Does having kids make 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 befell the Sloans—the egging of their house one Halloween; the landslide 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 adults 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 superclean 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 (whisper) 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 content 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 ascertains 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, a sociology professor who’s conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. “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 a counterintuitive 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 (“Obviously Professor Simon hates her kids,” read one), 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 lament their lack of sleep, hectic schedules and difficulty in dealing with their surly teens, 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 making you happy, it’s basically blasphemy,” says Jen Singer, a stay-at-home mother of two from New Jersey who runs the popular parenting blog MommaSaid.net. “From baby-lotion 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 blissful 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 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 deteriorating 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 nonparents 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 sexes 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 (“I got a raise!”) or a carefree social life (“God, this is a great martini!”). Shuttling cranky kids to school or dashing to work with spit-up on your favorite sweater doesn’t skew as romantic.

For the childless, all this research must certainly feel redeeming. 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.

From Newsweek, June 28 2008 – Article Link

The Way to Happiness – Proven tips to help you feel content with yourself and your life

In a taxicab on a rainy day in New York City, Gretchen Rubin, 41, suddenly asked herself what she wanted most in life. “I realized I wanted to be happy,” she recalls. “It was a lightning-bolt moment because I’d never even thought about it before.”

A couple of years ago, this wife, mother and former lawyer for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor launched a full-time happiness project to test-drive traditional and newly minted approaches toward her life goal. She kept a daily gratitude journal, read a poem every day and had regular date nights with her husband, among other strategies. Now she swears she’s cheerier.

Everyone seems to be jumping on the get-happier bandwagon. Happiness is making headlines, selling books, inspiring scientific studies and spawning laughter clubs and joyology workshops. The reason? As the burgeoning field of positive psychology has shown, happy people thrive. They’re more creative and productive, earn more money, attract more friends, enjoy better marriages, stay healthier and even outlive their grumpier peers.

“Imagine a drug that causes you to live eight or nine years longer, make $15,000 more a year, be less likely to get divorced,” says Martin Seligman, PhD, who started the positive psychology movement almost a decade ago. “Happiness seems to be that drug.”

But others wonder, Is this just one more thing we feel pressured to achieve in our overscheduled, overmeasured lives? How could there be one path to happiness for all people? And if we aren’t feeling blissful, are we failures at happiness? Some skeptics dismiss “happichondria” as the latest feel-good fad. “The notion that behavior modification can bring about true happiness is as bogus as can be,” says psychiatrist Charles Goodstein, MD, of New York University.

But happiness researchers, backed by thousands of studies, say happiness is measurable and buildable. If you’re willing to take a chance on the upside of life and shoot for your bliss, in spite of the naysayers, here’s help laying the groundwork.

Genetics, as research on 4,000 sets of twins has demonstrated, accounts for about 50 percent of your happiness quotient. But even if you inherited the family frown instead of joy genes, you’re not fated to a life of gloom. Just don’t pin your hopes on advantages like health, wealth, education and good looks — those bring only somewhat greater happiness than what those who are less blessed feel. Unless you’re extremely poor or gravely ill, life circumstances account for only about 10 percent of happiness. The other 40 percent depends on what you do to make yourself happy.

That’s the tricky part. Most of us assume that external things — a bigger house, a better job, a winning lottery ticket — will brighten our lives. While they do bring temporary delight, the thrill invariably fades. “After 18 years of studying happiness, I fell into the same trap as everyone else,” says psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD, author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. “I was so excited to get a new car, a hybrid I’d wanted for a long time, but within two months, driving it became routine. Happiness is like weight loss. We all know how to take off a few pounds; the trick is maintaining it.”

In their research, Lyubomirsky and her colleagues found that the key to enduring joy is to look beyond fleeting pleasures, to the other pillars of what Seligman calls authentic happiness: engagement with family, work or a passionate pursuit, and finding meaning from some higher purpose. “Different methods are a better fit for different people,” Lyubomirsky explains. “Keeping a daily gratitude journal seems hokey to some people, but writing a letter of gratitude may be very meaningful.” Timing and “doses” also matter. Performing five acts of kindness on one day, she found, yielded a significant increase in well-being, while acts of kindness on different days didn’t. “To sustain happiness,” she emphasizes, “you have to make the effort and commitment every day for the rest of your life.

