Child Custody Devotional - “Happy” is over...

An article by the founder of https://positivepsychology.com/ caught my eye, “Why You Should Have Never Had Kids (If You Want To Be Happy, That Is)”, and I confess that its half-troll, half-clickbait title got me. 

The thrust of the article, written by Seph Fontane Pennock, is that peer-reviewed, academic research supports a conclusion that the happiest times of parents’ married lives are before having children and after the children have left the home to start their own lives in post-secondary education or otherwise and that, here’s the kicker, the notion that we are supposed to be “happy” raising our children is part of the problem itself.

We’ve written before that parents and relative caregivers are better-suited to “Seek Progress” rather than seek “Happy” (https://www.thinkfoxtrot.com/blog/in-child-custody-dont-seek-happy-seek-progress/). A similar, semantic distinction is necessary here. Mr. Pennock points out that children are a significant source of “life satisfaction, self-esteem and meaning.” Those sound like pretty good things. (Although if you know our philosophy at Foxtrot, we acknowledge the dangers of having external sources of those things, especially when those sources can be taken away unfairly).

On a fundamental, if trite, level, it’s this simple. We might be happy if we could just drink wine and watch netflix, or spend the rest of our lives at Disney World, (yes, it’s still the happiest place on Earth even without children (think Epcot, not Magic Kingdom) and we’d be happier than plying our trade each day as parents, but it wouldn’t mean anything, not to us...and certainly not to anyone else.