reduces the happiness of parents.
That this research is heretical in terms of what most of us believe doesn’t really help with an interesting dilemma: if he knows all this, why would he want to have kids?
The evidence that children do nothing for our happiness levels comes from many studies in Europe and the United States. A typical sequence revealed by these studies seems to be that the couple get a boost in happiness from marrying and that this lasts until their first child is born.
Within a year of Junior’s birth they have fallen below their earlier, pre-marriage level of happiness. This goes on for about four years after which they reach a point at which they are about as happy as they were before they ever had kids.
Years ago I read about a South American tribe which engaged in the custom of putting their children out of their home at three years of age and leaving them to fend for themselves.
This seemed very cruel at the time but would make perfect sense if they had been keeping up with the latest research in this area.
What’s going on here? One possibility is that we tend to focus on different aspects of our experience at different times. There are innumerable positive experiences about interactions with children as any first-time parent will tell you until you’re fed up listening to them.
Parents get a great kick out of these experiences, the way their kids walk, the way they talk, the way they smile, all that kind of thing.
But there are also the stressful experiences: getting them to and from school, dealing with sickness and temper tantrums, getting them through their teenage years in one piece and so on. Because we can’t focus on more than one thing at a time, our understandable preoccupation with these stressful experiences drives out our focus on the good things that make us happy. So there are many happy aspects to having kids – we just don’t focus on them.
That’s the theory put forward at any rate by Nattavudh and he may well be right. There again he may just be searching for a reason to feel okay about having kids.
There is another possibility which has nothing to do with whether kids make you happy. This is that the pursuit of happiness is not our primary concern as human beings. There’s a mental experiment which is used to illustrate this point. If you could be happy but at the cost of your family being desperately unhappy, would you want it? Most people asked this question say that they would not want happiness at that price. What that appears to mean is that there are things that matter more to us than the pursuit of happiness.
I suspect that this is what is going on in our attitude to raising children. Because children need looking after for so very long compared with the young of other species, there is bound to be an extra stress on the parents.
Nonetheless, the experience of raising children is one which most parents would not want to be without even though their happiness levels are decreased or stay the same as those of people without children.
No doubt Mother Nature is in also in there throwing dust in our eyes. After all, if we really took on board the idea that having kids makes you unhappy, most of us would not, presumably, have kids and there goes the species. Not what Mother Nature wants at all.
Where does this leave Nattavudh and his dilemma about having kids? I suspect he and his partner are going to go ahead and have kids anyhow – so all I can say is, congratulations dad, he’s the image of you.
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor. His book, That's Men the best of the That's Men column from The Irish Times, is published by Veritas