The long run generally brings greater contentment, according to studies that chart the trajectory of happiness over a life span. After even the most joyous childhood, happiness typically declines in the teens through the early 20s, but, believe it or not, increases as we age. “Young people tend to pay more attention to the bad,” explains neuropsychologist Stacey Wood, PhD, of Scripps College. “As we get older, we learn to regulate and overcome this reaction.”

In fact, some experts say, happiness seems to rise even into old age. “Older adults don’t react as intensely to life events, and they report fewer negative emotions and more positive ones,” says Wood.

Not everyone agrees. Nora Ephron, author of I Feel Bad
About My Neck, says that, yes, after a certain age you tend to factor the realization that life is short into your decisions. “And you try to eliminate people and things (like bad meals) that don’t make you happy,” she says. “But of course, all this is overlaid by a certain sadness because this is the time when people start to get sick, and that absolutely cuts into the happiness quotient.”

Dare to Laugh Out Loud

Regardless of your age or temperament, you can feel happier right this minute, claims psychologist Will Fleeson, PhD, of Wake Forest University, who says he has found a surefire strategy to boost the spirit: Do something, however small, that is energetic, adventurous, assertive or bold. When volunteers recorded their feelings throughout the day, all felt happier when active and engaged, regardless of whether they were naturally introverted or extroverted.

“The biggest surprise in this research was that you can change your behavior and make yourself feel happier readily and easily,” says Fleeson, who found that almost any active behavior — even singing or dancing to the radio — has a positive effect on mood. “Laughing out loud is exactly the kind of adventurous, bold action that makes you feel happier.”

Simply putting on a happy face, as the classic song lyric advises, can make a difference. In experiments at Clark University, psychologist James Laird, PhD, hooked volunteers up to sham electrodes and instructed them to contract and relax specific facial muscles, so they were, in effect, smiling for no reason at all. With the corners of their mouths pulled up, most of the volunteers rated cartoons funnier than did those instructed to pull their eyebrows together as if frowning.

In other studies, smiling individuals recalled happier memories than those with furled brows or neutral expressions. Whenever we smile, nerves and muscles may transmit messages that turn on happiness centers in the brain, Laird speculates. “The bottom line is that a smile doesn’t cost anything and may do you good.” So why not grin?

Still, not everyone is sold on the power of positive thinking. According to Bowdoin College psychologist Barbara Held, PhD, for those with a glass-half-empty view of the world, all this happy talk can be downright depressing. In her book Stop Smiling, Start Kvetching, Held wages war against the “tyranny of the positive attitude,” the put-on-a-happy-face mind-set, which she believes holds too much sway in American culture. Not everyone can strike a pose of sunny optimism in the face of life’s mishaps, Held says, and not everyone should. “If you try to force people to cope in ways that don’t fit their nature, it can do harm.”

So if you’re going through a rough patch, don’t feel bad about feeling bad. “When someone’s in pain over the loss of a job, the end of a relationship or the death of a loved one, telling them to be more optimistic and look on the bright side just adds insult to injury,” Held says. The person now feels bad for not coping more effectively, on top of everything else. Instead, having the freedom to complain to a friend, what Held calls creative kvetching, can be cathartic. Her message: The path to contentment depends on finding the coping strategy that suits you best, even if that means expressing anger or sadness along the way.

Smile Power
Whatever their disposition, Americans have plenty of reasons to smile, says Will Wilkinson, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, who recently reviewed social, economic and political perspectives on our national happiness. “We have more wealth, health and comforts than 99.9 percent of the people who have ever lived on the planet, and we feel as good as anyone ever has,” he says.

Gretchen Rubin says her personal quest for happiness has infused her life with meaning: “I realized that by working hard to keep a lighter tone, by taking time to be silly, to laugh more, to sing every morning, I managed to bring about deeper changes in myself — more loving and considerate feelings and actions. That’s why it’s a duty to be happy. When I put in the effort to take the steps that will make me happier, I’m far better able to make other people happier too.”

