Doesn't add up for me. With my daughter, after the first year I was probably as satisfied as I had ever been. With my son, I'd say I'm still pretty damn satisfied and any lack of satisfaction has nothing to do with him or his birth. They never quantify "happiness" in this article or get specific in what they're measuring. This seems pretty half-baked.
The study was done in Germany. Doesn't make it universally appropriate. Something's going on in Europe though. There was a big to-do from a French mother not long ago who wrote a book regretting having children.She regrets having children. And, more so, she has decided that other women ought not to have them, if they know what is good for themselves and for the world. After 13 years of maternal humiliations, she wrote a quick, funny, angry book.
Everywhere you look in France these days, you seem to see its cover: The words NO KID in English, followed by "40 Reasons for Not Having Children" in French. It is a huge best seller. Her 40 reasons are often funny and personal ("Don't become a travelling feeding bottle," "don't adopt the idiot-language of children") sometimes bitter ("you will inevitably be disappointed with your child") and often designed to puncture the idealized notion of motherhood that poisons Western societies.
Most of the studies I've seen indicate that the isolated nuclear family doesn't work and that with the increase of mobility and the fraying of social networks, modern industrial society becomes more and more punitive towards successfully rearing a family. That's generally what all these studies indicate: "If you want future taxpayers, give their parents a break."IMHO, the studies on happiness and the effects of child rearing in industrialized nations really point to the one real problem, which is how the exclusively nuclear family doesn't work out in the end.
Socioeconomically speaking, our primary issues are related to the "village" being banished from modern society. When you've got grandparents and aunts and uncles, it's a lot easier to raise a kid. Elizabeth Warren has a great book she wrote with her daughter about ten years ago.
Based on n of 4 in this thread (including the French mom), maybe it's not location, but lingering higher expectations on mothers. Whoops, I read more carefully, and it looks like they did check on the gender thing -- no difference. 30% of parents did get happier after kids. Which means the rest of us, on average, are even less happy. I'm saying all this with a sort of gallows humor which is probably not reading in the form of 0's and 1's.
Agreed. I am a big believer that it's All Joy and No Fun. Certainly joy has value.