An excerpt from NEWSWEEK:

Today, we have kids more for emotional reasons, but an increasingly complicated work and social environment has made finding satisfaction far more difficult. A key study by University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Sara McLanahan and Julia Adams, conducted some 20 years ago, found that parenthood was perceived as significantly more stressful in the 1970s than in the 1950s; the researchers attribute part of that change to major shifts in employment patterns. The majority of American parents now work outside the home, have less support from extended family and face a deteriorating education and health-care system, so raising children has not only become more complicated—it has become more expensive. Today the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that it costs anywhere from $134,370 to $237,520 to raise a child from birth to the age of 17—and that’s not counting school or college tuition. No wonder parents are feeling a little blue.

Societal ills aside, perhaps we also expect too much from the promise of parenting. The National Marriage Project’s 2006 “State of Our Unions” report says that parents have significantly lower marital satisfaction than nonparents because they experienced more single and child-free years than previous generations. Twenty-five years ago, women married around the age of 20, and men at 23. Today both sexes are marrying four to five years later. This means the experience of raising kids is now competing with highs in a parent’s past, like career wins (“I got a raise!”) or a carefree social life (“God, this is a great martini!”). Shuttling cranky kids to school or dashing to work with spit-up on your favorite sweater doesn’t skew as romantic.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/143792

Most parents know that having children isn’t a cakewalk. I’ll be the first to admit, as a stay at home mother, there are days I most definitely want to run away and never come back. But to say that not having children will make you “happier” doesn’t feel right to me. I think it has to do with our cultural definition of happiness. From this article, you would think that happiness means nothing more than romantic love and a fat bank account. I’m sure there are plenty of childless couples in the world who have both and might still not define themselves as “happy.” Certainly, not having children will make you richer. You would also surely have more time to devote to your spouse. But, in the grand scheme of things, will this make you truly happy?

I’m not so sure. My personal opinion is that happiness is relative to the long-term. At the end of my life, I’d like to be able to say that I was happy for most of it. On a day-to-day basis, parents of young children may not rank themselves as being very “happy.” But I’ll bet if you asked those same parents at the end of their lives what the best thing they’ve ever accomplished was, a good majority would say their children. They may not be millionaires. Some of the years of their marriage may have been less happy than others, but at the end of it all, I think parents would say their children made them extremely “happy.”