Is joyful parenthood overrated?

Raising a child is emotionally and intellectually draining, and often requires professional sacrifice, financial hardship and declines in marital satisfaction. However, many parents still insist that their children are the source of happiness and fulfilment in their lives. Now, a new study has suggested that parents often exaggerate parental joy as a way to justify the huge investment that kids require. Psychological scientists Richard Eibach and Steven Mock from the University of Waterloo explored the role self-justification plays in parental beliefs about their choice to have and raise children. More specifically, they wanted to focus on parental views of the economic hardships they have endured while raising their children. The researchers recruited 80 fathers and mothers, each parent with at least one child under age 18. Half of the parents were primed to focus on the financial costs of parenting. They read a government document estimating that the costs of raising a child to age 18 exceed 190,000 dollars. The other half got this information as well, but they also read about the financial benefits of parenting - the fact that adult children often provide financial and practical support to aging parents. The study subjects then took two psychological tests - one to measure how much they idealized parenting and the other to assess their feelings of discomfort and uneasiness during the experiment. Eibach and Mock found that parents whose feelings of emotional discomfort were measured immediately after priming their thoughts about cost felt much worse than the parents with a more mixed view of parenting. But if they were first given the opportunity to idealize parenting and family life, and then measured their conflicted feelings, those negative feelings were gone. In a second study, the parents were again primed to think about their pricey life choice or both the costs and benefits of parenting. This time, the researchers asked the parents about their intrinsic enjoyment of various life activities, such as spending time with their children or engaging in their favourite personal activity. They also asked them how much leisure time they hoped to spend doing something with their child on their next day off from work. Parents who had the high costs of children in mind said that they enjoyed spending time with their children, and they also anticipated spending more leisure time with their kids. Eibach and Mock put their findings into a historical perspective. In earlier days, children actually had economic value; they worked on farms or brought home paychecks, and they did not cost that much. As the value of children diminished, and the costs escalated, the belief that parenthood is emotionally rewarding gained currency. In that sense, the myth of parental joy is a modern psychological phenomenon.