Having Kids Makes You Happy When I was growing up, our former neighbors, whom we’ll call the Sloans, were the only couple on the block without kids. It wasn’t that they couldn’t have children; according to Mr.Sloan, they just chose not to. All the other parents, including mine, thought it was odd-even tragic. So any bad luck that happened to the Sloans--the egging of their house one Halloween; the landslide(山崩) that sent their pool careering to the street below-was somehow attributed to that fateful decision they’d made so many years before. "Well," the other s would say, "you know they never did have kids." Each time I visited the Sloans, I’d search for signs of insanity, misery or even regret in their super clean home, yet I never seemed to find any. From what I could tell, the Sloans were happy, maybe even happier than my parents, despite the fact that they were childless. My impressions may have been swayed by the fact that their candy dish was always full, but several studies now show that the Sloans could well have been more satisfied than most of the traditional families around them. In Daniel Gilbert’s 2006 book Stumbling on Happiness, the Harvard professor of psychology looks at several studies and concludes that marital satisfaction decreases dramatically after the birth of the first child--and increases only when the last child has left home. He also finds out that parents are happier grocery shopping and even sleeping than spending time with their kids. Other data cited by 2008’s Gross National Happiness author, Arthur C. Brooks, finds that parents are about 7 percentage points less likely to report being happy than the childless. The most recent comprehensive study on the emotional state of those with kids shows us that the term "bundle of joy" may not be the most accurate way to describe our offspring. "Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers," says Florida State University’s Robin Simon. "In fact, no group of parents--married, single, step or even empty-nest-reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such an unexpected finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life,and they’re not." Simon received plenty of hate mail in response to her research, which isn’t surprising. Her findings shake the very foundation of what we’ve been raised to believe is true. In a recent Newsweek Poll, 50 percent of Americans said that adding new children to the family tends to increase happiness levels. Only one in six (16 percent) said that adding new children had a negative effect on the parents’ happiness. But which parent is willing to admit that the greatest gift life has to offer has in fact made his or her life less enjoyable Parents may openly complain their lack of sleep, busy schedules and difficulty in dealing with their bad-tempered s, but rarely will they cop to feeling depressed due to the everyday rigors of child rearing. "’If you admit that kids and parenthood aren’t you happy, it’s basically blasphemy(亵读)," says Jen Singer, a stay-at-home mother of two from New Jersey who runs the popular parenting blog MommaSaid.net. "From baby-cream commercials that make motherhood look happy and well rested, to commercials for Disney World where you’re supposed to feel like a kid because you’re there with your kids, we’ve made parenthood out to be one extremely happy moment after another, and it’s disappointing when you find out it’s not." Is it possible that American parents have always been this disillusioned Anecdotal(轶事的) evidence says no. In pre-industrial America, parents certainly loved their children, but their offspring also served a purpose--to work the farm, contribute to the household. Children were a necessity. Today, we have kids more for emotional reasons, but an increasingly complicated work and social environment has made finding satisfaction far more difficult. A key study by University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Sara McLanahan and Julia Adams, conducted some 20 years ago, found that parenthood was perceived as significantly more stressful in the 1970s than in the 1950s; the researchers attribute part of that change to major shifts in employment patterns. The majority of American parents now work outside the home, have less support from extended family and face a worsening education and health-care system, so raising children has not only become more complicated--it has become more expensive. Today the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that it costs anywhere from $134,370 to $237,520 to raise a child from birth to the age of 17--and that’s not counting school or college tuition. No wonder parents are feeling a little blue. Societal ills aside, perhaps we also expect too much from the promise of parenting. The National Marriage Project’s 2006 "State of Our Unions" report says that parents have significantly lower marital satisfaction than non-parents because they experienced more single and child-free years than previous generations. Twenty-five years ago, women married around the age of 20, and men at 23. Today both es are marrying four to five years later. This means the experience of raising kids is now competing with highs in a parent’s past, like career wins or a earefree social life. Sending bad-tempered kids to school or dashing to work with spit-up on your favorite sweater doesn’t turn out to be romantic. For the childless, all this research must certainly feel redeeming(弥补的). As for those of us with kids, well, the news isn’t all bad. Parents still report feeling a greater sense of purpose and meaning in their lives than those who’ve never had kids. And there are other rewarding aspects of parenting that are impossible to quantify. For example, I never thought it possible to love someone as deeply as I love my son. As for the Sloans, it’s hard to say whether they had a less meaningful existence than my parents, or if my parents were 7 percent less happy than the Sloans. Perhaps it just comes down to how you see the candy dish--half empty or half full. Or at least as a parent, that’s what I’ll keep telling myself.

Having Kids Makes You HappyParenthood became more stressful in the 1970s partly due to______.