Earlier this month, I came across Jennifer Senior’s article “All Joy and No Fun: Why parents hate parenting” and it’s been weighing on my mind ever since. The article is fascinating throughout, so much so that I scarcely know where to start—really, you should read the entire article—but I’ve included a few choice excerpts (emphasis mine).

On the general trends and issues:

From the perspective of the species, it’s perfectly unmysterious why people have children. From the perspective of the individual, however, it’s more of a mystery than one might think. Most people assume that having children will make them happier. Yet a wide variety of academic research shows that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases are less so. This finding is surprisingly consistent, showing up across a range of disciplines. Perhaps the most oft-cited datum comes from a 2004 study by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist, who surveyed 909 working Texas women and found that child care ranked sixteenth in pleasurability out of nineteen activities. (Among the endeavors they preferred: preparing food, watching TV, exercising, talking on the phone, napping, shopping, housework.) This result also shows up regularly in relationship research, with children invariably reducing marital satisfaction. The economist Andrew Oswald, who’s compared tens of thousands of Britons with children to those without, is at least inclined to view his data in a more positive light: “The broad message is not that children make you less happy; it’s just that children don’t make you more happy.” That is, he tells me, unless you have more than one. “Then the studies show a more negative impact.” As a rule, most studies show that mothers are less happy than fathers, that single parents are less happy still, that babies and toddlers are the hardest, and that each successive child produces diminishing returns. But some of the studies are grimmer than others. Robin Simon, a sociologist at Wake Forest University, says parents are more depressed than nonparents no matter what their circumstances—whether they’re single or married, whether they have one child or four.

[...]

So what, precisely, is going on here? Why is this finding duplicated over and over again despite the fact that most parents believe it to be wrong?

One answer could simply be that parents are deluded, in the grip of some false consciousness that’s good for mankind but not for men and women in particular. Gilbert, a proud father and grandfather, would argue as much. He’s made a name for himself showing that we humans are pretty sorry predictors of what will make us happy, and to his mind, the yearning for children, the literal mother of all aspirations for so many, is a very good case in point—what children really do, he suspects, is offer moments of transcendence, not an overall improvement in well-being.

Perhaps. But there are less fatalistic explanations, too. And high among them is the possibility that parents don’t much enjoy parenting because the experience of raising children has fundamentally changed.

On society’s changing view of children:

Before urbanization, children were viewed as economic assets to their parents. If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store. But all of this dramatically changed with the moral and technological revolutions of modernity. As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed. (The Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes this transformation of a child’s value in five ruthless words: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”) Kids, in short, went from being our staffs to being our bosses.

On the potential downfalls of waiting to have children:

It wouldn’t be a particularly bold inference to say that the longer we put off having kids, the greater our expectations. “There’s all this buildup—as soon as I get this done, I’m going to have a baby, and it’s going to be a great reward!” says Ada Calhoun, the author of Instinctive Parenting and founding editor-in-chief of Babble, the online parenting site. “And then you’re like, ‘Wait, this is my reward? This nineteen-year grind?’”

When people wait to have children, they’re also bringing different sensibilities to the enterprise. They’ve spent their adult lives as professionals, believing there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing things; now they’re applying the same logic to the family-expansion business, and they’re surrounded by a marketplace that only affirms and reinforces this idea.

On the potential benefits of stronger welfare systems for parents:

One hates to invoke Scandinavia in stories about child-rearing, but it can’t be an accident that the one superbly designed study that said, unambiguously, that having kids makes you happier was done with Danish subjects. The researcher, Hans-Peter Kohler, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says he originally studied this question because he was intrigued by the declining fertility rates in Europe. One of the things he noticed is that countries with stronger welfare systems produce more children—and happier parents.

Of course, this should not be a surprise. If you are no longer fretting about spending too little time with your children after they’re born (because you have a year of paid maternity leave), if you’re no longer anxious about finding affordable child care once you go back to work (because the state subsidizes it), if you’re no longer wondering how to pay for your children’s education and health care (because they’re free)—well, it stands to reason that your own mental health would improve.

