Today Show Hosts Experience Another Bout of Cognitive Dissonance

If you've ever taken a psychology class, you may have heard the term cognitive dissonance. Simply stated, it refers to an uneasy state of mind in which a person tries to maintain two contradicting ideas at the same time. Well, I had to laugh out loud at this example of cognitive dissonance on display on the Today Show when the hosts report on research which shows that married couples with children have lower levels of marital satisfaction. Watch how the hosts - who, in keeping with the pro-parenthood stance of the show, do their best to rationalize, justify and minimize the impact of this research. You can just feel their unease as they try to stomach this research which flies in the face of the pro-parenthood messages they are constantly pedaling.



This isn't the Today Show's first offense on this matter. Remember this?

While the Today Show does its best to poo-poo and pay minimal lip service to the research on the negative impact of children on marriage and on happiness, I am going to re-publish for you graduate level research which pays this subject the attention it deserves and doesn't soft-pedal on the issue of what children do to marriages and levels of personal happiness.

From No to Children, Yes to Childfreedom: Pronatalism and the Perceptions and Experiences of Childfree Women:

"The relational advantages of childfreedom are most pronounced in the area of marital satisfaction. Several studies have concluded that childfree marriages are happier than the marriages of parents. Crohan explored how styles of conflict resolution change for spouses after they become parents using data from the first and third waves of the First Years of Marriage Study conducted at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. Results showed that spouses who became parents report lower marital happiness and more frequent conflicts after the transition than before having children. White parents also reported higher marital tension.

Feldman studied intentional parents and childfree couples and found that while levels of marital satisfaction were similar, childfree couples have significantly more positive marital interactions for example, “having fun away from home”, “having a stimulating exchange of ideas”, “working together on a project” and “having sexual relations” more often. He found that childfree marriages are more interactive, with more conversations in the areas of “work”, “health”, “feelings”, “cultural” topics, “mutual friends”, “politics” and “sexual relations”. As would be expected, parents talked more frequently than nonparents about rearing children. Similarly, Somers, who conducted a study comparing childfree and parents, found the childfree groups scored higher on marital satisfaction and showed significantly higher levels of cohesion (working together, discussing and exchanging ideas) than parents. Additionally, the childfree showed higher levels of dyadic satisfaction (measured by the frequency of quarrels, threats of divorce) and scored higher on the life satisfaction scale than parents. Callan, who interviewed 60 mothers, 36 voluntarily childless wives and 53 infertile women noted that the childfree women reported more time with their husbands including higher levels of consensus and more exchanges of ideas.

Twenge, Campbell and Foster, who conducted a meta-analytic review on 97 articles containing 148 data points on parenthood and marital satisfaction, concluded that parents report lower marital satisfaction than non-parents and that there is a significant negative correlation between marital satisfaction and the number of children. The effect of parenthood on marital satisfaction is more negative among high socioeconomic groups, younger birth cohorts and in more recent years. The data suggest that role conflicts and restriction of freedom are responsible for this decrease in marital satisfaction.

Renne, who conducted a study on 4,452 married couples (including childless couples, couples rearing children, and couples with children no longer living at home), found that parenthood detracts from the morale and health of married persons, particularly among younger couples. Childless marriages were found to be happier, even among older couples and while childless marriages appeared to improve with time, the marriages of parent couples tended to deteriorate. Renne concluded that childless marriages are happier, regardless of the length of marriage or age of the couple.

Cowan and Cowan, authors of When Partners Become Parents: The Big Life Change for Couples, describe what happens to parents when they become parents. Upon having a child, the household tasks become more specialized and the division of labor with respect to child care falls more to the mother than the father. Their study, as well as a study by Pleck, indicate that husbands whose wives are employed do little more housework and caring for the children than husbands whose wives do not work outside the home.

