Ask a parent and they might say...
My relationships with my children are absolutely the most important thing in my
life, even more important than my relationship with my partner.
The joy of being parents, I don't know anyone who says that's easy.
But the reward is amazing.
We have a lot of gratification from just sort of raising these like beautiful boys who are
doing amazing things every day.
But not everyone wants to be a parent.
And research suggests those without kids are actually happier.
Parenthood is like a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs, of highs and lows.
And life without children is simply much more stable.
It has much less variation.
Meet Amy Blackstone, author of "Childfree by Choice." She herself has chosen to be
childfree. She's also been conducting research on the subject for the last 12
years. By my mid-thirties, I had three friends share with me that they were pregnant
themselves. I started to really worry that something was wrong with me.
What I was relieved to discover is that there is no scientific evidence that there's
a thing called a maternal instinct that drives women to become mothers.
There are legitimate reasons why being a parent could make you less happy.
First, there's money.
The average cost of raising a child from birth to 17 in the U.S.
was estimated to be over $233,000 in 2015.
That doesn't include things like a college education.
We have made parenthood so stressful here in the United States.
Meet Jennifer Glass, a demographer and mother of two, studying the relationship between
parenthood and well-being around the world.
Generally having kids does not make you happier.
There's a happiness bump right after a healthy baby is born, and that tends to
dissipate over the course of a year.
And after that time point, what we see is gradually diverging happiness between parents
and non-parents in the United States.
In general, fewer people are choosing to have children.
In 2019, the American birthrate hit a record low.
Today, about 15% of women reach their 40s without ever having had a kid.
For some, the logistical hurdles to becoming parents can be even greater.
Johnny and Seb have been married since 2011 and have two sons by surrogacy.
They faced many challenges bringing their eldest, Vaughn, into the world.
It took us a little over three years actually to successfully get pregnant and have our
first son. First time around, it was estimated that it would cost roughly around
like $90,000.
The final number was probably close to like $180,000.
That was just the cost of surrogacy.
After two surrogates, three egg donors and four attempts, they successfully brought
Vaughn into the world. They welcomed Aston in December 2019.
In the end, it was, of course, not the easiest to kind of handle all of the
emotional issues and the financial issues that cropped up because of it.
By now, we are fairly relaxed because I think we are fortunate enough to have jobs that
allow us to put enough money to the side to allow for exactly those expenses, including a
good education.
Raising children, as we have by now experienced, is connected to a lot of extra
burden and you cannot live your own life anymore.
It's thankless! It's all about the children and you're going to give them the best set of
opportunities. You want to see them happy all the time and it's at the cost of your own
individual life.
I am personally very excited by the notion of raising kids who, whether they be gay,
straight or anything else, I am just so ready to support that and help them along and
not give them kind of the struggles and challenges that I had with my parents.
I know this is very cliche, but you look into their faces and they look at you and smile
back at you. That offsets so much of the maybe personal level of happiness reduction
that it's kind of like, OK.
Donnya and Tam got married in college and very shortly after graduation, unexpectedly
got pregnant.
It's like, I have this body, but
it's no longer mine.
Like I'm pumping and I'm breastfeeding and I have cramps.
It's just the whole ordeal.
And so it was really hard to feel that sense of happiness.
So that's where I had to shift and find out my hobbies, what I like to do and getting in
on self-care and just pursuing different dreams that I had.
It was during this period of self-reflection that Donnya realized her passion for
entrepreneurship and started her own business.
That's when I started to become, like happy, you can say, fulfilled.
Having a family has been always my goal since I was a small kid.
So, you know, having kids, having a wife, that's like fulfillment and having that
fulfillment, you know, that's what gives me happiness.
It does get a lot when it comes to paying for all these things, especially diapers and
wipes and clothes.
Our kids are giants, they grow out of everything.
And so it's just this constant spending.
Being a parent, it's wonderful.
And I've grown a lot, like, you know, small things, like you learn about, you know, be
patient, be loving, be caring.
It's unmatched, like having a child.
Of course, there are those days when things get rough, but I wouldn't trade it for the
world. We love our children.
I would never in a million years say that parents don't adore their children, they
don't want the best for their children, and they don't feel that their children are
incredibly important sources of life satisfaction for them.
But that's not the same thing as happiness and it's not the same thing as financial
well-being or physical, good physical health or good emotional health.
Jennifer attributes the financial difficulty of raising children in the U.S.
to modern social structures.
People generally live in cities.
They have to work away from home for long hours.
They have to find substitute care for their children.
Partnerships are less stable and wages for many, many people have been stagnant or
falling, while the costs of preparing children for the future labor market have
escalated dramatically.
Jennifer says Americans frequently mention this notion that, "If you can't afford kids,
you shouldn't have them."
It ignores the fact that our labor force does not provide jobs that pay enough for people
between the ages of 18 to 40 to have kids.
On top of that, there's the gender wage gap.
Women may lose over $400,000 over a 40-year career compared to their male counterparts.
And minority women stand to lose more than double that.
Parents in the U.S.
are far less happy than parents in European nations that have all kinds of supports for
parents. It really does take a village to raise a child.
And if we care about children and their future and their role in our society, I think
we have to think of the rearing and the caring for children as a collective activity.
And that's what many, frankly, socialist countries do that we fall down on.
We think of parenthood as this very individual thing that parents themselves are
entirely responsible for.
And the research shows that that contributes to a lack of happiness for them.
With the financial and emotional challenges American parents face, it's understandable
why some folks are childfree by choice.
Do I ever feel like I'm missing out by not having kids?
The short answer to that question is no.
But I do recognize that there are some things that I am missing out on.
And the same is true in that I didn't choose a career as an astronaut.
Parenthood is like a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs, of highs and lows, and life
without children is simply much more stable.
It has much less variation.
You know, I got to get up late because I don't have anyone I have to take care of in
the morning and I'm going to eat when I'm hungry as opposed to eating on a schedule
with someone else in my house there, all those little small things that I think
contribute to our daily sense of satisfaction and happiness that make a
difference. Since child-rearing is so pricey in the U.S., you might think that a childfree
couple has heaps of savings.
If you look at how we spend our money, we donate more money to causes that matter to us
than parents do.
So it's not that we're only spending our money on ourselves.
And because we're not spending our money rearing kids, many of us are able to sock
away money for retirement in a way that parents may not be able to do.
I know that's definitely true for me and my husband.
That's a huge priority for us.
My financial well-being would be better off if I had not had children.
And that's true of all childfree people in the United States.
They are financially better off.
The question of happiness and parenthood really comes down to a question about
autonomy and choice. When people are given the autonomy and the choice to make the
choice that's right for them and when they're supported in that choice, that they
are fulfilled and happy.