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.
Walking away from the plantation is self-preservation.
He who dies with the most stuff wins.
The methodology there sounds a bit funky. Did the individual factors predict happiness too? Did you have to bunch them together to get a statistically valid affirmative? That is, did the desire for family not stand on its own?
What's the answer you want to hear? Men?
Kids are hard work and a long-term commitment. Not an attractive proposition to a generation that has been raised to value their own “happiness” above all else and to “collect experiences.”
Shaming also won't get people to join your side; it will just reinforce the theory that men have an incredibly hard time of doing anything pertaining to relationships today.
You don't really have a point, Morgana, and you reaffirm some men choosing the path of least resistance, and that is walking away from the plantation.
Who said this? Tell me do you know?
“Present-day capitalist society conceals within itself numerous cases of poverty and oppression which do not immediately strike the eye. At the best of times, the scattered families of poor townspeople, artisans, workers, employees and petty officials live in incredible difficulties, barely managing to make both ends meet. Millions upon millions of women in such families live (or, rather, exist) as “domestic slaves”, striving to feed and clothe their family on pennies, at the cost of desperate daily effort and “saving” on everything—except their own labour.
It is these women that the capitalists most willingly employ as home-workers, who are prepared for a monstrously low wage to “earn a little extra” for themselves and their family, for the sake of a crust of bread. It is from among these women, too, that the capitalists of all countries recruit for themselves (like the ancient slave-owners and the medieval feudal lords) any number of concubines at a most “reasonable” price. And no amount of “moral indignation” (hypocritical in 99 cases out of 100) about prostitution can do anything against this trade in female flesh; so long as wage-slavery exists, inevitably prostitution too will exist. All the oppressed and exploited classes throughout the history of human societies have always been forced (and it is in this that their exploitation consists) to give up to their oppressors, first, their unpaid labour and, second, their women as concubines for the “masters”.
Slavery, feudalism and capitalism are identical in this respect. It is only the form of exploitation that changes; the exploitation itself remains.
An exhibition of the work of “women exploited at home” has opened in Paris, the “capital of the world”, and the centre of civilisation.
Each exhibit has a little tag showing how much the woman working at home receives for making it, and how much she can make per day and per hour on this basis.
And what do we find? Not on a single article can a woman working at home earn more than 1.25 francs, i.e., 50 kopeks, whereas the earnings on the vast majority of jobs are very much smaller. Take lampshades. The pay is 4 kopeks per dozen. Or paper bags: 15 kopeks per thousand, with earnings at six kopeks an hour. Here are little toys with ribbons, etc.: 2.5 kopeks an hour. Artificial flowers: two or three kopeks an hour. Ladies’ and gentlemen’s underwear: from two to six kopeks an hour. And so on, without end.
Our workers’ associations and trade unions, too, ought to organise an “exhibition” of this kind. It will not yield the colossal profits brought in by the exhibitions, of the bourgeoisie. A display of proletarian women’s poverty and indigence will bring a different benefit: it will help wage-slaves, both men and women, to understand their condition, look back over their “life”, ponder the conditions for emancipation from this perpetual yoke of want, poverty, prostitution and every kind of outrage against the have-nots.”
He who dies with the most stuff still dies.
And who will long remember him?
One of the risks is that you ruin the kid's life. If someone is on the fence about having kids, then they shouldn't. It shouldn't be something they're pressured into by friends/family/significant other/the public at large.
well, hell. let’s start electing the dogs to congress. maybe we’d get better results.
"You have kids? Yeah, I know exactly what it's like to be a parent. I have two pet dogs. It's just like having children."
Um, no. It's not.
Re: 68
Some just don’t care about that. I’ll let others pursue narcissism by living life vicariously through their children’s accomplishments.
That’s what “leaving a legacy” is. We see it all too clearly with hussein. Parallels can be drawn all too easily with people that believe every human’s purpose is to reproduce.
Re: 67
I don’t care who said it. Does it have any relevance to relationships/reproducing, as well as the factors to decide for or against?
“1. She is the last person to tell anyone that.”
Dr. Laura Schlessinger used to repeat that on a regular basis.
“2. No girlfriend is “unpaid”.”
Not necessarily true, when the couple are splitting expenses and maintaining separate bank accounts.
You are absolutely correct.
I’m steadily purging non-essential stuff and things have no real meaning. For the most part I don’t miss anything I’ve jettisoned.
Apart from the jalopy collection, I’d like to be able to put everything on a pickup and trailer.
Illegals are doing a good job of popping out babies.
Mrs. Child and I tried for a second child but her health issues kept that from happening. And I darn near crippled my manhood doing my part during our attempt. When you begin to dread the next sexual encounter you know you are working pretty hard for that kid. LOL
You can’t take anything with you and that is just as well.
And your evidence that everyone cares about that rather than spending time together and doing things as a family is?
Because the legacy as I was taught isn’t achievments but an honest character, enjoyable time together as a family, independence and sincere faith.
Nothing wrong with that. The idea that everyone should have kids is wrong.
We love kids, would have had more than one had my wife’s health permitted. Tried to adopt, that’s another story. But you play the hand you’re dealt. A lot of weekends I wish there was a way to “rent a grandkid” for Saturday. I love them, but I am too old to raise any more full time.
But I know people that don’t have that same affinity for children and I think it is good if they follow their instincts. Parenthood is definitely not a “one size fits all” occupation. That’s for darn certain.
Some people avoid having kids and later regret it. Others have kids and later regret that. But for most of us, if you want kids, have them. If you don’t, then don’t.
A final editorial comment. ‘Effed up progressivism is destroying our families. It is stopping people who would like kids because of the legal risks. I told my wife, if I was young now I would give serious consideration to not getting married because of how distorted our society has become. If your wife is a hard core lefty, probably best to not have them. She’ll screw you six ways to Sunday somewhere along the line and screw up your kids in the process.
Can’t have independence if someone relies on you.
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