Contrary to the celebratory pieces on voluntary single motherhood by journalists like Roiphe, we found that married parents generally do experience more happiness and less depression than parents who are unmarried. For instance, among women, 50 percent of married mothers report that they are “very happy” with life, compared to 39 percent of cohabiting mothers and 25 percent of single mothers, even after controlling for differences in education, income, and race/ethnicity. The transition to parenthood is hard, but being married helps soften the blow.
We also found that the impact of parenthood is not negative on outcomes such as marital stability or whether one perceives one’s life to have meaning. In fact, married parents — especially women — are significantly more likely to report that their “life has an important purpose,” compared to their childless peers. For instance, 57 percent of married mothers reported high levels of a sense of purpose, compared to 40 percent of childless wives.
The headline focuses on the negative, but the study itself is very positive and worth reading. http://www.virginia.edu/marriageproject/pdfs/Union_2011.pdf
It’s a good article. The comments below it are also a useful (if depressing) insight into where people are at. An awful lot of people now see children as either negotiable, something to be avoided, or something that should only be taken up if people are confident that they’ll be in that top 1/3 group of parents (which means no children is still the default). Any sense of an intrinsic connection between marriage and children, or sex and children is gone for a lot of people. Children is a lifestyle choice.
“…who nevertheless experience parenting as a burdensome chore and a profound obstacle to a happy marriage. ”
In many ways parenting enhances the marriage. But, I wouldn’t advise any married couples to have children if they happen to stink at working as a team. If yours is more of an individualistic marriage where each partner does his/her own thing and then occasionally meets in the middle for together time, then perhaps parenting is not for you. And, in a parenting marriage, there has to be a pronounced element of putting the kids and their needs first, not yours.
Just $.02, I like to say that the kids are a full-time job, and the house is a full-time job. It stands to reason that the work of 10 kids is going to be more than the work of one kid, but even only children are a lot of work, as they don’t have siblings to interact with and thus can look to their parents to provide way more entertainment than a parent of “multiples” might provide. But thus, a stay-at-home parent, male or female, has the equivalent of two full-time jobs. If both parents work full-time, there are, in reality, 4 full-time jobs being worked in the house. And the stay-at-home parts of the job can be less tangibly rewarding than jobs outside the home–if you succeed, no praise from the boss, no promotion, no “job-well-done”, no salary increases or cash bonuses. So, she/he who deals with that needs to have a pretty strong sense of self so as not to let that bother her/him. And it’s work that’s never done, you can feel like no matter what you do it’s not good enough, and kids are by nature a little narcissistic and self-centered(you have to hope you can teach that out of them so as not to create adult monsters), so they will always be somewhat happy to point out the 8th thing you didn’t get done for them, even if you got the first 7 done. It can be a wild ride–
The parenting tasks start out very “custodial”–yup, none of them can clean or feed themselves but then move to being more challenging emotionally and mentally. I have a young teen, and so far he has a lot of sense, but the stories I hear from my friends with older teens could curl my hair. One prays every day they can be successfully taught and kept safe; that’s a challenge.
What helps a lot is to take the housework off people’s backs, either through hired help if people can afford it or extended family. The article is right in saying that sharing the household foibles can make for more marital harmony. I truly cannot believe some of these dingy men who can be engineers, etc. in their workplace outside the home, but consider wiping counters or doing a load of wash a significant mental/physical challenge. I was blessed to have a very kind dad who was very involved with the family; he worked hard outside the home but would also help with dinner, dishes, homework, the wash, “mr. fix-it”, etc. And then there are the types who will leave their kids sitting in dirty diapers until their wives come home–that’s ridiculous and neglectful and will not make for marital harmony.
My spouse wasn’t the most well-trained “domestic engineer” but he was willing to learn and muck in. He now likes to refer to himself as “full-service”. We don’t have a whole lot of help from extended family, so occasionally we have outside help when we can afford it; that’s a godsend; and the less time you have to spend on things that really need to be done, like dinner and clean clothes on the kids’ backs, the more time can be spent together doing fun things instead. It’s that sort of thing that makes for success in this department–dividing the labor so that one partner is not on “overload”, and quality time is quality time, instead of drudgery time. And when the household is under control, and there is some marital harmony in the picture, “date nights” are possible for willing participants. 🙂