Happiness and Children

For me having children feels "closer to being a terminal value" than happiness does. So saying "you should have Children because it makes you happy" sounds like "You should have a meaningful job and a loving relationship with your wife because it decreases your chances of having a heart attack by 8%!" or "You should avoid murdering people because it looks bad on your resume".

I looked into this a couple years ago and wrote up what I found:

Summary: the research isn't that good, is all correlational, and how parenting affects your happiness varies widely by demographics (age, gender, income). Neither a simple "parenting makes people happy" nor a "parenting makes people miserable" are justified.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/erj/parenting_and_happiness/

Some links from LW:

Parenting and Happiness

• Review: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids

• Some thoughts on having children

• Is it immoral to have children?

• Rationality and being child-free

Any time I see anyone with children, it makes me super happy that I don't have any. :) (Of course, my 1 data point is a very insignificant sample size).

I don't have the citation to hand, but IIRC there's research suggesting higher variance among parents is the most significant effect.

IIRC Ed Diener seemed to have a nuanced and balanced summary of the research in his book Happiness: Unlocking the Secrets of Psychological Wealth, I think in Chapter 4.

Posting this here since I found it useful.

The pains and pleasures of parenting: when, why, and how is parenthood associated with more or less well-being?

I think the really worth-while stuff is in the section "When Is Parenthood Associated With Well-Being?
Exploring Moderators" which starts on page 33.

Does a human life include more happiness than anti-happiness or non-happiness? Does the quality of happiness in a human life rate above the quality of anti-happiness or non-happiness? If the answers are yes, then a new human means more and better happiness (including the happiness of the new human). If the answers are no...

I don't think the research that can be done is sufficient. What you really want to know is the effect on happiness of having children on YOU where your category may be that you want children or it may be that you don't want children. I think the subtlety of estimating the happiness of people who wanted children but didn't get them against those who wanted children but did get them is too high. I think it is established by research that we rewrite our own history depending on how things go. So if you talk to childless people many of them will understate or even negate that they wanted children, because their childlessness will cause them to look for the good in wnat happened. And similarly on the other side, people who get children will include people who assume that since they got children they must have wanted them.

In my case, I deliberately set out, and spent years to get children. It seems unlikely to me that I would have been just as happy if I failed at my long term project, especially considering how much I like my children and how involving they are. I don't know if this subtlety is captured in any studies.

Personally, I'm not exactly thrilled with life, so I don't necessarily want to replicate that anyway. But at the same time it's not like I want humanity to die out. So ethically it seems complex.