A new study suggests that having children doesn’t make you happy.  Or perhaps I should rephrase.  A new study suggests that people with children report lower happiness levels than those without.  This is unexpected, to be sure:

In fact, no group of parents-married, single, step or even empty nest-reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.

This is a complicated matter.  How would one explain such results?

For the childless, all this research must certainly feel redeeming. As for those of us with kids, well, the news isn’t all bad. Parents still report feeling a greater sense of purpose and meaning in their lives than those who’ve never had kids.

But still, how do you explain that parents show less happiness than non-parents?  The easy answer is that kids are no fun, but it seems it would be more complicated than that.  My answer is that happiness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. 

There are two kinds of moms.  The kinds who put their kids in daycare, and the kinds who don’t.  The former group is subdivided into those who work and those who play.  The latter group consists of women who work at home or who have family to tend to the babies.  In my experience, women only hang out with other women who share their proclivities for, or against, daycare.  Women on one side of the line typically have strong feelings about women on the other side of the line.  At least that’s my experience.

My wife was a nanny for several years, and then worked at a daycare for a year.  The daycare was the most exhausting job she’s ever had.  All I could think was: you get to wear shorts and tennis shoes all day long, you get to develop real relationships with children, you get to be outside much of the time, and so on.  All she said in reply was: I spend my day cleaning snot and human waste from objects and people, including myself; I work with colleagues who are irrational, demanding, exhausted, and confused (the babies and the staff); and I spend much of my energy wondering how much these children would be better served by care from a member of their own families, including their parents.  And as for me, after working in the nursery during Sunday school and church for a few Sundays, I think I’ll keep my day job.

In Standardized Childhood sociologist Bruce Fuller describes how in the last 40 years, increasingly desperate working parents have turned to formal institutions to care for the youngest of children-in 1970 about 25 percent of 4-year-olds were in preschool; by 2000 more than 60 percent were. He describes America as having a “ragged non-system of child care” with the most recent statistics showing there are 113,000 nonprofit preschools across the country “situated in YWCAs, church basements, even licensed homes where women take in small gaggles of children.”

Over the decades, policy debates have raged and quieted over the need for and the benefits of universal preschool. (We’re currently in a quiet period.) But no one has resolved the tension between parents’ desire for day care that is high-quality and low-cost. Low-cost means low pay for the workers, which means high turnover, which means lower quality.

Daycare is a tender, complicated issue, because it touches on issues of gender roles, parenting roles, economic abilities, and ultimately the formation of the character and minds and abilities of our children.  So it won’t surprise me if some of your comments are full of invective.

Everybody’s got an opinion about A.D.D. and A.D.H.D., about all the drugs that we give to children, and about the implications of what it all means.  Which is to say, don’t these kids just need a swift kick in the pants?  The answer to the question is not as easy as we want it to be.  Yet, concerns about overmedicating children have many thinking about how to help these children without doping them into zombies.

The most common strategy involves diet changes, like giving up processed foods, sugars and food additives. About 20 percent of children with the disorder have been given some form of herbal therapy; others have tried supplements like vitamins and fish oil or have used biofeedback, massage and yoga.

Unfortunately, there’s no data to back up the use of herbal remedies, but that doesn’t mean people won’t try.  Read this article if you teach or raise an A.D.H.D. child.

Something unusual happened to me this past weekend.  When my wife and I were about to leave the house for dinner on Friday night, the babysitter explained that she had no cell phone.  Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles.  A teenager with no cell phone.  I wanted to hug her, and her parents.  They had managed to stem the technological tide in their home.  The girl looked normal.  She’d never been beaten or abused for not having a cell phone.  She was well socialized and kind and even said Yes, sir and No, sir and Please and Thank you.  That got my wife and me talking about cell phones, and when kids should have them, and why.  I am no technoclast, wanting to flush anything invented in the last ten years.  I am also no technophile, willing to stand in line for it.  So I want to know, when will let our daughter have a phone?  Warren Buckleitner has some thoughts on the issue, but I’m not sure I like all of them.

I think the bigger question is, When will I flush my phone?  I will, one day.  Before I retire, too.  I will do it. 

Here’s one for a future collection of great essays.  It’s from Joseph Epstein, and the title: “The Kindergarchy.”  Epstein is writing about how children came to rule the world: “Children have gone from background to foreground figures in domestic life, with more and more attention centered on them, their upbringing, their small accomplishments, their right relationship with parents and grandparents. For the past 30 years at least, we have been lavishing vast expense and anxiety on our children in ways that are unprecedented in American and in perhaps any other national life.”  I’ll just excerpt some rich paragraphs.

