Kids: Bringers Or Destroyers Of Marital Happiness?

So, does a child bring greater love, happiness, and intimacy to his or her parents, or is having children instead a marital challenge only the strongest can endure? According to several new studies (discussed in a recent New York Times health column) marital happiness declines when children are born, and stays low until they grow up and leave the house. Empty nesters, whom popular media and self-help books would teach us to pity, turn out to be among the happiest of all married people!

As with so many “groundbreaking” new research results, this one leaves me surprised anyone is surprised. Of course having children is backbreaking, infuriating, heartbreaking and absolutely incompatible with so many of the things that make life truly fun (spontaneous travel, sex and drinking, for instance!). On the other hand, surviving the early years of parenthood and reaching a state of satisfaction with one’s adult children and spouse would seem like a slam dunk in the happiness department. The studies cited in the Times article dealt mostly with women’s happiness, which they described as peaking when women hit their 60s and presumably had launched their children into the world (although with many of us now having kids into our early 40s, some of us will still be scouting colleges and paying tuition deep into our mid-sixties). Less studied was the effect of having children on men’s happiness, but one study seemed to address the gender inequality so common in family life:

The arrival of children also puts a disproportionate burden of household duties on women, a common source of marital conflict. After children, housework increases three times as much for women as for men, according to studies from the Center on Population, Gender and Social Equality at the University of Maryland.

Didn’t Ann Landers famously ask people to write in and say whether or not they were glad they had had kids, and wasn’t the nation shocked when a full 70% of her respondents (10,000 people!) said that if they had it to do over, they would not have had kids? Having children is hard work, folks, and while it’s no surprise they put enormous pressure on our marriages while they’re young, it’s really kind of heartening to hear that maybe, when all these grueling years are past us, we can enjoy true marital bliss in our empty nests (if our superannuation funds rebound enough by then for us to afford them!).