On the brutal reality of children:

This is the brutal reality about children—they’re such powerful stressors that small perforations in relationships can turn into deep fault lines.

[...]

This is another brutal reality about children: They expose the gulf between our fantasies about family and its spikier realities. They also mean parting with an old way of life, one with more freewheeling rhythms and richer opportunities for romance.

On the necessity of having a proper definition of “happiness”:

...for many of us, purpose is happiness—particularly those of us who find moment-to-moment happiness a bit elusive to begin with. Martin Seligman, the positive-psychology pioneer who is, famously, not a natural optimist, has always taken the view that happiness is best defined in the ancient Greek sense: leading a productive, purposeful life. And the way we take stock of that life, in the end, isn’t by how much fun we had, but what we did with it.

To say that parenting is difficult would be to make one of the greatest understatements possible. It’s a Herculean task, and at times, you simply find yourself unable to think of how you’re going to survive another hour, much less make it to the end of the day. It’s amazing—and sometimes disturbing—just how much children can wreck your life, or rather, wreck a particular version of your life. I’ve said this before, but from a certain perspective, having children is one of the dumbest decisions you can make, particularly if you value your autonomy (not to mention your financial security, personal time, and relationships with your peers).

But, from another perspective, having children is one of the greatest things you can ever do with your life. True, you’re helping to sustain the human race, but on a slightly more personal level, you are bringing new life into this world and playing an absolutely critical role in its creation and development. Children are a blessing, and it’s a blessing that absolutely annihilates many of our modern ideas (and idols) of happiness and joy. Which, again, seems like a rather obvious thing to say—but something that needs to be said nevertheless.

Or, as Albert Mohler (whose blog introduced me to Senior’s article) puts it:

Christians must see children as gifts from God, not as projects. We should see marriage and parenthood as a stewardship and privilege, not as a mere lifestyle choice. We must resist the cultural seductions and raise children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and understand family life as a crucible for holiness, not an experiment in happiness.

And when it comes to happiness, we must aim for something higher. Christians are called to joy and satisfaction in Christ, and to find joy in the duties and privileges of this earthly life. Every parent will know moments of honest unhappiness, but the Christian parent settles for nothing less than joy.

I’ll close with these thoughts: I know several people who have emphatically stated that they will never have children, for all sorts of reasons. And up until just a few years ago, I felt much the same way—again, for all sorts of reasons. But now that I have children of my own, I realize that while part of me is certainly envious of the freedom that my child-less friends have, there’s a deeper part that’s not envious at all. When I think of the totality of having children—the good, the bad, and the ugly—I’m glad I made the choice. I’m content with it. I wouldn’t miss this for anything.

Several years ago, I attended a family reunion where nearly all of my mother’s family got together for the first time in God knows how long. My grandfather—a wonderful, Godly man—expressed his gratitude at seeing his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren gathered together in one room. At that moment, I saw—perhaps for the first time in my life—the beauty of having a legacy, of having surrendered yourself to something bigger, something that transcends your own lifetime and even echoes on into eternity.

I think that was the moment when my usual objections to parenting began to wither away. I didn’t think children would make me happy or make my life more pleasant (plenty of stories of trials and hardships had disabused me of those notions). Rather, I was captivated, if you will, by the thought of sitting in a room when I’m in my eighties and being surrounded by my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—a rich legacy in which I, in God’s sovereignty, had been allowed to play a role.

It’s a thought that gets me through even the roughest days and nights of pooping, vomiting, kicking, screaming, and mysterious skin conditions.

I’ve read Rod Dreher‘s blog for awhile now, and while I’ve always found his entries interesting and thought-provoking, he’s been on a real roll for the past week or two. Here’s a small sampling:

We are all ideologues to some degree

...I hope Andrew [Sullivan] will recognize himself in his condemnation of the right-wing ideologues he rightly condemns here. He’s often an ideologue about the issues he cares most about, and abusively unfair to those he’s identified as his enemies. Is there any word more loaded and less meaningful than “Christianist”? It means, “Christians Andrew Sullivan doesn’t like.” It’s a way of slapping a label on that sort of Christian so their arguments and their concerns don’t have to be taken seriously. Andrew does the same thing, in principle, that he condemns others for. And guess what? So do I. And you, Reader, do too; if you don’t think you do, you are not examining yourself closely enough.

