Your social-media feed is full of birth announcements, and you and your spouse are thinking it might be time to have kids of your own. Then the questions start popping up: How will children impact our lives? What do we have to give up? What will having kids do to our marriage? Will kids make us happier? Or will we just be tired and stressed?
So you do what many of us do: Ask Google. You hit enter, and the results are endless. Where do you begin?
Countless people have tackled this question. A large body of research shows that parents are indeed less happy and experience more depression and anxiety. And often, they have less fulfilling marriages than non-parents.
One study involving 22 countries found that the emotional and financial costs of having children outweigh the emotional rewards. Ask any parent, and they’ll acknowledge that having kids is expensive and exhausting. Parents never have enough time, lose sleep often, struggle to find quality child care and constantly battle work-family balance.
That’s heavy, but it’s the reality of parenting. You may be thinking, “Well, that settles it. No kids!”