Have you heard about the “U” shaped happiness curve? It’s the output of psychology research across ages. It suggests that people are happiest when they are younger, lose some of that happiness in middle-age, and then get it back as they get older.
Here’s a plot of the curve, with the colors representing 7 different studies of happiness by age.
There has been a lot written about these studies if you look them up online. My take has always been that it seems that happiness starts rising at right about the time kids are off into adulthood and people retire from their jobs.
Sure, everyone loves their kids, but being a parent is a lot of effort and that gets combined with increasing work responsibilities in your middle-age years. Having both of those happy burdens dissolve at the same time certainly feels liberating.
Are you surprised by this happiness “U”-curve?
Image: Pixabay
MrFireStation 
I agree with the Happiness Curve. Children nowadays have to be driven everywhere, most public schools are not good enough and the norm is no longer young adults mostly paying their own way through college. Everything seems to be geared to extract as much time and money as possible from Mom and Dad. Adding to the toxicity is the breakdown of the family with high divorce rates shared custody arrangements.
The Corporate World has done it’s part via long hours and frequent restructurings with zero job security.
The U curve wouldn’t have existed in the early 1900s because people didn’t live long enough to experience retirement.
While on business travel, we had a partner company in Ireland that I went to sometimes. The CEO talked about how his kids went to public school and he didn’t know of one divorced family in the entire school. The whole work – life balance seemed to be better. The society had a Catholic common culture. St. Patrick’s Day is more of a religious observation celebrating the man who brought Christianity to Ireland, not the bacchanal that it has become in the US. I wonder if the happiness curve would look different in Ireland.
But alas, the Irish way of life is under attack by globalism and its rampant immigration of people who don’t want to become Irish. I heard an Tucker Carlson interview with Conor McGregor, who described the problems and laid out the case for his becoming Prime Minister.
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Interesting. That conversation you had in Ireland reminds me of a Spanish-language focus group we did with Hispanic Moms at MegaCorp. They were talking about their lives relative to “American Moms”. The very family-first Hispanic Moms were appalled to see that American Moms stuck their kids in daycare, were willing to put their careers ahead of their role as a Mom, that divorce was so common, and that kids were “pushed out of the house” after high school. The common American trade off of the individual versus others (even your own kids) was deeply concerning to them. Those words stick with me all of these years later!
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You were meeting with traditional Hispanic Moms that were first generation. My sons meet later generation Hispanics at their work who are getting pregnant by multiple fathers at a very young age and are probably on public assistance such as Head Start for daycare and food stamps. One said to my son, “You are lucky to not already have a bunch of kids.”
I remember visiting an exchange student in Saltillo, MX during Christmas break in college. You just described his parents perfectly. They told me that traditional families like theirs were afraid of their children going to the US and becoming corrupted. This was around 1980. Before the cartels came in Coahuila.
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Yes – they were first generation Mexican-Americans.
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Another addition to the stress level of modern life, is that Mom used to run the household. With both husband and wife working, both get home and they have the second job of running the household. Growing up in the 60s and 70s, eating out was rare. Now its the norm.
All three of my sons are aiming to have Moms at home. They have been taught about the costs of daycare, two commuters, restaurant meals, dress for success and the biggest expense of all, government theft AKA taxes.
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