In my experience, my probability of having children and my desire to have them are highly correlated with my happiness going up. Primarily I believe this is common cause, as the factors that make me happier also make it far more attractive and practical to have children. Other comments have noted events in the world that made them happy and also made them more inclined to have children.
However, it is also clear that those who come from wealthy or generally happier classes and backgrounds are far less likely to have children; the countries and areas with high birth rates are usually relatively unhappy and the most happy ones are below replacement.
This implies that it probably depends how you find the people for your study. If you’re looking for similar backgrounds and then seeing who has children, I’d expect the ones with children to have previously been happier. If you’re sampling randomly from the world I’d be confident in the opposite but I’ve never heard of doing a study that way.
In my experience, my probability of having children and my desire to have them are highly correlated with my happiness going up. Primarily I believe this is common cause, as the factors that make me happier also make it far more attractive and practical to have children. Other comments have noted events in the world that made them happy and also made them more inclined to have children.
However, it is also clear that those who come from wealthy or generally happier classes and backgrounds are far less likely to have children; the countries and areas with high birth rates are usually relatively unhappy and the most happy ones are below replacement.
This implies that it probably depends how you find the people for your study. If you’re looking for similar backgrounds and then seeing who has children, I’d expect the ones with children to have previously been happier. If you’re sampling randomly from the world I’d be confident in the opposite but I’ve never heard of doing a study that way.