joy

At about the same time that our own Rod Dreher was having his reactions to this New York magazine article about the problematic relationship between happiness and parenting, I was having my own reactions — as a (relatively) new father — to the article's assertions. I discovered one thing that neither the article nor Dreher discusses — a facet of happiness that child-rearing, almost by its very nature, excludes.

First off, listen to this presentation by futurist, game designer, and all-around smart person Jane McGonigal. It begins by discussing four areas that positive psychologists have deemed common to happiness.

1. Satisfying work to do

2. The experience of being good at something

3. Time spent with people we like

4. The chance to be part of something bigger

After pointing this out, McGonigal goes on to explain how games are very good at this and everyday life is not, and how making life more like games is an actual, and surprisingly useful, trend, and you should really just stop reading this and go listen to the presentation because it will knock your socks off.

Now, let me draw your attention to item number 2 on that list. When I think about happiness and how it relates to parenting, I can't help but focus on the idea that, as a parent, I never really feel like I'm good at it. There are times when I enjoy it. There are times when it drives me crazy. There are times when it frightens me. But at no point are there times when I say to myself, "Oh, yeah.  I've got this parenting thing down." Not the same way I feel I've got writing, movies, or new media "down." I feel I can say with confidence I am good at those things and, not coincidentally, those things do bring me a certain happiness. I cannot say with confidence that I am "good" at parenting. Competent, perhaps. My child is healthy and appears to be learning. But does that make me a good parent the way I am a good filmmaker? 

That image is from the great photoblog Sh*t My Kids Ruined. Check out this article in New York magazine. Excerpt: 

A few generations ago, people weren’t stopping to contemplate whether having a child would make them happy. Having children was simply what you did. And we are lucky, today, to have choices about these matters. But the abundance of choices -- whether to have kids, when, how many -- may be one of the reasons parents are less happy.

That was at least partly the conclusion of psychologists W. Keith Campbell and Jean Twenge, who, in 2003, did a meta-analysis of 97 children-and-marital-satisfaction studies stretching back to the seventies. Not only did they find that couples’ overall marital satisfaction went down if they had kids; they found that every successive generation was more put out by having them than the last -- our current one most of all. Even more surprisingly, they found that parents’ dissatisfaction only grew the more money they had, even though they had the purchasing power to buy more child care. "And my hypothesis about why this is, in both cases, is the same," says Twenge. "They become parents later in life. There’s a loss of freedom, a loss of autonomy. It’s totally different from going from your parents’ house to immediately having a baby. Now you know what you’re giving up." (Or, as a fellow psychologist told Gilbert when he finally got around to having a child: "They’re a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to sh*t.") 

I get this, and I don't get this. A few weeks before my wife and I had our firstborn, my sister, who started her family before we did, phoned to say that we had no way of knowing how much our lives were about to change. We probably figured that the spontaneity that we'd enjoyed as a childless couple was about to end, but (she said) we're still going to be gobsmacked by how much our freedom will be constricted. Even less, she counseled, can we imagine how much of a different kind of freedom we'll know as parents. "You can't imagine how much pleasure it's going to give you just being there to look at him. Pretty soon, you're not going to be able to imagine what life was like before you had kids."

She meant that children would be so satisfying that we couldn't imagine going back to our previous life. She was right -- but that was an ambiguous prophecy. The loss of parental freedom is severe, and if young marrieds had any idea how difficult raising children can be, they might never conceive. Today, my wife and I are smack in the middle of raising three small children, each of whom presents a particular challenge. So many nights we are just flat-out exhausted. We have little time for ourselves anymore, and don't have the money or liberty to do the fun things we once did. By conventional standards of measuring happiness, we ought not be happy.

And, I would say, we aren't exactly happy. Rather, we're joyful. I don't for a minute regret having chosen parenthood, despite all the pain, frustration and heartbreak. I think there's a difference between happiness and joy. Happiness is a superficial and fragile thing; joy is happiness that has been deepened and refined by tragedy. Joy is happiness with dimension. Joy is what you have that tells you that the burden is light, the yoke is freedom. It looks like a lie, maybe, from the outside, which is why, I think, my sister told me that we weren't going to be able to understand what we will have lost and what we will have gained from parenthood until we've lived it.

More from the New York essay:

But for many of us, purpose is happiness -- particularly those of us who find moment-to-moment happiness a bit elusive to begin with. Martin Seligman, the positive-psychology pioneer who is, famously, not a natural optimist, has always taken the view that happiness is best defined in the ancient Greek sense: leading a productive, purposeful life. And the way we take stock of that life, in the end, isn’t by how much fun we had, but what we did with it. (Seligman has seven children.)  

That's it, isn't it? I am reminded of my wife, to whom I'd been married only one year, standing with me near the corner of Third Avenue and 63rd St. in Manhattan one weekend afternoon, struggling to say something that was on her mind. She was about to burst with frustration, and said, "We've just got to, I dunno, *do* something -- move to Brooklyn and open a bakery ... something!" Then it hit me, and I said: "You want to have a baby, don't you?"

"No! ... Well, maybe."

Mind you, we had a great life at that time. We both had good jobs we loved, and did fun things all the time, two young marrieds free in Manhattan. But to Julie, this life didn't seem purposeful. So we quite naturally did what lots of New Yorkers like us do: we swam across the East River to Brooklyn and spawned.

The other night I was talking to a new friend who immigrated here from Ukraine. We were talking about the population collapse in Russia, and how people aren't having children like they used to. She said it's a mistake to think that it has anything to do with money. People were much poorer in the past, and they still had kids. She said it has to do with your moral and spiritual convictions. Do you think children are a primary good? Then you will have them, she said.

A thought: When the people in a civilization see child-bearing as a choice, one to be made after cost-benefit analysis, instead of something you just do, is it possible to sustain that civilization?

UPDATE: E.D. Kain's thoughts on the question. Excerpt:

I think a civilization that sees child-bearing as a choice can survive just fine. It’s that civilization’s understanding of purpose that matters. Once society has given up on work, on producing things, on striving for meaning outside of the cocoon of self-pleasure and consumption, then we’re in trouble.

Having kids requires us to leave that cocoon entirely. It requires us to move beyond ourselves, to give ourselves up. To sacrifice our happiness for a much deeper joy.