10 Ways to Turn That Frown Upside Down

1. Be less virtual, more 3-D. “If there’s one thing that separates happy people from ridiculously happy people, it’s the quality of their social relationships,” says psychologist Todd Kashdan of George Mason University. If you sit at a computer all day, get up and indulge in some human contact instead. Even time with strangers ramps up your sense of well-being, says Kashdan. “You laugh much harder when you’re with other people in a theater than when you watch a movie at home.”

2. 4, 6, 8 … who do we appreciate? Making a list of things you’re grateful for may seem silly, but it’s been proven to work. In fact, counting your blessings may be the single most helpful thing you can do for your happiness quotient, say experts.

3. Rack ‘em up. Think of every positive experience during the day as a bead on a string, and see how they add up. This simple exercise makes you focus on even the smallest positive moments, like a fellow driver waving you to go first at a four-way stop, or an e-mail from a friend in a spam-filled inbox.

4. Think memorable, not material. If you have to choose between, say, a new car and a family vacation, pack your bags. Even the sexiest sports car becomes routine over time. But the memory of a good time with friends and loved ones will last forever.

5. Go to the funny side. “Humor is like salt on meat,” observes psychologist Martin Seligman, PhD. “It amplifies everything.” Watch reruns of classic shows that never fail to make you laugh. Try to smile at the absurdities of life. And when you read the jokes in this issue, laugh out loud.

6. Escape to your stress-free zone. Think of a place where you always feel calm and happy. Then, when you’re tense and miserable, call it up mentally, with as much detail as possible. Smell the suntan lotion. Feel the sun. Hear the sea. Play this video in your mind when your spirits slump.

7. See the glass as half full. Whenever possible, try to look at the bright side. You might be feeling like your life right now is one giant downhill slope. But if you stop and assess it honestly, you’ll see you actually have it pretty good. And if things truly are against you, see No. 8.

8. Find your inner artist. Think back to when you had time for creative expression. Were you in a rock band? Did you write poetry? Did you love tinkering with cars? Remember feeling so engaged that you lost track of time? Why not pick up that Fender (or fender) again? Joyful expression can bring happiness.

9. Do good. Acts of kindness, however small, deliver as much pleasure to the giver as to the getter. For example, a real paper-and-pen letter, telling someone who’s helped you how much it meant to you, is a surefire cheer-upper. So is giving time, money or both to a good cause.

10. Seize the moment. Rather than waiting to celebrate a big event, why not do it today? Bake a cake just because. Take someone out to lunch. Buy pink nail polish.Have sex in the afternoon. Raise a toast to a good day. Go ahead, be happier.

From Reader’s Digest, February 2008 – Article Link

Why We’re Happy

You want to be happy. I’m going to make this assumption, and I think I’m in pretty smart company to do so. Socrates once asked his students, “Do not all men desire happiness?” A student answered him, “There is no one who does not.”

If Socrates was right, isn’t it reasonable to assume that a decent nation will, at minimum, create the conditions in which its citizens can best pursue happiness? In the Declaration of Independence, the Founders didn’t treat happiness as some fuzzy concept; they believed that people wanted happiness and had the right to pursue it. Along with life and liberty, happiness was the connection between the Creator and our nation’s destiny, and the ability of its citizens to pursue and achieve happiness was a measure of the effectiveness and morality of the state.
But today’s leaders and policymakers seem to have forgotten this. To hear politicians talk about gross domestic product, health-care reform, and Social Security, you’d think that this nation’s Founding Fathers held as self-evident that we are endowed by our Creator with the ability to purchase new, high-quality consumer durables each and every year, or to enjoy healthy economic growth with low inflation and full employment. The Founders didn’t talk about these matters, not because they’re unimportant, but because they believed happiness went deeper.

As a professor of business and government policy, I’ve long been interested in the pursuit of happiness as a national concept. According to hundreds of reliable surveys of thousands of people across the land, happy people increase our prosperity and strengthen our communities. They make better citizens — and better citizens are vital to making our nation healthy and strong. Happiness, in other words, is important for America. So when I chanced upon data a couple of years ago saying that certain Americans were living in a manner that facilitated happiness — while others were not — I jumped on it.

