i was sitting in a marriage and family therapy class a few years ago when my professor handed out a rollins and feldman  graph entitled marriage satisfaction across the family life cycle.

the graph we saw in class, which was a more detailed version of the one above, showed that marital satisfaction is at an impressive high for newlyweds. satisfaction steadily decreases when children hit the scene and begins to rise again at the point when the children launch.

the members of our class were indignant. most of us were parents whose children were still at home. “we’re happy!” we protested defensively. “our marriages are satisfying!” we argued.

yesterday, i read this recent new york magazine article entitled all joy and no fun: why parents hate parenting. sited in it are a number of studies like that of rollins and feldman that examine the stress that children bring to marriages. but the article examines many similar studies that essentially assert that parenting diminishes happiness for individuals too. in other words,

“as a rule, most studies show that mothers are less happy than fathers, that single parents are less happy still, that babies and toddlers are the hardest, and that each successive child produces diminishing returns.”

author jennifer senior proposes a number of potential reasons for the inverse relationship between parenting and happiness. one is that along with children come dramatic and momentary shifts between intense joy and intense frustration. another is that while parents love our children, perhaps we are not so in love with the day-to-day tasks of parenting. another is that our country’s less-than-stellar childcare and family leave provisions contribute to parents’ worry. and finally, perhaps the most comically stated reason is that “[children] are a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit.”

i cannot deny that there is spark of truth in the above musings. motherhood is not all snuggles and tender i love you’s. in the time that it has taken me to write this post, for example, my children have:

• argued over a harmonica
• drawn all over themselves with brown marker
• face planted into a cardboard playhouse (the bird)
• systematically spread my fabric collection all over the house (the monkey), and
• taken all of their clothes off.

but still, i really do love my life. i do not think i am in denial. i just think that there is more to life than day-do-day happiness. apparently, i am in good company. daniel gilbert, a harvard psychologist who is also a father and grandfather, asserts that “what children really do is offer moments of transcendence, not an overall improvement in well-being.”

sociologists kei nomaguchi and melissa milkie studied the costs and rewards of parenting and concluded that mothers are often less depressed after having children. like gilbert, nomaguchi and milkie “sought to understand not just the moment-to-moment moods of [their] participants, but more existential matters, like how connected they felt, and how motivated.”

perhaps many studies on the impact of children on marital and personal satisfaction yield such dismal results because the kind of rewards that come with parenting, like most things that are unspeakably beautiful and important, cannot be easily described, categorized, and charted. but i relish the transcendent, existential meaning that my children have helped me to recognize. and to share this experience with my husband is something that i truly cherish.

we may argue over whose turn it is to read llama llama red pajama to the monkey for the five millionth time but even as we do this, we know that we are participating in some sort of divine mystery. we are tapping into something that is bigger than we are. we have lost much of our free time, it’s true. but we have traded it for a fierce and boundless love.

Tags: all joy and no fun, family life cycle, jennifer senior, marriage and family therapy, marriage satisfaction, new york magazine, rollins and feldman

This entry was posted on Monday, August 9th, 2010 at 11:11 am and is filed under awe, choices, family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.