Do children improve your life? Do parents regret having children?

It's complicated

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Do children make you happier?¹

Maybe not. In a famous study, Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues got about 900 employed women to report every one of their activities at the end of each day and how happy they were when they did them. They recalled being with their children as less enjoyable than many other activities, such as watching TV, shopping, or preparing food. Other research finds that when a child is born, parents experience a decrease in happiness that doesn’t go away for a long time, along with a drop in marital satisfaction that recovers only once the children leave the house. As psychologist Dan Gilbert puts it, “The only symptom of empty nest syndrome is nonstop smiling.”

This shouldn’t be too surprising. Having children involves financial struggle, sleep deprivation, and stress. For mothers, there is also the physical strain of pregnancy and breastfeeding. And children can turn a cheerful and loving relationship into a zero-sum battle over who gets to sleep and rest and work and who doesn’t. As the writer Jennifer Senior notes, children provoke a couple’s most frequent arguments—

more than money, more than work, more than in-laws, more than annoying personal habits, communication styles, leisure activities, commitment issues, bothersome friends, and sex.

Someone who doesn’t understand this is welcome to spend a full day with an angry two-year-old (or a sullen fifteen-year-old) and find out.

So, don’t have children, right?

It’s not as simple as that.