Another Darwin Award Winner!
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.
We have more possessions and less time to enjoy them.
250 grand per kid today plus women divorce raping men at unprecedented rates and taking rhe kids away for alimony 2 and 3.
Simply not affordable.
Funny how they only focus on happiness of married people.
They are only happy until they’re divorced.
Ask the divorced people how happy they are compared to single people.
Another Darwin Award Winner!
“Incel” is a term invented by the left and feminists to shame any man that chooses to leave the plantation that is relationships and marriage.
It’s unfortunate you’re using their language in a similar context.
Ask the divorced people how happy they are compared to single people.....I’m pretty damned happy...twice.
It's too risky to marry and have kids.
Video games and anime cost less and keep me entertained. I can also go back and forth between games and nobody is going to complain.
Look at another woman for too long and you’ll get yelled at.
I'd rather keep my tax dollars and spend it on myself.
I can believe it. In our neighborhood pretty much every household has a dog. There are a lot of forest preserves and hiking trails nearby and at least a half dozen dog parks, so there are scores of places where one can take one’s dog. And in the late afternoon and early evening, when people get home from work, there is a virtual army of people walking their dogs on the sidewalks. While we’ve pretty much always had a dog, I have never seen so many dogs in one neighborhood as we have here.
Re: your post 22
At least someone posted it, because I didn’t want to.
Where I live (San Francisco), I’ve long noticed that dog ownership among childless women over 25 is about 95%. I have nothing against dogs, but it’s pretty sad to see so many satisfying their maternal instinct with pets. On other hand, on a long-term basis, brain-dead liberals not breeding isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
lol funny
I’m unfit to be a parent. I hate children and avoid them if at all possible.
I was also cursed with horrible DNA, I cannot be allowed to have children.
The video games will never love you back.
Three miscarriages was as close as I ever got.
Wasn’t for the lack of trying.
Needed something to “mother” due to my nature so dogs it is.
When people paint with a broad brush, others can get smacked right in the heart.
This is not news. A remember a story like this from at least 20 or 30 years ago. Older people, either couples or singles, have pets. They are past the child-bearing age so of course they don’t have children. We now have more older people than ever. These pets are not replacing children. They’re just pets.
“She and her long-term boyfriend are dithering about having kids”
(Poking nose in where it doesn’t belong mode ON)
If he’s not eager to marry her, she should kick him to the curb, and let him take the animals with him. A man who doesn’t want to marry and have kids isn’t worth a bucket of warm piss.
(Poking nose in where it doesn’t belong mode OFF)
This article is a hoot!
"Single women have more time to attend political rallies!"
I personally don’t think anyone who does not want kids should have them but and here is the BUT don’t have an abortion. Make your choices before the pregnancy. Don’t kill an innocent person because you don’t want kids. Give the baby up to someone who does.
The problem with MGTOW is that most these babies were made out of wedlock and these “men” are complaining about child support. Well if they had waited until marriage this would not be a problem. Yes I know divorce is high, you may thank no fault divorce for that.
“”Single women have more time to attend political rallies!””
How many voted Trump?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.