Flowers Fall: Why Have Kids?

by Bethany Saltman, July 28, 2010

One of Azalea’s best friends told her that Elvis ate too many cookies, then died. Every now and then, in a particularly contemplative moment, Azalea will ask, “Mommy, why did Elvis do that to himself?” It’s a good question. Why do any of us do what we do? Even though there are infinite and unknowable karmic causes to every action, I wish we could at least ask Elvis what he thought he was doing when he excessed himself into oblivion.

Even when people are alive and well, asking “Why?’ doesn’t seem to get very far. What can seem like such an open-ended, heart-in-the-right-place approach, actually, once it hits the air of a real conversation, feels like a dead-end, at best, or accusatory, at worst. Take me asking my mom why she married my dad (He was a good dancer. Say what?). Or why she had kids (Because, honey, I really wanted to be a mom). Actually, take asking anyone why they had kids, especially if they are in the midst of the dealing with said kids in the moment. Usefulness and appropriateness aside, I wonder about it all the time. Obviously there are many good reasons to procreate, not the least of which is the next generation of humans. But...well…it’s complicated, too.

So I was intrigued when New York magazine recently ran a cover story called, “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting.” In the piece, Jennifer Senior, herself a parent, refers to many of the recent and well-publicized studies indicating that parenting is very low on the list of what makes us happy (one particularly stunning study shows that Texas moms rated childrearing number 16 on their list of pleasurable activities. Housework was among the 15 that were more fun). While this data is not new, what was interesting to me was how Senior developed the question: Are people deluded into thinking that parenthood will make them happy, or is there something about parenting itself (expectations, guilt, etc.) that makes it such a significant hurdle to happiness?

One of the most intriguing parts of the discussion came from a conversation Senior had with Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist and author of Stumbling on Happiness. He had this to say:

“‘When you pause to think what children mean to you, of course they make you feel good…The problem is, 95 percent of the time, you’re not thinking about what they mean to you. You’re thinking that you have to take them to piano lessons. So you have to think about which kind of happiness you’ll be consuming most often. Do you want to maximize the one you experience almost all the time’—moment-to-moment happiness—‘or the one you experience rarely?’”

In other words: What is it about parenting (or anything for that matter) do we think we are drawn to? Or repelled by? Is it the idea of parenting that we like, the happiness that we “experience rarely,” or the actual work of raising children that gives us a good feeling? And, I would add, can we just schlep the kid to piano lessons, or do we have to think about that, too? It’s another way of asking: Who am I? Really! Are some parents “hating” it because they don’t like the activity of raising kids or is that they are not, in fact, experiencing it all? Because they are so busy thinking about whether or not it makes them happy?