by Bryan Caplan
In the movie Saved! a pregnant teenager named Mary learns that cancer and pregnancy have common symptoms—and suddenly feels hopeful. “Please be cancer, please be cancer!” she frantically pleads. When happiness researchers talk about kids, they often sound like Mary. In Gross National Happiness, Arthur Brooks, now president of the American Enterprise Institute, jokes, “There are many things in a parent’s life that bring great joy. For example, spending time away from their children.” When you look at the numbers, the picture’s much brighter. If you compare two otherwise identical people, but only one has kids, smart money says that the childless one will be only a tad happier.
MOMENTARY HAPPINESS
Can you trust what people say about their overall happiness? On such an abstract question, answers might depend more on how we’re supposed to feel than how we really feel. To get around this problem, some happiness researchers change gears: Instead of asking subjects how they feel overall, they ask them how they spent their day, and how each of their activities made them feel. How does parenting measure up?
The most famous work along these lines, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and coauthors’ study of working moms, appeared in Science in 2004. According to secondhand reports, Kahneman and company discovered that taking care of kids is virtually the low point of the day. A piece in Time announced that “an act of parenting makes most people about as happy as an act of housework.” The Economist added:When researchers ask parents what they enjoy, it turns out that they prefer almost anything to looking after their children. Eating, shopping, exercising, cooking, praying and watching television were all rated more pleasurable than watching the brats . . .
Popular summaries of the original paper turn out to be awfully misleading. Here is how moms actually rated their enjoyment of their days’ activities on a scale from 0 (“not at all”) to 6 (“very much”).
Activity Average Enjoyment (0–6)
Intimate relations 5.10
Socializing 4.59
Relaxing 4.42
Pray/worship/meditate 4.35
Eating 4.34
Exercising 4.31
Watching TV 4.19
Shopping 3.95
Preparing food 3.93
On the phone 3.92
Napping 3.87
Taking care of my children 3.86
Computer/e-mail/Internet 3.81
Housework 3.73
Working 3.62
Commuting 3.45
As far as happiness researchers go, Arthur Brooks is proparenthood. Yet even he looks at these very numbers and concludes that women “enjoy almost everything more than they enjoy taking care of their kids.” But child care comes in twelfth out of sixteen activities, and easily beats the most time-consuming activity of the day—working. And there is virtually a six-way tie between shopping, preparing food, talking on the phone, napping, taking care of children, and computer use. Last, notice that the top seven activities—from sex (“intimate relations”) to watching TV—are all forms of recreation. As far as worklike activities go, enjoyment of child care is slightly above average.
If the Kahneman study has a big social message, it’s not that kids are a disaster for happiness. It’s that women enjoy taking care of their children more than working outside the home. The only thing women like less than being at their jobs is getting to and from their jobs. Child care isn’t a picnic, but it beats a paying job.
In Stumbling on Happiness, psychologist Daniel Gilbert contrasts our dreams about children with the harsh reality of parenting. Our dreams:When people think about their offspring—either imagining future offspring or thinking about current ones—they tend to conjure up images of cooing babies smiling from their bassinets, adorable toddlers running higgledy-piggledy across the lawn, handsome boys and gorgeous girls playing trumpets and tubas in the school marching band, successful college students going on to have beautiful weddings, satisfying careers, and flawless grandchildren whose affections can be purchased with candy.
The harsh reality:Although parenting has many rewarding moments, the vast majority of its moments involve dull and selfless service to people who will take decades to become even begrudgingly grateful for what we are doing.
After you sift through the evidence, Gilbert’s harsh reality looks more like a recurring nightmare. The not-so-harsh reality is that parents are far better off than nonparents by the standard of customer satisfaction, and only slightly worse off by the standard of personal happiness. Married couples with big families are much happier than childless singles. Child care is a form of work, but it’s nice work if you can get it.
TOIL AND TROUBLE: A WEEK IN THE LIFE OF TODAY’S TYPICAL PARENT
A British nanny must be a gen’ral! / The future empire lies within her hands / And so the person that we need to mold the breed, / Is a nanny who can give commands!
—Mary Poppins
When he was a boy, my dad rode his bike all over downtown Los Angeles. My friends and I had more supervision, but our moms still got us out of their hair by ordering us to play outside until dinner. My mom kindly let me read in my room, but the philosophy was the same: Entertaining myself was my job, not hers. Today, I almost never see kids playing outside without a watchful parent—and several have told me they wouldn’t have it any other way. Parents spend their weekends bringing their children to activities I never heard of when I was a kid: Tae Kwon Do classes, Pokemon tournaments, Mandarin immersion.
These are just anecdotes. But they fit the systematic research on the question “What do people do all day?” Sociologists have measured how Americans spend their minutes for over four decades. Their favorite tool is the time diary. You contact a random sample of Americans and ask them to walk you through their previous day. “When did you wake up?” “What did you do then?” “What happened next?” Questions continue until the respondent tells you when he went to bed. Methodically reliving your day makes it hard to stray far from the truth.
