Last week I was contacted by a Yahoo journalist seeking a
comment on some new research from the London School of Economics and Western
University, Canada suggesting that having a third child won’t make you happier.
Due to her deadline, and my being across the globe and in a completely
unfriendly time zone, I never got to make that comment.
But her piece has been followed in recent days by plenty of
other people commenting on the third-child-won’t-make-you-happy syndrome. I am
a researcher by training so I know that you can often find whatever results you
want within the myriad data you collect (you can find a summary of the results
here).
But without looking deep into their research methods, I am
pretty sure that that the results are accurate. Did having my third child make
me happier? Ah… no. But did having my first or second baby actually make me
happy? Uh, can’t remember, probably not.
What the hell does ‘happy’ mean anyway? The Oxford Dictionary says it means ‘feeling
or showing pleasure or contentment’. Merriam-Webster says happy means ‘feeling
pleasure and enjoyment because of your life, situation etc’.
You know what I think of those words?
Let’s talk about the real
words that describe how we feel when we have kids:
relieved
overjoyed
overawed
content
terrified
joyful
intimidated
fortunate
ecstatic
fulfilled
appreciative
passionate.
I certainly never considered that I would be ‘happier’ after
having children. That’s not why I did it, and certainly not why I had Number
Three.
Who’s to say that the parents who registered as being less
happy when baby three arrived weren’t overwhelmed by other factors – the physical
toll on their inevitably older body, the emotional pull between partners and
children, older kids causing grief either as toddlers or tweens, losing older
kids to friends and school, less time with your partner, giving up work, having
less money etc.
If ‘happy’ means all those words I listed before, then I am
definitely more ‘happy’ with three kids. I feel more stable and grounded (even
if on a minute-to-minute basis I might appear more flummoxed.) I felt pretty
good with two but if I had been completely, 100% happy, then I doubt I would
have chosen to have Baby Number Three.
Three for me feels more like the whole package, we are more
self-contained. If two kids are fighting, there’s still another to fill the
gap. At any point in time there is at least one of them not pissing me off
(hopefully). And if some of them are at school or having a sleepover, then having
the remaining one or two is easy, almost like a holiday. But, as I have come to
realise, it’s not as easy as having three because that’s how our family was meant to be. And every family is going to be different.
But I don’t agree with the basic premise of the research
because it implies that we have children to make us happy: that our personal
happiness is an actual factor in the decision to breed. I actually can’t
remember why I decided to have children: it may have just been because it was
assumed that’s what we would do. I may have felt a strong biological urge.
Perhaps a less strong psychological curiosity. But it’s irrelevant now.
I am also concerned that their finding that baby number 1
and 2 only ‘briefly’ increases our happiness, before returning to pre-baby
levels of happiness. Who are these poor, sad souls that were interviewed for
the research?
I can categorically say that I am much more relieved-overjoyed-overawed-content-terrified-joyful-intimidated-fortunate-
ecstatic-fulfilled -passionate now than before I had children. I think I am a
better, more well-rounded, appreciative, empathetic and involved person for
having them.
And if that doesn’t make me happy, then I don’t know what
will.