I wanted to be able to articulate which personal lifestyles and public policies would make us the happiest nation possible. I also wanted to know which of my own values, learned during my childhood in Seattle and practiced during my career as a university professor, were the most conducive to happiness. I had always thought that marching to the beat of my own drummer and making up my own values as I went along were the right things to do, and that traditional values, to put it bluntly, were for suckers.

Turns out that I was in for some surprises.

First, just what is happiness? Most researchers agree that it involves an assessment of the good and bad in our lives. It’s the emotional balance sheet we keep that allows us to say honestly whether we’re living a happy life, in spite of bad things now and then.

You might suspect that Americans are getting happier all the time. After all, many (though clearly not all) are getting richer, and this should make them better able and equipped to follow their dreams. On the other hand, there’s a lot of talk about the good old days, when kids could play outside without any worry about being kidnapped. And there’s a great deal of stress in this country right now, due to financial concerns, negative workplace environments, and chronic health problems, among other pressing issues.

But average happiness levels in America have stayed largely constant for many years. In 1972, 30 percent of the population said they were very happy with their lives, according to the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey. In 1982, 31 percent said so, and in 2006, 31 percent said so as well. The percentage saying they were not too happy was similarly constant, generally hovering around 13 percent.

The factors that add up to a happy life for most people are not what we typically hear about. Things like winning the lottery, getting liposuction, and earning a master’s degree don’t make people happy over the long haul. Rather, the key to happiness, and the difference between happy and unhappy Americans, is a life that reflects values and practices like faith, hard work, marriage, charity, and freedom.

Happiness Predictor 1: Faith

Roughly 85 percent of Americans identify with a religion, and about a third of Americans attend a house of worship every week or more. These statistics have changed relatively little over the decades. By international standards, America’s level of religious practice is exceptionally high. In Holland, for example, just 9 percent of the population attends church on a regular basis; in France, it’s 7 percent; in Latvia, 3 percent.

In general, religious Americans (those who attend a place of worship almost every week or more) are happier than those who rarely or never attend. In 2004 the General Social Survey found that 43 percent of religious folks said they were very happy with their lives, compared with 23 percent of secularists. Religious people were a third more likely than secularists to say they’re optimistic about the future. And secularists were nearly twice as likely as religious people to say “I’m inclined to feel I’m a failure.”

The connection between faith and happiness holds regardless of one’s religion. All nonpartisan surveys on the subject have found that Christians (Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and others) and Jews, as well as members of many other religious traditions, are far more likely than secularists to say they’re happy. It also doesn’t matter if we measure religious practice in ways other than attendance at worship services. In 2004, 36 percent of people who prayed every day said they were very happy, versus 21 percent of people who never prayed.

Of course, not every religious person is happy; neither is every secularist unhappy. Nonetheless, it’s clear that faith is a common value among happy Americans.

Happiness Predictor 2: Work

If you hit the lottery today, would you quit your job? If you’re like most Americans, you probably wouldn’t. When more than 1,000 people across the country were asked in 2002, “If you were to get enough money to live comfortably for the rest of your life, would you stop working?” fewer than a third of the respondents answered yes.

Contrary to widely held opinion, most Americans like or even love their work. In 2002 an amazing 89 percent of workers said they were very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their jobs. This isn’t true just for those with high-paying, highly skilled jobs but for all workers across the board. And the percentage is almost exactly the same among those with and without college degrees and among those working for private companies, nonprofit organizations, and the government.

For most Americans, job satisfaction is nearly equivalent to life satisfaction. Among those people who say they are very happy in their lives, 95 percent are also satisfied with their jobs. Furthermore, job satisfaction would seem to be causing overall happiness, not the other way around.

The bottom line here: If we want to be happy, we need to work. And that’s advice worth sharing with our kids as well.

Happiness Predictor 3: Marriage & Family

Matrimony has taken a lot of hits since the 1960s. It’s been said to hold many people, especially women, back from their full potential to be happy. Don’t believe it.

In 2004, 42 percent of married Americans said they were very happy. Just 23 percent of never-married people said this. The happiness numbers were even lower for other groups: Only 20 percent of those who were widowed, 17 percent of those who were divorced, and 11 percent of those who were separated but not divorced said they were happy. Overall, married people were six times more likely to say that they were very happy than to report that they were not too happy. And generally speaking, married women say they’re happy more often than married men.

