The Atlantic

It Isn’t the Kids. It’s the Cost of Raising Them.

Having children makes people happier—if they can afford it.
Source: Gary Hershorn / Getty

For several decades, the work of happiness researchers has consistently pointed to an unintuitive conclusion: Having children doesn’t tend to make people happier, and might even make them less happy.

“That never made any sense [to me],” says David Blanchflower, an economist at Dartmouth College. If having kids makes people less happy, why do so many people do it? Why would people have more than one child after the supposed misery

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