Kids cause unhappiness, and they don't need you anyway

According to the experts, parenting is not only bad for you, it's not so great for your kids. Last year I noted here studies claiming that people with children report significant declines in happiness. And now George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan has summarized research indicating that compared to genetic influences, how we raise our children matters relatively little:

". . . within the normal range of parenting styles, how you raise your children has little effect on how your children turn out. You can be strict or permissive, involved or distant, encouraging or critical, religious or secular. In the long run, your kids will resemble you in many ways; but they would have resembled you about as much if they had never met you."

So to sum up, kids will make you miserable, and in return you are unlikely to do them much good beyond keeping them fed and schooled.

All this academic research conveniently is very convenient, because many of the academics I know don't want to be bothered with children, their own or anyone else's. Professors announcing that children bring unhappiness, and that it's alright to ignore the ones we have, is something like tobacco companies declaring there's no link between smoking and cancer.

And sure enough, along comes a study that explains how all those anti-child-rearing studies (25 of them!) got it wrong. This study's authors "found that the average drop in marital satisfaction was almost entirely accounted for by the couples who slid into being parents, disagreed over it, or were ambivalent about it. Couples who planned or equally welcomed the conception were likely to maintain or even increase their marital satisfaction after the child was born."

So people who are predisposed to welcome parenthood are made happy by it, while the large swaths of selfish adults who didn't really want it in the first place discover that it makes them unhappy. That sounds like common sense to me, which is why I suppose we must forgive the academic authors of the 25 studies that missed it.

I suspect a little investigation will reveal as well that the studies on which Caplan hinges his parenting-doesn't-really-matter hypothesis are likewise poorly done. If the study sample is swamped by what passes for today's average parent, then there's no surprise that assessments of religiosity and strictness appear to have little bearing on outcomes. The average child on Elm Street looks an awful lot like the average child on Miller Street, not because parenting doesn't matter but because the average parent on Elm Street has no more idea than his counterpart on Miller Street how a child ought to be raised.

Or to be more blunt, in a land of midgets, most children are going to be short.

And my professor friends wonder why the average citizen is no more willing to trust their opinions than he does a used car salesman to give him a reliable vehicle. But as I try to remind my non-professor friends, not every Ph.D. lacks common sense. It's the 95 percent of them who give the other 5 percent a bad name.