Children Can Make You Happy

“Social science may suggest that kids drain their parents’ happiness, but there’s evidence that good parenting is less work and more fun than people think,” says Bryan Caplan at The Wall Street Journal. “The main problem with parenting pessimists is that they assume there’s no acceptable way to make parenting less work and more fun. Parents may feel like their pressure, encouragement, money and time are all that stands between their kids and failure. But decades’ worth of twin and adoption research says the opposite: Parents have a lot more room to safely maneuver than they realize, because the long-run effects of parenting on children’s outcomes are much smaller than they look.”