According to time diaries, modern parents spend an incredible amount of time taking care of their kids. As expected, dads do a lot more than they used to. Since 1965, when the average dad did only three hours of child care per week, we’ve more than doubled our efforts. Given how little dads used to do, though, doubling wasn’t hard. What’s amazing is the change in the typical mother’s workload: Today’s mom spends more time taking care of children than she did in the heyday of the stay-at-home mom.
Back in 1965, when the typical mom was a housewife, she spent ten hours a week specifically focusing on her children’s needs. By 2000, this number had risen to thirteen hours a week. This happened despite the fact that today’s moms are much more likely to work outside the home, despite the fact that moms have fewer kids, and despite the fact that dads are a lot more helpful. Everything suggests that modern moms would put in fewer hours than ever—except the facts.
One pattern hasn’t changed: Stay-at-home moms spend more time with their kids than working moms. However, both kinds of moms try harder than they used to. Stay-at-home moms went from about eleven hours per week in 1975 to seventeen hours per week in 2000. Working moms went from six hours per week in 1975 to eleven hours per week in 2000. Modern working moms spend as much time caring for their kids as stay-at-home moms did thirty years ago.
These weekly totals sound low because they define “child care” narrowly. Reading a book on the couch while my sons fight Playmobil wars wouldn’t count—even if I occasionally urged them to play nice. When parents get full credit for multitasking, measured child care shoots up about 50 percent. But however you measure, the main patterns remain. The average dad has roughly doubled his effort. The average mom spends more time taking care of her kids than she did when the average mom was a housewife.
When people learn about these patterns, they’re usually relieved. But why? If the statistics are right, it’s clear why raising kids feels like a chore. By the standards of the Sixties, modern dads do enough child care to pass for moms—and modern moms do enough child c
are to compete for Mother of the Year. Kid time has crowded out couple time: Parents in 2000 spent about 25 percent fewer hours with each other than they did in 1975. To use an expression I often heard during my childhood, parents are working their fingers to the bone. Considering how much time we spend caring for our kids, the real surprise is that parents’ happiness deficit isn’t a lot bigger.
HOW TO BE A HAPPIER PARENT: A PRIMER
It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
—Chinese proverb
If I’m merely cementing your preexisting reservations about children, hold on. Modern parenting has turned kids into a heavy burden. But it’s not kids that changed; it’s us! We frequently meet demands that our elders would have rejected out of hand (“I’m not your chauffeur”). We even invent demands on our children’s behalf (“M-o-m, I don’t want to take karate”). Why can’t parents learn to say no, or at least learn to take no for an answer?
If you want to make parents happier, it’s tempting to simply turn back the clock to the more relaxed standards of the Sixties or Seventies. But the smarter approach is to look at parents’ lives with a modern eye and target the parts that are least useful and least pleasant. Of course, “Stop doing stuff with big costs and small benefits” is good advice whether or not you’re a parent. It’s on par with “Buy low, sell high.” But comparing costs and benefits is especially helpful for parents, because so many avoid it out of the mistaken sense that only bad parents would do it. As a result, there is plenty of low-hanging fruit to pick.
When my twins were infants, our baby monitor was a godsend. If the kids were crying for food or a change, we wanted to know ASAP. Without the monitor, we would have endlessly visited their room to double-check their status. The monitor let us relax, secure in the knowledge that we’d know as soon as our babies needed us.
As our boys got older, the tears tapered off. By the time they were two, my wife and I would tuck them in, then head downstairs to watch TV. The baby monitor was still broadcasting. But instead of cries, we heard laughs. The twins were joking when they were supposed to be sleeping. We’d start 24 and hope for the laughter to die down. Ten minutes later, I’d pause the show, lumber upstairs, and quiet the troublemakers. My first warning rarely took. The aggravating cycle often took an hour.
Then one great night, my wife and I found a way out: We turned off the monitor. Our evenings immediately improved. After tuck-in, we could relax—and the boys still felt fine in the morning. The experience taught us a valuable lesson: We, not our kids, were causing our own aggravation. Our sons never asked us to spy on them. The monitor was a good idea at first; our mistake was to listen long after it stopped making sense.
Turning off the baby monitor did not revolutionize our lives. Yet small changes add up, and they’re not hard to find. Review your most unpleasant chores: How many could you safely scale back? Review your least useful chores: How many could you safely forget? Don’t look for “solutions” for your problems; you’ll rarely find them. Look instead for sensible adjustments to brighten your days. Before you do something for your child, try asking yourself three questions.1. Do I enjoy it?
2. Does my child enjoy it?
3. Are there any long-run benefits?
I don’t pretend to have adjustments that work for everyone. But four great places to start looking are sleep, activities, discipline, and supervision.
SLEEP
Sleep deprivation is new parents’ leading complaint. Part of the problem is unavoidable biology—newborns need small, frequent feedings. But infants’ needs explain only a sliver of what parents endure. Kids often refuse to sleep through the night for years, long enough to turn their parents into zombies.
