My boyfriend and I have been together for 25 years, which is an unconscionable amount of time for people our age, gay or not. Through the entirety of that time, I have worked with young kids: as a pre-school teacher, the director of an early-childhood center, an educational evaluator, author of a parenting book, a parenting columnist, and proud uncle to eight biological nieces and nephews (and countless fake ones). Yet, when people ask us the secret of our relationship’s longevity, we always tell them, “We never had kids.” We don’t even have a plant, let alone a pet. We’ve kept our encumbrances to a minimum, freeing up more time for travel, dining, drinking, and drinking while traveling and dining.
The study—authored by Rachel Margolis and Mikko Myrskylä of the University of Western Ontario and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, respectively—analyzed declining birth rates in the developed world. Their hypothesis was based on notions of parental happiness: that if parents didn’t feel that their lives were better after having one child, they might not want another.
Using a cohort of more than 2,000 Germans, and following them from childlessness to two or more years after the birth of their first child, the discoveries were starker than expected. The study not only proved a correlation between parents whose happiness declined after the birth of a first child and a decision to forego having more kids. It also demonstrated that the unhappiness associated with having a child is both pervasive and intense.
Using standard surveys to measure individual happiness—rated on a scale from 1 to 10—the study discovered that, in the years immediately following the birth of a child, over two-thirds of respondents, men and women alike, reported a significant decline in their levels of overall well-being. The average decline was 1.4 units on this scale. It was even higher for older parents, and for those who were highly educated.
The 1.4 average does not seem like such a huge number. But, as on the Richter scale, seemingly incremental changes in this metric can signal profound impact. For example, getting divorced causes an average drop of just 0.6 units. Losing a job and the death of a partner each cause a drop of only one unit. So, a 1.4-unit drop is almost as bad as splitting up and being fired in the same day.
The extreme parental unhappiness had—somewhat predictably if you know anything about childbearing and childrearing—varied sources: the emotional and physical stressors associated with getting pregnant; the pain and discomfort (actual, projected, and sympathetic) related to giving birth; and, in the main source category, the social, sleep, employment, psychological, relational, recreational, and amorous deprivation concomitant with the arrival of a bundle of joy.
These findings are, interestingly enough, consistent with other recent meta-analytical studies (like this, this, and this) that show that the day-to-day routines of being a parent can have a profoundly detrimental impact on personal happiness. This is particularly true for parents of younger kids, who deal with a wicked mixture of constant need and a loss of self, that, not to get too literal, transforms (wedding) gold into (baby) shit.
But there’s a bright side to these other studies, in that they generally show that longer-term life satisfaction is higher among people who have children than those who do not. Down the line, once these beleaguered parents emerge from the mire of early childhood, adolescence, boomeranging, and emergent adulthood, they tend to feel like they’ve accomplished something meaningful: they are proud of their offspring and their achievements, they are pleased that they’ve perpetuated the species, and they feel supported in their old age by the close community of relatives they’ve created.
This makes perfect sense. (Mostly. I’m not fully sold on the value of our species.) When my boyfriend’s mother died a few years ago, she was fortunate enough to be home, in her own bed, surrounded by and holding the hands of all three of her children and their partners and kids. Even a coal-hearted automaton like me could ascertain, no less experience, the immense contentment that this gathering provided—a kind of culmination of a life’s work, albeit in death. (Less consoling was having to walk to the crematorium the next day with my brother-in-law, who wanted to be the one to hit the start button on the oven and retrieve my mother-in-law’s titanium shoulder. But that’s another story.)
Immediately following her passing, I called some close friends of ours—a straight couple, parents of two of the objects of our aforementioned “fake” avuncularity. I wanted to tell them of our loss, but also to make a personal request.
“When we die,” I said, “can your kids come and hold our hands and mop our brows?”
Our friends offered condolences, and comfort, but their answer was immediate. “Of course,” they said. “Next time you come over for dinner, we can practice. You guys can lie on the floor and we’ll play Dead Gay Uncle. The kids will love it.”