Little did I know when I wrote a post titled It's About Me, that I'd be wanting to revisit this self-indulgence on a regular basis. Apparently, however, I will need to.
Today's installment of It's All About Me concerns how many children a person should have. The idea comes from this Andrew Sullivan post about this study which tried to determine why people keep having kids. According to University of Pennsylvania sociology professor Hans-Peter Kohler, it's all about personal happiness.
In comparing identical twins, Kohler found that mothers with one child are about 20 percent happier than their childless counterparts; and while fathers' happiness gains are smaller, men enjoy an almost 75 percent larger happiness boost from a firstborn son than from a firstborn daughter. The first child's sex doesn't matter to mothers, perhaps because women are better than men at enjoying the company of both girls and boys, Kohler speculates.
Interestingly, second and third children don't add to parents' happiness at all. In fact, these additional children seem to make mothers less happy than mothers with only one child—though still happier than women with no children.
"If you want to maximize your subjective well-being, you should stop at one child," concludes Kohler, adding that people probably have additional children either for the benefit of the firstborn or because they reason that if the first child made them happy, the second one will, too...
What seems to happen over time, says Kohler, is "you look forward to having a child, then you have it and find it really difficult and your happiness dips, and then you see a substantial gain." Overall, he says the lesson from the study is that "just having reproduced at least once seems to be the crucial aspect of providing the happiness gain."
Sullivan points out that the Europeans seem to have discovered this "one child" happiness and embraced it.
Europe seems to have this pretty well figured out. And I don't mean to be flip - the European "let's stop at one" approach to childbearing really is well-calculated to maximize a certain kind of parental well-being, narrowly defined. Of course, it's also calculated to seriously diminish the "subjective well-being" of all the second and third children who don't get conceived because their parents decided it wasn't worth the trouble. And while the theory that parents have children "either for the benefit of the firstborn or because they reason that if the first child made them happy, the second one will, too" may be true in many or even most cases, it also reflects a certain degree of deplorable solipsism. The chief reason parents should take on the trouble of conceiving and raising a child is that the child is a good in and of itself - one of the greatest goods there is, in fact, in any moral scheme worth considering - not because they think that it will make them or their already-existing offspring happier.
I thought the researcher's statement about the happiness induced by first, second, and third children to be bizarre and self-serving.
As much as I loved my first child, she was the most stressful of the three. Her birth caused the greatest changes, stresses, and alterations of lifestyle. She was cholicky, didn't sleep, cried constantly, and has always been the most sensitive of the three kids.
The younger two children, on the other hand, were perfect babies. They cried little and behaved exactly the way the textbooks described babies behaving. Is this because I was more skilled as a mother and less stressed out at the changes involved than I had been with the first one? It's quite possible.
But beyond that, each child has increased my happiness in immeasurable ways. They are all stressful and they are all wonderful. How could you possibly decide that one was enough?
I was the youngest of three children, and maybe that's why I was determined to have at least three children (we originally talked about five, but with the youngest two being only 18 months apart, I was ready to quit at three kids). But I also wanted more children because, as Sullivan puts it, children in and of themselves are an intrinsic good. Perhaps this is why I don't understand abortion, or the women who flippantly talk about it being a 20-minute procedure. Having children isn't about how much entertainment they bring one individually. It's about realizing children are the best thing we bring to this world.
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