The United States is awash with politicians who promote
“family values” as a fundamental requirement for a healthy nation. They are usually referring to a nuclear
family with a few children and two straight parents. If that is the ideal, one would think that
said politicians would do more to make it easier to raise a family. It is not uncommon to encounter headlines
such as People Without Kids Are Way Happier Than Parents in the U.S. The
consensus seems to agree with the accuracy of that statement. What is it about the US that renders parents
unhappy? Is the US unique in this
respect? Is there a pain associated with
modern parenthood that explains the lower fertility observed in the wealthier
nations that often leads to declining populations?
There is an organization called the Council on
Contemporary Families (CCF) that set out to answer those questions. Their findings are summarized in CCF BRIEF: Parenting and Happiness in 22 Countries. They refer to the degree
to which parents are less happy than nonparents as the “happiness penalty.”
“Many people now know that
parents in the United States report being less happy than nonparents, but there
is considerable disagreement about why parents pay a “happiness penalty,” along
with conflicting reports about whether this is true in most contemporary
cultures. To explore these questions, our team, with support from the National
Science Foundation, examined comparative data from 22 European and
English-speaking countries.”
The CCF concludes that this happiness penalty is not
inevitable and that there are countries in which parenthood actually leads to
greater happiness.
“The good news is that parents
are not doomed to be unhappier than nonparents. Our results indicate that the parental
‘happiness penalty’ varies substantially from country to country, and is not an
inevitable accompaniment of contemporary family life. In fact, in some
countries, such as Norway and Hungary, parents are actually happier than
nonparents!”
However, the US was notably deficient in parental
happiness compared to other countries, a curious situation for a supposedly family-values
nation.
“The bad news is that of the 22
countries we studied, the U.S. has the largest happiness shortfall among
parents compared to nonparents, significantly larger than the gap found in
Great Britain and Australia.”
Why should that be?
The CCF has a very simple and obvious explanation. Parental happiness increases when governments
provide services that make life easier for parents to earn a living and raise children. The US is the worst performer because it has
the most family-unfriendly policies of any of the other countries studied.
“What we found was astonishing.
The negative effects of parenthood on happiness were entirely explained by the presence
or absence of social policies allowing parents to better combine paid work with
family obligations. And this was true for both mothers and fathers.
Countries with better family policy “packages” had no happiness gap between
parents and non-parents.”
Services like low-cost childcare, healthcare, education,
and generous family leave policies that provide flexibility in dealing with the
contingencies associated with raising children can be provided through general
taxation more efficiently by governments than by parents who must seek them on
the open market. Not surprisingly, these
are the same policies that lead to greater happiness for a population as a whole.
“Furthermore, the positive
effects of good family support policies for parents were not achieved at the
expense of non-parents, as some commentators have claimed might be the case.
The policies that helped parents the most were policies that also improved the
happiness of everyone in that country, whether they had children or not.
Policies such as guaranteed minimum paid sick and vacation days make everyone happier, but they had an
extra happiness bonus for parents of minor children.”
The US has been experienced a growing population in
recent years that is due mainly to immigration.
Non-immigrant citizens seem to have a fertility level that is right
around the value necessary to maintain a constant population. Are their long-term ramifications for the
nation from continuing the US policy of making it extremely difficult and
expensive to raise children? An article in The Economist provided some relevant information that addresses
that issue.
The subject for The
Economist was the tendency of women to refrain from having children. The article concluded that the trend to have
children later in life condensed the period in which women could have
children. That shortened period could be
eliminated entirely for some who undergo economic shocks and decide to delay
having children. Consider the following
data.
Plotted for the United States are the percentages of
women who are childless at a given age as related to their year of birth. The trend to give birth later in life is
apparent, but generally women eventually had children at a more or less constant
rate—at least until the housing bubble and the Great Recession that
followed. In the boom years just after
the turn of this century women were more likely to have children. That trend ended and turned around during the
Great Recession. The trend is most noticeable
for the 30-year-olds. But note that the
recession has come and gone and the 30-year-olds continue to put off childbirth
at an increasing rate. The curve for
women at age 35 begins to show the same trend.
It is too early to assume that these curves can be
extrapolated and that deciding to not have children might become ever more
common. But one would think that
politicians who believe so fervently in the wisdom of markets would realize
that making parenthood expensive and difficult might cause people to forego
that burden.
The interested reader might find the following articles
informative:
No comments:
Post a Comment