A major flaw that seems to run fairly consistently through these studies is that they aren’t longitudinal over the course of an entire lifetime. That is, they focus entirely on the effect on happiness of having children while they are children, and ignore the possible difference in happiness when the parents are elderly. The old person surrounded by children and grandchildren is quite plausibly going be happier than the increasingly isolated person watching their friends die off one by one in the relatively unappealing environment of an assisted living facility.
True, those are good points.
The conclusion does not follow from the premise. This seems like excellent reasoning for employing different parenting strategies and family values than you experienced in your childhood, not evidence that there is no benefit to family under any circumstances.
Perhaps. But having never felt familial love, I’m very resistant to the idea of starting a family, and I default to a decision to not start one. If I could even feel any reward from having a family (the way a lot of white families feel), then maybe I might intrinsically default to the other decision. To me, having a family sounds like an extremely irrational decision (one made out of a decision to cave into social pressure rather than from any real intrinsic reward), but that’s because I’ve never felt the intense rewards that other people have felt from having families
True, those are good points.
Perhaps. But having never felt familial love, I’m very resistant to the idea of starting a family, and I default to a decision to not start one. If I could even feel any reward from having a family (the way a lot of white families feel), then maybe I might intrinsically default to the other decision. To me, having a family sounds like an extremely irrational decision (one made out of a decision to cave into social pressure rather than from any real intrinsic reward), but that’s because I’ve never felt the intense rewards that other people have felt from having families