It’s human nature for us to make snap judgments of others, based on limited information and experience. I made a quick and emotional judgment about the Journolist thing based on what I know from personal experience about liberal bias in the media, and based on my own personal experience of very nearly being the professional victim of a group conspiring on its semi-private e-mail list to destroy me personally and professionally because they didn’t like serious questions I was raising about their beliefs in my journalism. I still believe I am right about Journolist, but upon reflection, especially reflection about the Shirley Sherrod story, I wish I had waited to get more information before reaching a conclusion. The point, though, is that the facts in the Journolist case fit my personal biases like a glove, and I thought I knew what I was seeing. The truth is more complicated.

It is impossible to make completely objective judgments. We cannot possibly know everything about people. We do the best with the information we have. But if I’ve learned anything in the past decade of thinking and writing, it’s an appreciation for the limitations of my own judgment. This is a lesson I have to learn almost every day, and probably will keep learning until the moment of my death. It’s called humility, and it’s the unfortunate truth that we often have to be humiliated by our own foolishness and rashness to learn it.

What if you were an Auschwitz guard?

A friend passed on an anecdote the other day. A friend of his was at a dinner party at which everybody around the table was discussing what they would do if they were an inmate in a Nazi concentration camp. My friend’s friend said that the more interesting question is: What would you do if you were a Nazi concentration camp guard?

That really is the more interesting question. It’s a radical iteration of a moral dilemma that many of us face: what do you do if your livelihood depends on the contribution of your labor to an unjust, even an evil, system? It’s easy to say, “I’d quit, and join the resistance.” But would you really? What if your family might go hungry if you quit, or otherwise suffer? It’s one thing to be prepared to suffer personally for your convictions, but to put your spouse and children at risk is another. I’m not saying it would be right, obviously, to labor as a concentration camp guard under any conditions. I am saying, though, that some of us have jobs, or are involved in industries, that we know in our hearts are immoral. But we see no way out, because we have become enmeshed in the system. What to do? This is what haunts me when I think about what if I had grown up under segregation: what would I, a white person, have done? It turns out that it’s easier (at least for me) to imagine what I would have done as a victim of cruelty or oppression than as someone who was part of a system that perpetrates it.

Information, the basis of reality

Yesterday at the Foundation, I heard a presentation by Hyung Choi, a physicist, philosopher and theologian who is in charge of our grant-giving in mathematics and the physical sciences. Hyung said that the emergence of quantum mechanics caused a revolution in our entire understanding of the way reality worked. He said we are now undergoing a second revolution, building on the first: today, physicists are exploring the idea that the basis of reality is not energy and matter, but information. He gave a quote by Anton Zeilinger, one of the world’s great physicists, who said that the first syllables of the Gospel of John—“In the beginning was the Word…” actually tells us something profound about reality.

[...]

I am wondering, though, about the philosophical and theological implications of this work. It seems to me that information, to have any definition, must have a receiver (is a sound really a sound if it is not received?). In other words, information must have a knower to be known. Can the purpose of the universe, built into its very structure, be relational—that is, to know and to be known? Is consciousness the telos of Creation? For the Christian, of course, the point of our existence is to know God, our Creator, and to exist in transformative relationship with Him. Orthodox Christianity is panentheistic, meaning it sees God, in his energies, as immanent in all matter, though matter is not essentially God. In the Orthodox view of the Fall, humankind, through the exercise of its free will, disrupted the harmonious order of Creation; salvation for the Orthodox, then, is not a legal process, but one of regeneration and healing—restoring harmonious order to creation, spiritually and physically.

