Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Married Parents are Happier
There has been some back and forth about whether kids make parents happy or unhappy. A new study in the Journal of Happiness Studies says that kids make married parents happier. This makes sense to me. Marrying and raising a family together as a deliberate and permanent status is a coherent, whole project. It is not each piece that may or not make a couple happy, it is the package.
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4 comments:
It sounds like they're equating "life satisfaction" (presumably measured by oneself) with happiness. Seems like it should be an indirect measure, at best.
Since you brought up marriage again.
FYI
I think you may have mentioned these folks before when you commented on being a the big gathering of sociologists a while back. But Sunday before last a couple of sociologists from Middlebury (Essig and Owens) had piece in the Dallas Morning news opinion section.
"What if marriage is bad for You."
(www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-essig_08edi.28ea88f80.html)
They were specific in describing themselves as critical sociologists.
A key sentence:
We can dress up marriage in as many beautiful white wedding gowns as we like, but the fundamental fact remains: Marriage is a structure of rights and privileges for those who least need them and a culture of prestige for those who already have the highest levels of racial, economic and educational capital.
Ceemac, thanks for that foolish article. See the following blogpost.
Gruntled,
This bit of pop trivia may interest you. I was this morning watching on Youtube the video of Bryan Ferry's 1985 song "Slave to Love," when I noticed something rather remarkable. (Actually, it was pointed out by one of the Youtube commenters.)
"Slave to Love" is -- or maybe seems -- one of Ferry's classy paeans to erotic enchantment. Certainly much of the song is, but note that at the end of the video, as he's singing "The tide is turning, and so it seems, we're too young to reason, too grown up to dream" he's also sitting in a darkened bedoom, on the edge of the bed. Of course, one expects him to be crooning to his lover. As the camera pans down the bed, we see that he's looking at his sleeping child. In other words, it's a song about the maturation of erotic obsession into familial love.
I'm sure some people will find this trite or sentimetal, but as the father of two young daughters, I have to say that it struck me differently. Of course, it probably helps that I think Bryan Ferry more or less defines the word "suave."
The video is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYdF1qjMNks&feature=related
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