'The most problematic issue for men and women in the early family years is who cares for the children. Neither the traditional male/female division nor the new egalitarian sharing arrangements stand out as ideal: Modern couples get penalized either way. When one parent brings home the bacon while the other stays home to look after the child, both can feel underappreciated and strapped economically, which burdens the marriage and the children. When both parents work outside the family, they tend to feel better about themselves and about their contributions to the family economy, but parents and children are breathless, often missing the opportunity for intimate moments.” (Cowan and Cowan, p. 203)'

In addition to having higher levels of marital satisfaction, childfree marriages tend to be more egalitarian with more freedom to modify conventional sex roles. Veevers explains that in ordinary families, “the coming of children tends to accentuate biological sex differences and to buttress conventional sex role expectations. The birth of a baby signals the beginning of a traditional division of labor with the woman taking on more of the childbearing chores, regardless of her employment status outside the home.” (p. 104). By comparison, childfree couples maintain roles which are interchangeable and more equal. Without the constraints of child care, childfree couples are better able to negotiate an equal partnership, especially since both partners are likely to work outside the home and are therefore likely to see themselves as equal contributors to the marriage."
__________________________________________________________
Another researcher, Harvard Psychologist Dan Gilbert, has also concluded that parenthood has a negative impact on happiness. The Sydney Morning Herald did an article on this aspect of his book which I previously posted here.

Happy reading!

A Dad Laments: I Miss My Wife

Thanks to Wag the Dog for forwarding me this article from Parenting.com in which a dad discusses how having kids has wreaked havoc on his marriage.

Happiness & Parenthood: An Expert's View

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Parenthood doesn't lead to joy: expert

May 8, 2008 -

Marriage will make you happy, and money won't hurt. But if you're seeking joy in your life it's probably best not to have children, a Harvard academic has told a Sydney conference.

The troika of experiences is conventionally considered to be the cornerstone of happiness, but such thinking does not stand up to scientific scrutiny, Harvard University psychology professor Daniel Gilbert says. According to the scientific and economic research, only marriage proved to be a constant source of joy. "Figures show that married people are in almost every way happier than unmarried people -whether they are single, divorced, cohabiting," he told the Happiness and its Causes conference at Darling Harbour. "Married people live longer, married people earn more money per capita, married people have more sex and enjoy it more. "Married people seem to be happier on every dimension that you can imagine."

Money, he said, could buy you happiness - just not as much happiness as people think. "Money buys you a lot of happiness first and then it buys you less and less - every dollar buys you less happiness as the dollar before, and you reach a point where money is doing almost nothing for your happiness," he said. "But it's never the case that more money makes you sadder. If you get millions and millions you never get depressed about it."

The happiness people gained from money was only relative, he said. Having money only makes a difference if we have more money than the next person. "If all of us double our income tomorrow we might as well have not have had an increase in income at all," he said.

Professor Gilbert left the sacred cow of parenthood for last, saying that despite the belief children were the apples of our eyes, they actually had a negative impact on happiness. The more kids you have, the sadder you are likely to be, he said. US and European studies over the past 10 to 15 years showed people's happiness did spike while they were expecting a baby, but it sharply plummeted after the child was born.

The nadir of people's happiness came when children reached the ages of 12-16, and only recovered when they had flown the coop, he said. "In reality ... children do seem to increase happiness as long as you're expecting them, but as soon as you have them, trouble sets in," he said. "People are extremely happy before they have children and then their happiness goes down, and it takes another big hit when kids reach adolescence.

"When does it come back to it's original baseline? Oh, about the time the children grow up and go away."

Explaining why the statistics conflicted with most people's view of parenthood, Prof Gilbert made the unusual comparison to buying a pair of Armani socks. "When people own Armani socks they can't stop telling you they are the best socks, the most amazing socks," he said. "(But) I suspect that one of the reasons that people who own Armani socks think they are wonderful is because they have paid $US85 ($A90.30) for a pair.

"The psychologists tell us that we like things more when we pay for them - what does that sound like? It sounds like children. "We pay for them in time, attention, blood, sweat and tears - what kind of idiots would we be to devote all of that to the rearing of our young if they'd didn't bring us some happiness?"

The fact that parenthood crowds out all other things in life could explain why we consider children as our greatest source of joy, he said. "Parents tell me all the time that: 'My child is my greatest source of joy'," he said. "My reply is that: 'Yes, when you have one source of joy, it's bound to be your greatest'.

__________________________________________

Interesting post-script to this article: Dr. Gilbert is a parent.