From a macro-economic point of view, every new birth should be flagged – red at the top – because aging is one of the world’s major problems.
But microeconomically, children have turned from a joy to a burden. Although social media is full of photos of proud parents with their radiant kids, new studies show that there is no relationship between children and happiness.
‘Children make happy, but not happier,’ headlined the British newspaper The Times on August 6, above an essay by Emma Duncan who had just dropped off her last child living at home at the airport for a year-long trip around the world and breathed a sigh of relief. “The only symptom of the empty nest feeling is a big smile,” said Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard University.
Strangely enough, childless parents are often seen as pathetic. Not only would they miss the joy of parenthood, but they would also receive less social respect. That is why some people go to great lengths to raise children.
In 2019, the European Research Council examined the relationship between fertility and well-being in 22 countries. The reason for the study was the declining birth rate. The conclusion was that people’s sense of well-being declines once parenthood begins. “This is what might be called the parenting happiness gap,” the study said. One of the reasons is that raising children has become much more time-consuming. In 1965, parents spent an average of half an hour a day caring for and raising children. In 2012, that was five times as much. In 1965, children were allowed to be seen, but not heard. In 2012, they had to speak up and be listened to. At the same time, the number of mothers who went to work has exploded over the same period. “Full working mothers are 40 percent more stressed than women without children,” the study said.
In the distant past, children were inevitable and an economic necessity. They helped in the shop, worked in the fields and went to the factory. Older children took care of the younger children. That has changed in the western welfare society. Children have become more and more expensive. To give them a chance in the labor market, more money needs to be invested in their studies. “Whoever takes children does so as an expression of lifestyle, the idea that with them life is completed or a goal is created”, according to the Israeli economist Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner in 2002. In the American state of Texas he did research into what makes people happy. Caring for children was second to last, before taking care of the household, and well after shopping, cooking or exercising.
Perhaps the best solution to preserving this world is to stop having children. Humanity may die out within a century, but until then everyone lives happily ever after, just like in a fairy tale. And then the evolution can start again and the globe gets a million years of rest.