Kids, A Gift From God?

Well that's not a unanimous sentiment - especially not for those smarter-than-everyone, professional thinkers known as academics:

The economist Andrew Oswald, who's compared tens of thousands of Britons with children to those without, is at least inclined to view his data in a more positive light: "The broad message is not that children make you less happy; it's just that children don't make you more happy." That is, he tells me, unless you have more than one. "Then the studies show a more negative impact." As a rule, most studies show that mothers are less happy than fathers, that single parents are less happy still, that babies and toddlers are the hardest, and that each successive child produces diminishing returns. But some of the studies are grimmer than others. Robin Simon, a sociologist at Wake Forest University, says parents are more depressed than nonparents no matter what their circumstances--whether they're single or married, whether they have one child or four.

The idea that parents are less happy than nonparents has become so commonplace in academia that it was big news last year when the Journal of Happiness Studies published a Scottish paper declaring the opposite was true. "Contrary to much of the literature," said the introduction, "our results are consistent with an effect of children on life satisfaction that is positive, large and increasing in the number of children." Alas, the euphoria was short-lived. A few months later, the poor author discovered a coding error in his data, and the publication ran an erratum. "After correcting the problem," it read,"the main results of the paper no longer hold. The effect of children on the life satisfaction of married individuals is small, often negative, and never statistically significant."

Hah!

The idea that parents are less happy than nonparents has become so commonplace in academia...

But this is an interesting *study* and it's similar to one of my own.

Recently the C-Nut Analytics department polled 10,000 kids and asked them if having their particular parents made them happier or not.

A whopping, statistically-significant 96% said NO!

And in a related C-Nut Analytics study, it was found that academics and periodicals such as the New Yorker....not only impart misery to consumers, but they also have been statistically proven to DEFORM rather than inform minds.

BTW, who but taxpayers could have ever paid for a guy to study the *happiness* of ten thousand parents? How is that anything but pure junk science and utterly useless?