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Comment by mordrax | Hacker News Reader

> Having children, for example, is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study.

I have to either strongly disagree with the outcome of this research or disagree with the definition of happiness used here. If you were to ask parents (myself included), if having children makes you happier in life, I think you would get a resounding yes it does! Having kids is stressful at times, and you can be constantly tired and stretched to your limits but the heights of joy one experiences as a parent has no bounds. I'd hate to think that the majority of parents think of child rearing as some sort of meaningful suffering...

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I have no children, but those studies always seem to focus on parents who are, at that moment, raising small children. They are asked at the most stressful point in the process if they are happy, of course they'll say no. These studies need to amortize happiness levels over a number of points in the childs life: birth, a few intervals likke 2/5/10/15, and once the child has moved on and left their house.

Did you stop reading there? I have to ask because IMO this is such a wonderful article, and that particular statement (counterintuitive and questionable as it may be) is really a rather minor point to the larger thesis.

Though I can understand your point of view, I'm not a parent myself, but when I read that bit, I immediately had to think "whether this is actually true or not, most parents are probably going to disagree vehemently".

But on the whole, IMO it's a rather minor point. I'm not sure if it's true either (but if it was I can easily imagine most parents to have a bias that still makes them disagree), and because of that it distracts.

Yes. The way I've seen it explained is people (particularly younger people) confuse euphoria with happiness in the same way people tend to confuse infatuation with love.

Yup. Parenting, like jobs, can involve significant ups and downs, and I fear studies like this are confusing an point-in-time assessment with a global assessment. If you asked me last week "does having your son make you happy", I'd probably have said "no" preceded by a couple of expletives. That doesn't mean that over the course of having him he hasn't increased the happiness of my life.

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