The Joys of Parenthood.pdf

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The joys of parenthood
Father’s day
Having children really does make a man more content with
life
May 19th 2012 | from the print edition
WILL fatherhood make me happy? That
is a question many men have found
themselves asking, and the scientific
evidence is equivocal. A lot of studies
have linked parenthood—particularly
fatherhood—with lower levels of marital
satisfaction and higher rates of
depression than are found among non-
parents.
Biologically speaking, that looks odd.
Natural selection might be expected to
favour the progeny of men who enjoy
bringing them up. On the other hand,
the countervailing pressure to have
other children, by other women, may
leave the man who is already
encumbered by a set of offspring
dissatisfied.
To investigate the matter further Sonja
Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the
University of California, Riverside,
decided both to study the existing
literature, and to conduct some
experiments of her own. The results, just published in Psychological
Science , suggest parenthood in general, and fatherhood in particular,
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really are blessings, even though the parent in question might
sometimes feel they are in disguise.
Dr Lyubomirsky's first port of call was the World Values Survey. This is
a project which gathers huge amounts of data about the lives of people
all around the planet. For the purposes of her research, Dr Lyubomirsky
looked at the answers 6,906 Americans had given, in four different
years, to four particular questions. These were: how many children the
responder had; how satisfied he (or she) was with life; how happy he
was; and how often he thought about the meaning and purpose of life.
She found that, regardless of the year the survey was conducted,
parents had higher happiness, satisfaction and meaning-of-life scores
than non-parents. The differences were not huge, but they were
statistically significant. Moreover, a closer look showed that the
differences in happiness and satisfaction were the result of men's
scores alone going up with parenthood. Those of women did not
change.
Armed with this result, Dr Lyubomirsky conducted her own experiment.
The problem with projects like the World Values Survey is that,
because participants are asked to recall their feelings rather than
stating what they are experiencing in the here and now, this might lead
them into thinking more fondly in hindsight about their parenting
duties than they actually felt at the time. Dr Lyubomirsky therefore
gave pagers to 329 North American volunteers aged between 18 and
94, having first recorded, among other things, their sex, age, ethnicity,
socioeconomic status, marital status and number of children. She told
them they would be paged at random, five times a day. When they
were so paged, they were asked to complete a brief response sheet
about how they felt, then and there. She did not, however, tell them
why she was asking these questions.
The upshot was the same as her findings from the World Values
Survey. Parents claimed more positive emotions and more meaning in
their lives than non-parents, and a closer look revealed that it was
fathers who most enjoyed these benefits. Moreover, further analysis
revealed that this enhanced enjoyment came from activities which
involved children rather than those (such as watching television alone,
or cooking) that did not.
It looks, then, as if evolution has bolted into men a psychological
mechanism to keep them in the family. At first sight, it is strange that
women do not share this mechanism, but perhaps they do not need to.
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They know, after all, that the children are theirs, whereas the best a
man can do is hope that is true. That, and a man's potential to father
an indefinite number of offspring if he can find willing volunteers,
might encourage him to stray from the bosom of his family. Enjoying
fatherhood, by contrast, will help keep him in the porch.
from the print edition | Science and technology
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