Aharon comments on Stupid Questions Thread - January 2014 - Less Wrong

10 Post author: RomeoStevens 13 January 2014 02:31AM

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Comment author: Aharon 13 January 2014 09:38:48PM 1 point [-]

I first wanted to comment on 5, because I had previously read that having children reduces happiness. Interestingly, when searching a link (because I couldn't remember where I had read it), I found this source (http://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2012-013.pdf) that corrobates your specific expectation: children lead to higher happiness for older, better educated parents.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 14 January 2014 01:53:44PM 2 points [-]

Having children is an example where two methodologies in happiness research dramatically diverge. One method is asking people in the moment how happy they are; the other is asking how they happy they generally feel about their lives. The first method finds that people really hate child care and is probably what you remembered.

Comment author: adbge 14 January 2014 06:54:49PM *  0 points [-]

I think the paper you're thinking of is Kahneman et al's A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: The day reconstruction method.

Notably,

In Table 1, taking care of one's children ranks just above the least enjoyable activities of working, housework, and commuting.

On the other hand, having children also harms marital satisfaction. See, for example, here.

Comment author: gjm 13 January 2014 10:15:04PM -1 points [-]

How excellent! It's nice to be statistically typical :-).