What Becoming a Parent Really Does to Your Happiness

The Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman demonstrated in research that, compared to other activities, parents do not generally enjoy spending time with their children. One of the reasons for this is that parents are distracted by other activities or people, and when their attention is divided they find the experience strenuous and drain

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert cites several other studies showing that the happiness of couples declines after the birth of children and does not rise again until their offspring leave home.38

Other researchers have reported that couples that do have children experience higher levels of tension, depression, and emotional distress than couples without children.37

The more money you make, the less likely you are to place ‘being a parent’ at the center of your identity. Part of this probably has to do with the fact that middle and upper-income people are more likely to understand their identity  as  their job, but even that doesn’t fully explain this stat. Instead, I’d argue that bourgeois parents