I can feel it a slight, yet apparent shift. Has my "mommy gene" really begun to rear its denounced little head?
A few months ago, I dreamed that my cousin Julie's baby was in danger. He was in the middle of a busy intersection. Intrinsically, I hurled my own body in front of the cars to protect him. When I woke up, I realized that it was the first time I thought of my well being secondary; I realized, "Yes, I would do anything to protect him."
Mind you, I do not want children anytime soon. But it was the first time I thought, "Maybe someday."
Unlike most parents-to-be, I have no illusions that kids will make me happier: they're loud and smelly and expensive and greedy little creatures. And a wide variety of academic research shows that, for these reasons, parents are often unhappier than their childless peers.
For example, a Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist, Daniel Kahneman, surveyed 909 working Texas women in 2004. His research found that child care ranked 16th in pleasurability out of 19 activities. (Among the endeavors they preferred: preparing food, watching TV, exercising, napping, shopping, and housework.)
This month's issue of New York magazine quoted the economist Andrew Oswald who's compared tens of thousands of Britons with children to those without. In most of his studies, he found that that, "mothers are less happy than fathers, and that single parents are less happy still, that babies and toddlers are the hardest, and that each successive child produces diminishing returns."
Then why might the idea of having a child (let alone children) still sound appealing? Perhaps it's because women were born to breed yadda yadda yadda ... But I just don't think so.
A trio of sociologists named Suzanne M. Bianchi, John P. Robinson, and Melissa A. Milkie complied data about family statistics in correlation with time management in Changing Rhythms of American Family Life. They found that compared to 1975, all parents spend more time today with their children today.
When considering the rush of women into the workforce, it's no wonder why today's married mothers have so much less leisure time (5.4 fewer hours per week; 71 percent say they crave more time for themselves, as do 57 percent of married fathers).
With no alone-/down-time for themselves, it's even more difficult to be with your significant other. Psychologists W. Keith Campbell and Jean Twenge did an analysis of 97 children-and-marital-satisfaction studies stretching back to the seventies. When they published their findings in 2003, not only did they find that couples' overall marital satisfaction went down when they had kids, they found that every successive generation was more put out by having them than the last.
This is especially so for the current generation.
"They become parents later in life," Campbell said. "There's a loss of freedom, a loss of autonomy. It's totally different from going from your parents' house to immediately having a baby. Now you know what you're giving up."
Here are the brutal realities about children:
They're loud, smelly, expensive and greedy.
They deprive parents of much-needed leisure/alone time.
They drive a huge steak through the once rapid hearts of lovers.
They make you less happy.
So if having children expose the ocean between our fantasies and realities of the white picket fence, why do people - why might I someday - want children?
"You gave me a reason to live so many times," my mom said to me recently.
Maybe children give us a purpose in life. And maybe that purpose is happiness.
Sarah T. Schwab is a Sunday OBSERVER contributor. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com or view her Web site at www.SarahTSchwab.com