When believing a lie is beneficial

My friend David Rieff writes about how believing the lie about one’s own intentions can lead to all kinds of trouble, re: intervention in foreign people’s affairs. But what I find more troubling is the thought that one might be compelled to believe lies about the manifest destiny of one’s own culture, and the humanity of the enemy, in order to survive as a culture. If you were a Comanche in 1850, you didn’t have the luxury of being broad-minded and humanitarian towards the white man. He was coming to take your land, which would destroy your civilization. You had to fight; softness meant cultural extinction. So you fought the best way you knew how, which included gang rape of the enemy’s women, kidnapping, and gruesome tortures. A broad-minded Comanche was a dead Comanche. (Similarly, if you were an Apache, you couldn’t afford to stop to think about what the world must look like from the point of view of a Comanche.) If you were on the Plains as a white settler in 1850, you couldn’t afford to be thoughtful and humane about the Indians. That would have been a great way to die. Perhaps your father ought not have moved you and your family out to the territory, but there you were, and you had to fight for your life. The only way you could do what you had to do to survive, and ultimately prevail, was to cast out all doubts about your people and their mission, and to harden yourself against the enemy.

What does it mean for our political culture if people assume this cutthroat logic is permissible during peacetime? I mean, if people assume that things they value greatly are a threat, so anything they do to the Enemy for the sake of preserving their tribe is justified? Because guess what, we’re living in those times now.

On a sidenote, Dreher will soon be leaving Beliefnet and start blogging at Big Questions Online, a new web magazine from the Templeton Foundation—but not before he has posted 1,000 entries on his Beliefnet blog.

There will come a time when you have to decide between letting your children throw up all over the table and themselves or catching it in your hands… and you will choose the latter.

Last week, I came across two articles that have lodged themselves quite firmly within my mind. The articles contain two very different worldviews, but as such, they ironically parallel and dovetail with each other—at least, in my mind they do.

The first article was by controversial philosopher/ethicist Peter Singer. Entitled “Should This Be the Last Generation?”, it’s a response to Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, a book by South African philosopher David Benatar. Singer writes:

Benatar also argues that human lives are, in general, much less good than we think they are. We spend most of our lives with unfulfilled desires, and the occasional satisfactions that are all most of us can achieve are insufficient to outweigh these prolonged negative states. If we think that this is a tolerable state of affairs it is because we are, in Benatar’s view, victims of the illusion of pollyannaism. This illusion may have evolved because it helped our ancestors survive, but it is an illusion nonetheless. If we could see our lives objectively, we would see that they are not something we should inflict on anyone.

Here is a thought experiment to test our attitudes to this view. Most thoughtful people are extremely concerned about climate change. Some stop eating meat, or flying abroad on vacation, in order to reduce their carbon footprint. But the people who will be most severely harmed by climate change have not yet been conceived. If there were to be no future generations, there would be much less for us to feel to guilty about.

So why don’t we make ourselves the last generation on earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction!

Singer ultimately rejects Benatar’s position, saying that he’s “enough of an optimist to believe that, should humans survive for another century or two, we will learn from our past mistakes and bring about a world in which there is far less suffering than there is now.” (He provides more response in this follow-up article.) Nevertheless, I found Singer’s article distressing: the thought that ideas such as these exist and are passionately propounded and defended by many (i.e., antinatalists) is one that I find unsettling, to say the least.

While still mulling over Singer’s article, I read “Hearing the Melody”, the latest from one of my favorite critics and bloggers, Andy Whitman. Whitman writes of his younger sister, who is currently dying from cancer, the paths of their lives, and his wrestling with death and suffering.

This is the oldest theological conundrum in the world, of course, the boundless love of God and the horrific prospect of untimely death; as ancient as the story of Job, as contemporary as my 14-year-old niece, newly minted as a misunderstood adolescent Goth, confused and angry and utterly unprepared to face the world without a mother. These are the kind of juxtapositions that can leave one wide awake and staring at the ceiling at 3:00 a.m.

I don’t pretend to have an answer to that conundrum. I’ve never had an answer, and the well-intentioned answers I’ve encountered in the past have always struck me as nicely, coolly reasonable and utterly insufficient to deal with the realities of the disinfectant smell of a hospice room and morphine drips and pain so searing that the strongest medications in the world have no impact at all.

