Posted on 12/05/2019 2:50:53 PM PST by Morgana
We’ve reached a barking point in American history. (Yeah, I’m sorry for that one.) A few years ago, for the first time ever, the number of dogs in this country surpassed the number of children under eighteen. According to Statista, there are 90 million dogs in America today, up from just 68 million in 2000. And a higher percentage of American households own dogs than ever before.
By contrast, there are just over 73 million children. That still sounds like a lot, but as a percentage of the population, children have never been rarer. In 1960, for instance, over one-in-three Americans were under the age of eighteen. According to government projections, by 2050, children will make up less than a quarter of the population.
As you’d expect, this drop in birth rates corresponds to a drop in marriages. What you might not expect is that it also corresponds to a drop in happiness. The General Social Survey in 2018 found that Americans today are more miserable than they’ve been in decades. And replacing family with dogs isn’t reversing the trend.
Of course, what we increasingly hear today, in print and on television and movies, is that what will make us happy is the freedom that can come only from singleness and childlessness. Writing in The Atlantic recently, Mandy Len Catron bemoaned “What You Lose When You Gain a Spouse.” According to her, family life is isolating and unfair to outsiders, because spouses give most of their attention to each other and to their kids. When people get married, she writes, they retreat into “socially neglectful cocoons.”
London School of Economics professor Paul Dolan goes even further in his book, “Happily Ever After.” He says the only reason married people report being happier on average than singles is that they’re lying to save face. The book was corrected, by the way, when this claim turned out to be unsupportable.
In reality, the statistics are clear: Married people really are happier than those who are unmarried—by an average of ten percentage points. But is that because marriage makes people happy, or because happy people are more likely to get married?
A new paper by the Institute for Family Studies offers a surprising answer. Instead of looking at the effect of family itself, author James McQuivey decided to look at the effect of the desire for family. He asked over a thousand men and women how much they value having an emotionally intimate relationship, sexual faithfulness, and children. He then combined these answers into a single measure, which we might call a desire for a traditional, nuclear family.
He discovered that scoring higher on this measure predicted greater happiness and overall life satisfaction—regardless of whether or not the respondent was actually married or had kids!
It’s one of those results that makes you do a double take. After all, you’d expect people who want a family life and haven’t found it to be dissatisfied. But on average, they’re not. As McQuivey says, “[i]f you merely have the desire to pair bond and procreate, you are already happier than average…”
Act on that desire, he adds, and your happiness jumps, while your life satisfaction (a separate metric) “practically leaps off the chart.”
In other words, contrary to the thesis that getting married and having kids dooms you to misery, committing to a family is one of the most effective means ever created to train people to care for others. And a cornerstone of psychology is that other-centeredness brings human beings happiness.
Look, dogs are great and all, but we were made for communion with other people. The family bond is so central to our design that merely pursuing it leads to greater happiness.
For a society like ours, one in the midst of family and happiness shortages, the solution is obvious, but it won’t be found at the dog park.
More and more places are allowing dogs but banning children.
We would have preferred children, but did not happen. There was a time when we had four dogs at once, we have owned seven during our 38 year marriage.
I’ve got 3 nieces. Stable marriages. Let me withdraw $300k tax free and I’ll divide it amongst the 3 provided they bring into the world that 3rd kid. All rich uncles out there offer do the same. Screwed up women can bring into this world that ONE child they were chosen to(by God) and put it up for adoption. Problem solved. Holidays are more fun that way.
I like dogs and children but have neither. No time and not married.
I know a lot of people who treat their dogs like babies, and either have no kids or leave them with others for up to 8 hours of the day.
I wonder why they do these things but there’s no polite way to ask.
Satan has flim-flammed Western culture into committing suicide in a dozen different ways.
Not a problem with muzzies and mexicans.
I grew up rolling around in the yard and playing with a lab pup that Grandad got for me. My kids grew up with dogs and both have kids growing up with dogs. My one granddaughter has a rescue border collie that I got her, she 17. My wife and I have two dogs now. My point? I wouldn’t be here without mom and dad I passed it on. Dogs need kids and vice Versa.
I wonder how many are going to say it’s all men’s fault.
MGTOW is the way forward.
I've got a niece who is smart, responsible and pretty. She and her long-term boyfriend are dithering about having kids, so have dogs and cats instead. My wife and I are gently prodding her to consider children, but both were brought up in divorced households, being told typical post-modern crap that relationships are fluid, immigrants replacing them are great, they are damaging the planet, etc... cognitive dissonance reigns.
” leave them with others for up to 8 hours of the day.”
and you wonder WHY places are banning children but not dogs? They take their dog to obedience school but their kid? Their kid is a little hellion at the wal-mart or restaurant. Running and screaming up and down the isle, opening up toys out of the boxes and playing with them, throwing food all over the place. The dog however, it does one thing bad and it gets called down. The child is ignored by the parent.
You don’t have to pay “child” support on behalf of pets... at least not yet and not for 18-21 years.
They must not know that dogs and cats will be first on the chopping block once the New Green Scam hits. That’s gonna suck.
Prefer dogs ...
“Not a problem with muzzies and mexicans.”
I stayed in downtown D.C. earlier in the year.
What I noticed:
White women all extremely fit and nearly all wore yoga pants walking dogs on leashes.
Muslims, Chinese and Hispanic women all had 3-5 children
PG: That’s where you and the missus come in. Just move in down the street. The kid(s) will figure it out if turbulence hits.
If they don’t want kids, don’t push it.
We should not “push” it but they should not abort them either. Give the baby up for adoption, then go to the animal shelter and get Fido or Fluffy.
“MGTOW is the way forward.”
MGTOW or incels?
As Paul Joseph Watson calls MGTOW’s “Men Groping Their Own Penises”
“Look, dogs are great and all, but we were made for communion with other people. The family bond is so central to our design that merely pursuing it leads to greater happiness.”
When I was a pore widdle 17-year-old orphan (cue violins), I was given a feral German Shepherd. We had a very strong bond. A friend of mine took the dog when I went into the Navy, and for decades I went without a dog because of life situations.
I got another German Shepherd last year, which is now one year old. But it’s different.
I’ve been married 33 years, and I have a mess of kids and grandkids. It’s not just me and the dog against the world.
I think, based on my own experience, that some single dog owners invest emotion in their dog that rightly belongs to a spouse and progeny.
I guess it’s better that they have some comfort in life, but IMO all—all—of life’s greatest joys are connected with obeying God’s order to be fruitful and multiply.
I understand that some people undergo the great sorrow of childlessness, but I believe that God has a plan for them too.
She means they are less likely to vote for wasteful social spending programs that benefit the International Socialist agenda, preferring to keep their tax dollars and spend them on their own families.
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