A sliver of kids stubbornly refuses to sleep. Normally, though, the root cause of sleeplessness is overparenting. What do people do when their child cries instead of sleeping? If their baby isn’t hungry, thirsty, or in need of a fresh diaper, they try attention. The child gets picked up, rocked, and serenaded. He calms down until his parents put him back to bed—then cries louder than ever. What do you expect if he can avoid sleep and get attention merely by carrying on? As Joshua Gans writes in Parentonomics: Sleep is a negotiation. We want sleep, while the baby wants attention. There is an inherent conflict here. The screams of a baby are like an offer: “I’ll stop screaming if you give me some attention.” And it is not a vague offer. Give the baby attention and the crying stops. After only a few goes, a little baby can train its parents nicely.
You could argue that nighttime coddling is bad for kids because they’ll be tired the next day. Perhaps, but they enjoy the appeasement and can catch up on their sleep any time they please. The clear losers are the parents—and who’s to say that the child’s reign of terror won’t go on night after night?
If parents only cared about themselves, the obvious solution to sleeplessness would be to shut the child’s bedroom door and let the troublemaker cry himself out. Sleep researchers call this “systematic ignoring.” It works, but it’s harsh. “Parents count too” doesn’t mean “Kids don’t count at all.” Fortunately, there are intermediate options. The Ferber method—let the child cry for a few minutes, comfort him, repeat—is the most famous, and it works wonders, too. When our twins were about a month old, my wife and I invented our own version. By the time they were three months old, both slept through the night.
I want to believe that our approach was better for us and them, but I’m not convinced. During cry time, the twins were two unhappy campers. Still, we’re raising their baby brother the same way. While a coddling regime might mean an extra daily hour of fun for our son, it also means an extra dozen daily hours of sluggishness for us.
Getting your kids to sleep through the night is crucial for livable parenting. If you want better than livable, you’ll mandate regular naps until your kids are old enough to quietly entertain themselves for an hour. I don’t know how bad it is for toddlers not to nap. Many seem fine either way. What I do know is that if they don’t, it is bad for parents. Nap time gives parents of young children quiet time to catch up on their work, relax, or take a nap of their own.
Granted, mandatory naps can’t go on forever. Parents should be looking for sensible adjustments, not solutions. Still, parents who take their own interests into account will retain a daily nap for a year or two more than their child needs. We kept the twins on a daily napping schedule until they were almost six. By that point, they were mature enough to switch from nap time to quiet time. Instead of a two-hour nap, they have to keep down the noise for the same duration. For the twins, quiet time is a big improvement. For us, it’s a distinction without a difference.
ACTIVITIES
To the naive, activities are a great way for parents to get a break. Why not let their soccer coach mind them for a while? But in reality, kids’ activities are a time pit for parents. Kids usually need a ride, so the parent has to take them where they’re going, wait around, then take them home. If mom didn’t need a break before, she’ll need one by the time the car pulls back into the garage.
Chauffeuring kids to activities has always been a little stressful for parents. For Today’s Typical Parent, it’s more exhausting than ever, because kids have so many structured activities. These excesses would be bad enough if parents’ sacrifices actually made their children happy. But parents often reluctantly admit that their kids don’t even enjoy their activities. This is no surprise. How would you like it if an authority figure enrolled you in a weekly piano lesson?
A crucial step to happier parenting is to abandon “recreation” enjoyed by neither parent nor child. As Lenore Skenazy advises in Free-Range Kids, “Find one thing you’ve pushed your kids to do that they don’t really like and aren’t good at, and let them drop it. Be prepared for cheers.” Step two is to cut more activities, starting with the ones that parents dislike the most and kids like the least. You don’t have to drive your toddler to story time on a rainy day. He can just skip a class.
When parents hear this advice, they soon wonder, “What are my kids supposed to do with all their extra free time?” Notice: Moms and dads don’t ask how they’ll spend their extra free time. On that front, they’re full of ideas. When they imagine their kids with idle hands, however, the devil’s playground swiftly comes to mind.
Kids have plenty of wholesome stay-at-home options. Many simply want more time to play with their toys. Now that my twins are in school, they feel like they’re losing touch with their Playmobiles. “The problem with kindergarten,” they soon announced, “is that it takes away all your time.” Other kids would get some fresh air in the backyard; you don’t need a team to exercise. Still, parents worry that kids will spend most of their newfound free time on television, video games, and other plug-in babysitters.
Their suspicions are almost certainly correct. If you give mature adults extra free time, many relax in front of the TV or computer. It would be amazing if childish children didn’t do the same. But what’s wrong with that? Electronic babysitters are a vital component of cultural literacy. I hope my kids grow up to know both The Simpsons and Shakespeare. In any case, electronic babysitters are undeniably a lot of fun for kids, and—as a cheap, dependable substitute for a human babysitter—a blessing for parents, too. So why the hostility? It’s as if parents think that anything that feels good for every member of the family must be bad.