Marriage isn’t just associated with happiness — it brings happiness, at least for a lot of us. One 2003 study that followed 24,000 people for more than a decade documented a significant increase in happiness after people married. For some, the happiness increase wore off in a few years, and they ended up back at their premarriage happiness levels. But for others, it lasted as long as a lifetime.

What about having kids? While children, on their own, don’t appear to raise the happiness level (they actually tend to slightly lower the happiness of a marriage), studies suggest that children are almost always part of an overall lifestyle of happiness, which is likely to include such things as marriage and religion. Consider this: While 50 percent of married people of faith who have children consider themselves to be very happy, only 17 percent of nonreligious, unmarried people without kids feel the same way.

We’ve all heard that money doesn’t buy happiness, and that’s certainly true. But there is one way to get it: Give money away.

The evidence is clear that gifts to charitable organizations and other worthy causes bring substantial life satisfaction to the givers. If you want $50 in authentic happiness today, just donate it to a favorite charity.

People who give money to charity are 43 percent more likely than nongivers to say they’re very happy. Volunteers are 42 percent more likely to be very happy than nonvolunteers. It doesn’t matter whether the gifts of money go to churches or symphony orchestras; religious giving and secular giving leave people equally happy, and far happier than people who don’t give. Even donating blood, an especially personal kind of giving, improves our attitude.

In essence, the more people give, the happier they get.

Happiness Predictor 5: Freedom

The Founders listed liberty right up there with the pursuit of happiness as an objective that merited a struggle for our national independence. In fact, freedom and happiness are intimately related: People who consider themselves free are a lot happier than those who don’t. In 2000 the General Social Survey revealed that people who personally feel “completely free” or “very free” were twice as likely as those who don’t to say they’re very happy about their lives.

Not all types of freedom are the same in terms of happiness, however. Researchers have shown that economic freedom brings happiness, as does political and religious freedom. On the other hand, moral freedom — a lack of constraints on behavior — does not. People who feel they have unlimited moral choices in their lives when it comes to matters of sex or drugs, for example, tend to be unhappier than those who do not feel they have so many choices in life.

Americans appear to understand this quite well. When pollsters asked voters in the 2004 Presidential election what the most important issue facing America was, the issue voters chose above all others was “moral values.” This beat out the economy, terrorism, the Iraq war, education, and health care as people’s primary concern. Pundits and politicians would certainly like us to think otherwise, and critics scoffed at the conclusion, interpreting it as evidence that ordinary Americans were out of touch. But moral values are critical to Americans. This suggests that, as a people, we do best by protecting our political and economic freedoms and guarding against a culture that sanctions licentiousness.

Lessons for America

The data tell us that what matters most for happiness is not having a lot of things but having healthy values. Without these values, our jobs and our economy will bring us soulless toil and joyless riches. Our education will teach us nothing. There will be no reason to fight — or to make peace, for that matter — to protect our way of life. Our health-care system will keep us healthier, but what’s the point of good health without a happy life to enjoy?

The facts can help remind us of what we should be paying attention to, as individuals and as families, if we want to be happy. There’s also an important message here for public policy and politics. We must hold our leaders accountable for the facts on happiness and refuse to take it lightly when politicians abridge the values of faith, work, family, charity, and freedom.

Candidates running for office should be grilled about happiness in debates and by the press, and their answers should determine our votes.

Our happiness is simply too important to us — and to America — to do anything less.

The American Way

Independence is happiness.
Susan B. Anthony

All you need for happiness is a good gun, a good horse, and a good wife.
Daniel Boone

That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.
Willa Cather

There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.
Henry Ford

Being passionate about something is the key to success. But using that passion to help others is the key to happiness.
Arnold Schwarzenegger

Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness you are able to give.
Eleanor Roosevelt

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.
George Washington

Happiness is a by-product of a well-lived life, and it is achieved through the pursuit of endeavors that are meaningful and sometimes painful. Mark O’Connell in “The Marriage Benefit”

From Reader’s Digest, July 2008 – Article Link