Coulson says that we want to be the ideal parent we imagine everyone else is, but we can’t ever be good enough. Illustration / Getty Images.
In this extract from his book, The Parenting Revolution, Dr Justin Coulson looks at the factors that can make parenting so challenging and lead to a reduction in overall happiness.
Do children make us miserable? Since the 1980s, study after study after study has emphasised that happiness is not having kids. We now have decades of well-documented evidence that marital (or partner) satisfaction drops for many people when a baby is brought into a relationship.
The studies also show that parent wellbeing often declines following the birth of a child and throughout their childhood. The effects can be long-lasting, continuing even after the children leave home.
Here comes the kicker: the more children people have, the more likely the surveys will indicate lower wellbeing, particularly with more than three children. I am not highlighting this because I want to talk you out of having children, or so that I can make you think you should be miserable if you aren’t. WE all know countless parents who are lit up with genuine delight as they raise their children. But raising kids is hard for the majority of us at least some of the time.
While thinking about parenting has changed a lot over time, we do know that parents in the past also struggled with their children.
Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), one of the leading philosophers of the French Renaissance, said of his children, ‘I have not willingly suffered them to be brought up near me.’
This quote, more than any other, makes me laugh out loud. We’ve all had days (or weeks or months or years) where we would rather not have our children be brought up near us.
Even the Buddha named his son “Burden”. How’s that for a shot of self-esteem every time someone calls your name? ‘Hey Burden, not like that. Like this.’ (Fascinating sidebar: the Buddha left his family only a week after Burden was born so he could travel a path to enlightenment – without the kids.)
The famed father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, numbered education of children as one of the three “impossible professions” (the other two were governing nations and psychoanalysis).
He stated that raising and educating children was a role “in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results”. In other words, you already know before you’ve started that you won’t achieve the outcome you’re seeking.
In the late 1800s through to the early 1900s, mothers medicated their kids with cocaine- and opiate-spiked syrups so they could get through the day (and apparently quite a lot of mums took them as well – they were known as “mother’s little helpers”. After World War II they were typically Valium and Librium).
To understand a bit more about why parenting is utterly and in every way exhausting, impossibly heart-expanding, and achingly soul-stretching, we need to talk about modern research into parenting and happiness.
The data probably show happiness declining for parents because raising children introduces hardship into our lives that we might not otherwise have to face. It can be staggeringly expensive to raise a child, not to mention time-consuming, and physically and emotionally tiring.
Many of our children encounter developmental, social, psychological, or neurological challenges as they get older. Some experience them all. These things wear us down.
There’s a less obvious explanation for why parenting is associated with unhappiness. It’s deeply personal and it’s the kind of thing we’d probably never say to another soul – even our life partner: If we are honest with ourselves about our parenting, we know we don’t measure up. We want to be kind and calm, but we yell. We want to guide our children to play nicely together but they fight, and we snap. We want to give them great opportunities, but life is expensive, time is limited, and other children have needs too.
Sometimes we have a child who is tricky, and we can’t figure things out. We want to be the ideal parent we imagine everyone else is, but we can’t ever be good enough. If being a “good parent” matters to us, we are going to be driven to try harder and do more; to prove that we are the good parents we identify as. And we mostly cannot get there. That’s why it’s one of Freud’s impossible challenges.
Parenting creates an existential crisis as we contemplate how we’re supposed to get it right and how we simply cannot. Adding insult to injury, parenting might also make us miserable because we can’t agree on how to do it.
Parenting is ultimately about values, and when two people in a couple value things related to their children differently, it can be a recipe for conflict and unhappiness.
Jennifer Senior, author of the bestselling All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, provides a glimpse as to why being a parent provides the perfect backdrop for relationship stress when she writes that children, “more than money, more than work, more than in-laws, more than annoying personal habits, communication styles, leisure activities, commitment issues, bothersome friends, [and more than] sex” become the basis of argument and conflict at home. Conflict and kids go hand in hand for many couples.