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It was not quite 8 a.m. and as I was walking with Spider down streets still devoid of people, a little boy I don’t know called out to me heartily from his front porch: “Today’s my birthday!”

The notion of it was suddenly utterly delightful to me, as was this shared secret with a fellow earth traveler in an unrepeatable moment in time. “Is it really! That’s fantastic!” I said. “What’s the date today?” He cocked his head to think a second or two: “March 19^th.” “How old are you now?” “Six!” “I hope you have a wonderful birthday today!” I said (Everything was exclamation points.) “I will!” he said, as a foregone conclusion.

Remember the days when you didn’t need context to bring up a subject? All thoughts important to you were instantly relevant. Your friends, to their undying credit, didn’t think you weird but were on board without missing a beat, and ready to go with the flow.

Remember the days when you could expect that something that was good news to you would of course be good news to everyone? Even some strange middle-aged lady walking her dog?

No wonder God loves children especially. I wonder if I can become enough like one again that people over age six will feel free to tell me something out of context, and be able to trust that I care.

“Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it” (Luke 18:17)

I have a friend who helps coach a local track club, which includes children from high-school age all the way down to eight year-olds. Many of the children have a good time, she says, but some are there only because their parents want to see them win. Often times, her job is counselor more than coach, consoling girls who are crying because their parents have yelled at them not to be wimps, or walking beside children whose fuel is less physical than a growing emotional hatred for the adults who force them to engage in this activity that they don’t even like. These particular parents, she notes, have several things in common, like the fact that they tend to dress as if they are the ones competing, their loud declarations about their own athletic prowess, and their frequent disregard for their children, beyond yelling at them when they lag behind and clapping for them when they break the tape.

In a recent conversation with Harvard psychologist and author Howard Gardner, I asked him what advice he has for parents. Gardner, some of you may know, developed the concept of “multiple intelligences,” the theory that instead of just the math, logic, and linguistic skills measured by traditional IQ tests, there are other intelligences, like musical, spatial, interpersonal, and so on. Gardner’s theory has sparked considerable education debate and discussion for the past quarter century, and so I was curious what he might say about raising children.

Gardner told me we should avoid “positive and negative narcissism.” Positive narcissism, he explained, is manifested in a drive to make our children excel at whatever we are (or were) good at. Negative narcissism results in driving them to succeed where we failed. Both, of course, originate in selfishness, and describe perfectly the parents who make my friend’s coaching job so difficult.

Anyone involved in high-school athletics has seen parents (and coaches) like that, and they are a disgusting lot. It was only when recently reading Exodus, however, that I made a connection: “You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath…” Parents who drive their children to be what they imagine they once were, or to be what they themselves wanted to be, are fashioning idols. How fitting, in our narcissistic age, that a dominant idol is not one of fertility, or protection, or victory, but the self.

It’s easy to judge these egregious examples, but then I began to think about my relationships with my own children. My wife and I joke about the coming blessed day, when all of them are able to read to themselves. Oh, the blissful rainy Saturdays, all of us sprawled about our living room in front of a fire, reading Dostoevsky and Goudge and Percy and Agee!

But what if one of them doesn’t care to read Robert Penn Warren? What if he decides that “genuine” literature is boring next to Robert Ludlum or (horrors!) L. Ron Hubbard? What if he prefers Band of Brothers to The Persian Wars? Become a Better You to Fear and Trembling? Almost as bad, what if he doesn’t care to read at all? What if his heart’s desire is met by rebuilding engines, or (horrors, again!) slinging a ball at a hoop?

I suppose I have my own idols, my own sense of what I want my children to be, derived in many ways from what I imagine I am and could be. It’s so much easier to smash someone else’s idols, isn’t it?

What I try to remember is that they are gifts, these children, given to us for a precious short time, and it is our job to train them up in the way they should go — not the way we would go, or the way we imagine would lead to greatest applause for us as parents, or least anxiety (think, here of the parents and grandparents to missionaries in dangerous parts of the world). Train them up in the way they should go, which means casting down our idols.

Sometimes I believe it’s a full-time occupation, this casting down of idols, for just as soon as I think I have my shelves cleared, I spy another one lurking in the dust and shadows. So, what idols do you need to cast off? Are you training your children in the way they should go? Keep pressing toward the goal.

