Harvard Egghead Thinks Kids Destroy Happiness

Self-centered liberal elitism on full display:

Marriage has been shown, through research, to be an unending source of joy, a Harvard professor said at an Australian conference this week.

But introduce children into the relationship and that joy may plummet, according to a report from the Australian Associated Press.

"Figures show that married people are in almost every way happier than unmarried people — whether they are single, divorced, cohabiting," Harvard University psychology professor Daniel Gilbert told the Happiness and its Causes conference in Sydney.

"Married people live longer, married people earn more money per capita, married people have more sex and enjoy it more," AAP quoted Gilbert as saying.

But, despite the belief that children are the apples of our eyes, they actually can have a negative influence on marriages, according to the report. And more kids equals more sadness, Gilbert said.

U.S. and European studies show that married couples’ happiness spikes when they're expecting a baby but once that baby arrives, it plummets.

And forget about empty nest syndrome. The low point comes when children are between the ages of 12 and 16 and happiness only starts to recover once they fly the coop, Gilbert said.

I'm not surprised that some Harvard egghead would come up with this. Liberal elitism is a self-centered philosophy, and anything that interferes with ones self-worship must therefore be bad.

Because of the environment they've been raised in, the kids of the liberal elite probably are jerks and I could see how that could take the joy out of your life, but that's not true for most Americans. Families like ours get great joy from our kids and I can't imagine what life would have been like without them. Sure, we could have had more money to spend on ourselves if we'd remained childless, but I wouldn't trade a dollar I've spent to raise two kids for all the luxury vacations and personal toys I could have had instead.