But I do have a hope. I have a hope that senselessness is not the end, that love has the final word. I have a faith that I will see Libby again, that we will walk down another path where the footprints never diverge. And I have a prayer, a classic old melody that Christians have been riffing off of for a couple millennia now: Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy. It’s a tune that never gets old. It’s a good one to come back to after the improvised screams. It’s okay. But no, it’s not okay.

If this world is characterized by overwhelming suffering, and there’s little hope that man will evolve to alleviate much of that suffering—an idea that history certainly seems to support, contrary to Singer’s optimism—then sterilization and partying into oblivion make perfect sense. Indeed, oblivion is the only sane and logical response to such a predicament.

But if there is something above and beyond this world—admittedly something that we may only get brief, momentary glimpses of through life, love, relationships, art, etc.—then our existence here and now is not senseless. There is reason for bringing children into this world and there is no reason for letting despair win out in the death of a loved one.

In his most recent article, John Gruber (of Daring Fireball fame) responds to some criticism from Joe Wilcox (another technology writer) regarding his stance on Apple and Google. The whole article is entertaining and intriguing, but the Apple/Google stuff didn’t interest me so much as Gruber’s comments on, um, comments.

Gruber doesn’t allow commenting on Daring Fireball, something that Wilcox criticizes him for. In this day and age of social media and networking, it almost seems like a given that you have commenting enabled so that others can voice their feedback and opinions on your content—and this is true for blog entries, news articles, YouTube videos, Facebook posts, etc. To do otherwise—to not have commenting available—seems to go against the whole nature of the Web as it stands today.

Here’s Gruber’s explanation and defense of his “no comments” policy:

What makes DF an efficient and effective soapbox is exactly that it is not noisy. My goal is for not a single wasted word to appear anywhere on any page of the site.

Is my soapbox bigger than Joe Wilcox’s? Yes it is. But that’s fair, because I built this soapbox myself. It’s my firm belief that all websites eventually attract the attention and respect that they deserve. The hard work is in the “eventually” part.

Used to be, back in the early days of DF, that those complaining about the lack of comments simply were under the impression that a site without comments was not truly a “weblog”. (My stock answer at the time: “OK, then it’s not a weblog.”) Typically these weren’t even complaints, per se, but rather simply queries: Why not?

Now that DF has achieved a modicum of popularity, however, what I tend to get instead aren’t queries or complaints about the lack of comments, but rather demands that I add them—demands from entitled people who see that I’ve built something very nice that draws much attention, and who believe they have a right to share in it.

They don’t.

In today’s Web, it’s all about “signals vs. noise”. Signals are the good stuff—the blog entries, news articles, and YouTube videos that you find interesting, compelling, and relevant. Noise is the bad stuff, the stuff that gets in the way of you finding, experiencing, and sharing the signals.

And frankly, I have to agree with Gruber that comments are, by and large, noise (or, as he puts it, “cacophonous shouting matches”). We can go on and on about how great the social aspect of the Web is, how it encourages conversation, etc. Be that as it may, you can’t deny that an awful lot of crap has come along with any conversation that takes place. I always brace myself when I read an article on CNN because I know that I’ll encounter the comments—which, by and large, are obnoxious and boorish, and contribute little to the article. If anything else, commenting dilutes the article, and by extension, the website.

On the other hand, sites like Daring Fireball and Kottke are actually refreshing in their comments-lessness because there’s nothing standing between me and the signals. I have nothing distracting me from the author’s words, which allows me to better weigh and consider their point of view.

Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t think commenting is inherently bad or that it should never be implemented. For example, I tend to enjoy the comments on Internet Monk, which are very measured and thoughtful, even on entries that have the potential to be pretty controversial. (This is almost certainly due to the site administrators’ active moderation and curation of the comments, which is explained in the site’s FAQ.)