“The kids these days are just rude.”

“They show no respect to their elders.

“The kids back in my day didn’t say and do things like that.” 

Blah, blah, blah.

Plato said things like this, Confucius said things like this, the conservatives of just about every day say things like this.  Now, just because we all say this doesn’t mean it’s not true.  But “youth bashing” is an interesting thing. 

Richard P. Eibach, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, has found that exaggerated beliefs in social decline are widespread - largely because people tend to mistake changes in themselves for changes in the external world. “Our automatic assumption is something real has changed,” Mr. Eibach said. “It takes extra thought to realize that something about your own perspective or the information you’re receiving may have changed.”

I’d have to say that, yes, we don’t really see how rude, etc., youth can be until we grow out of it.  But the reaction doesn’t need to be youth bashing.  It needs to be a recognition that kids have something to learn and a decision to teach them. 

Test or no test, Mr. Arnett worries that “youth bashing” has become so common that accomplishments tend to be forgotten, like the fact that young people today have a closer relationship with their parents than existed between children and their parents in the 1960s (”They really understand things from their parents’ perspective,” Mr. Arnett said), or that they popularized the alternative spring break in which a student opts to spend a vacation helping people in a third world country instead of chugging 40s in Cancún.

If you teach kids, or are in any kind of position where you interact with them (minister, coach, parent, etc.), then the surest way to neutralize your persuasive ability with them is to tell them that Kids In Your Day Were So Much More Respectful.  It might be true, but hush your mouth about it and show them how to be.  Conservatives love to talk about the Good Old Days.  Let’s remember our own youthful sins, forgive our kids, and teach them.

This Times editorial is just another example of a well-meaning educator proffering a terrible solution to a real problem.  The problem: studies show that teenagers are on different biological clocks than the rest of us, which means they go to bed later and wake up later.  As such, the first hour of the school day is a waste, with many teens sleepy or asleep.  (The science itself seems questionable here.  If kids have delayed biological clocks, just do what they had to do on the farm: get over it.)  The proffered solution, however, is this: start the school day later.

Of course, when school starts later, it has to end later. But instead of viewing this as a liability, we should see it as an opportunity to extend the day even further until 5 p.m. or later, not just for high school students but for those in elementary and middle school as well. It would help working parents if their children were on the same basic schedule.

But there are other reasons to start and end school at a later time. According to Paul Reville, a professor of education policy at Harvard and chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education, “Trying to cram everything our 21st-century students need into a 19th-century six-and-a-half-hour day just isn’t working.” He says that children learn more at a less frantic pace, and that lengthening the school day would help “close the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their better-off peers.”

Yes, that’s right.  Take kids away from their families for even longer every day.  Now, in a way, all of this makes a twisted kind of sense, but the solution (longer school day) won’t seem to help the problem.  We’ve been making the school day longer and longer for decades, and it hasn’t helped.  We’ve been cramming more subjects into it, and it hasn’t helped.  Giving educators more time (and more money) won’t appear to help K-12 education in the U.S.  Just one more hopeful (and well-intended) bandage on a mortally wounded system.

In this Times op-ed, Caitlin Flanagan admits that teenage sexuality can be a bad thing.  Quite an admission from a newspaper and an elite that continues to talk about sexuality mostly in the rhetoric of liberation.  She even manages to compliment the Victorians for their prudishness:

Pregnancy robs a teenager of her girlhood. This stark fact is one reason girls used to be so carefully guarded and protected - in a system that at once limited their horizons and safeguarded them from devastating consequences. The feminist historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg has written that “however prudish and ‘uptight’ the Victorians were, our ancestors had a deep commitment to girls.”

We, too, have a deep commitment to girls, and ours centers not on protecting their chastity, but on supporting their ability to compete with boys, to be free - perhaps for the first time in history - from the restraints that kept women from achieving on the same level. Now we have to ask ourselves this question: Does the full enfranchisement of girls depend on their being sexually liberated? And if it does, can we somehow change or diminish among the very young the trauma of pregnancy, the occasional result of even safe sex?

Can you believe this?  She would seem to suggest that, for girls to be “equal” with boys, they should be spared the “trauma of pregnancy”!  The opening of this op-ed seemed to progressive, so new and different, and by the end, I realize that this is the same thing we’ve heard from the left for decades: we must transcend biology!