In my work with parents, I’ve heard arguments about parenting issues such as:
• Why aren’t they going to bed on time?
• Who said it was okay that they eat chocolate before 10 am (or before the age of 3)?
• Why do you keep giving in to him?
• I don’t want the kids sleeping in our bed … or in our bedroom.
• I don’t think we should be sending them to that school. It’s too expensive.
• You think she has a learning disorder? I think she’s lazy. And no, we’re not spending money on another psychologist.
• Why did you let him use the bath as a toilet?
• Do you really have to drink while you’re pregnant?
• I don’t like that you’re letting the kids ride on the outside of the 4 x 4 when we’re camping. It’s so dangerous.
• In my day, my dad would have given me a swift backhander and I never would have disrespected him again. We need to send that kid a message loud and clear. You’re too soft on him.
When our children have additional needs (like ADHD, ODD, autism, and so on) such value clashes and parenting priority issues are amplified. I highlight all of this to emphasise and acknowledge that parenting is exhausting physically, but it’s also exhausting psychologically and emotionally. It’s exhausting relationally.
It puts pressure on us in ways that are hard to describe. And much of it is new to us as a society. As society has shifted and parental expectations have intensified, current research increasingly shows that it’s normal to feel tired and over it when you’re interacting with your children – at least some of the time.
It’s normal to have conflict with a partner about how to deal with parenting questions – at least some of the time. It’s normal to prefer watching a new show on your favourite streaming service, talking with a friend (or any random adult in a call centre), or pretty much anything really, over playing another game of Pokemon Go – at least some of the time.
Research confirms that what you’re feeling is almost universal. Parenting is often tedious, tiring and taxing.
Children’s irrationality, demandingness, and utter dependence guarantee that you’ll always experience a level of ruin. No advice in any book can remove that reality.
But if parenting is so horribly hard, why do we say it’s such a wonderful pleasure?
There’s a widespread belief – and expectation – in every culture in the world that children are a delight and a blessing, and that they “should” make us happy. There are parents who shake their heads in disbelief when I describe the research we’ve just considered. “Oh no, that’s not true for me”, they self-righteously (and earnestly) assert. “I love playing with my kids and being with my kids and doing everything with and for my kids all the time.”
Perhaps that’s true. But for the rest of us? The good news is that while parenting is hard for most of us, parents also enjoy moments of incredible delight.
My academic research with a large sample of Australian families found that the more parents invested in parenting, the more likely it was that they would parent using an ideal parenting style, find pleasure in parenting and gain satisfaction from parenting, as well as experiencing a higher sense of meaning and satisfaction with life.
In a nutshell, they’d be happy – regardless of how many children they had. The icing on the cake came in a follow-up study where I found that when parents had these positive experiences, their children were more likely to be engaged in life, report positive outcomes, and thrive.
What’s really going on is this: when we are asked about the ‘big picture’ of parenting, we consider the transcendent experiences, the funny moments, and the flashes of perfection.
But when we focus on the moment-to-moment difficulties of parenting, as the participants in the 2004 study did, our recollections of what it is to be a parent are harsher. And that shows up in the data that indicates parenting makes us miserable.
Our moment-to-moment satisfaction is not the same as our overall satisfaction when it comes to parenting. Consider this from a career perspective. A criminal court judge might express high satisfaction with her work overall, but not feel particularly enthused about life when dealing with an unrepentant murderer. A gardener might feel overwhelmed when he looks at an overgrown yard that needs maintenance, and he might feel frustration during the heat of the day when his fuel tank empties, his whipper snipper runs out of trimming line, and the insects are biting. But he likely feels tremendous satisfaction when he surveys his completed labours.
Similarly, a parent could experience all kinds of negative emotions and challenging upheavals with a child over the course of one day, but still feel deeply satisfied with parenting (and a little relieved) as her child drifts off to peaceful sleep.
Edited extract from: The Parenting Revolution by Dr Justin Coulson. HarperCollins, RRP $37.99
They were in a 'secure and happy relationship' - until his mum interfered.