I have commenting enabled on Opus, a decision that honestly, I constantly go back and forth on. On the one hand, I receive so few non-spam comments overall that it doesn’t seem worth the overall management. On the other hand, the entries that do generate a lot of comments typically have very interesting, thoughtful discussion that doesn’t require much, if any, moderation on my part (and I’m very thankful to you, my readers, for that). Is the latter worth the former? I’m not sure.

One approach that I’m considering is picking and choosing which entries have comments and which ones don’t. Some entries are clearly ones that I hope will spark passionate and compelling dialog, but by and large, most entries are ones that don’t really require or necessitate discussion. I post them here because I find them interesting, and because I hope others do as well, but they’re not exactly conversation starters. But maybe I could be wrong. As I said, I’m still considering alternate approaches.

All I can say for certain is commenting has, as far as I’m concerned, lost its lustre—or at the very least, its novelty. And at some point, Opus will reflect that. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the discussion surrounding comments (Gruber has linked to several interesting articles on the topic, such as this one.)

Speaking as a parent and as someone in whose life technology—e.g., web design, blogging, Twitter, e-mail—plays a pretty significant role, this New York Times article is pretty sobering.

Much of the concern about cellphones and instant messaging and Twitter has been focused on how children who incessantly use the technology are affected by it. But parents’ use of such technology—and its effect on their offspring—is now becoming an equal source of concern to some child-development researchers.

Sherry Turkle, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Initiative on Technology and Self, has been studying how parental use of technology affects children and young adults. After five years and 300 interviews, she has found that feelings of hurt, jealousy and competition are widespread. Her findings will be published in “Alone Together” early next year by Basic Books.

In her studies, Dr. Turkle said, “Over and over, kids raised the same three examples of feeling hurt and not wanting to show it when their mom or dad would be on their devices instead of paying attention to them: at meals, during pickup after either school or an extracurricular activity, and during sports events.”

I am certainly guilty of picking up the laptop or iPod, and checking e-mail, newsfeeds, and/or Twitter without giving a second thought as to how my kids might interpret it. To me, it (obviously) doesn’t seem like a big deal, and it can lead to some nice family time (like snuggling with Simon on the couch to watch Elmo videos).

But by and large, it’s just me being selfish and resorting to a default behavior that isn’t really appropriate for my life as a father of two. Chatting with Simon in the morning when he’s eating his cereal and making faces at Ian are probably more important than getting the most recent tweets, or seeing if any new articles have appeared in Google Reader.

A little over a year ago, my family and I spent about a month in Japan. All told, it was a trip that left an indelible mark on both my wife and my myself. I’d been fascinated by Japanese culture (pop or otherwise) for many years, and getting to go was, in many ways, a dream come true for me—and I think it’s safe to say that we both fell in love with Japan and its citizens. Ever since then, we’ve been making plans to go back when the boys are little older, to see some old friends, revisit some of the amazing places we visited, and explore some new corners of the country.

I mention all of this because Brad Kremer’s stunning time-lapse video brings back all of those wonderful memories, memories of both the beautiful Japanese landscape and the wonderful people who inhabit it.

Via Topless Robot

It’s not too difficult to become rather cynical with humanity these days. But then you read about the exploits of Electron Boy and you’re suddenly proud to be a member of the human race.

Erik, who is living with liver cancer, has always wanted to be a superhero. On Thursday, the regional chapter of the Make-A-Wish Foundation granted him that wish with an elaborate event that involved hundreds of volunteers in Bellevue and Seattle.

The local chapter, which serves four states, grants more than 300 wishes every year to children with life-threatening medical conditions, but only a few of them involve so many participants.

Pulling off a wish like this one required a big story, and a lot of heart. And so, with a note of panic in his voice, Spider-Man explained the dilemma: “Dr. Dark” and “Blackout Boy” had imprisoned the Seattle Sounders in a locker room at Qwest Field. Only Electron Boy could free them.

Erik got into his red-and-blue superhero costume, and called on the powers of Moonshine Maid, who owns a DeLorean sports car. For good measure, more than 20 motorcycle officers from the Bellevue Police Department and King County and Snohomish sheriff’s offices escorted Electron Boy to Seattle.

Photo By Dean Rutz / The Seattle Times.