Sliding vs Deciding: Scott Stanley's Blog: Are Parents Less Happy? Are Couples with Children Less Happy?

Monday, October 19, 2015

Are Parents Less Happy? Are Couples with Children Less Happy?

You probably were not waiting to decide if you want to have children in life based on the latest answers from social science. But if you are wanting to know the answer, like the old status on FaceBook, it's complicated. If you want a good sense how and why, I have two pieces to recommend to you.

First, there is a brand new post over at Science of Relationships (www.scienceofrelationships.com) for you to read: “Parents Are Less Happy”: Fact or Fiction? It's an excellent piece by Andrew Willis Garcés that focuses on overall life happiness.

Want more? My favorite blog post ever was on this very subject, 6 years ago. I find that it holds up quite well. Here you go. Cleanup on Aisle 9 (at 35,000 Feet) This piecefocuses on what research suggests happens in terms of marital or couple happiness when people have a child.

The point that will come out strongly in both pieces is how complex the nature of contentment and happiness really is in life. I also make the point in my piece that we (those who study the effects on the couple) don't really measure something I'd call family happiness in social science. Rather, we have pretty thin measures of personal and couple-level happiness that likely don't capture something many people experience when it comes to fulfillment and meaning in life that I'd call happiness as a family.

Sure, some people are more miserable in life because they had children. Some couples have more strain that seems--and sometimes is--unending. Some children are challenging and/or difficult--and this can be unrelated to the quality of the parenting and upbringing they received. And some people are pretty lousy parents, and the whole world might have been better off if they had been better parents or not parents at all.

Children. They are not for everyone. But some of you will be great parents, even if it sometimes harshes your buzz in life to take it on.

Why Sliding vs. Deciding?

Sliding vs. Deciding is a theme that comes out of my study of commitment and my work with my major colleague in this area, Galena Rhoades, and the work of other scholars on how couples go through important relationship transitions. I believe “sliding vs. deciding” captures something important about how romantic relationships develop. The core idea is that people often slide through important transitions in relationships rather than deciding what they are doing and what it means, especially regarding commitment. An important paper by Wendy Manning and Pamela Smock (2005) was influential in our thinking about how couples transitioned into living together. They conducted a qualitative study of cohabiting couples and found that over one half of couples who are living together didn’t talk about it or make any decision, but simply slid into doing so. Another paper having a large influence on this thinking was written by Jo Lindsey (2000). She found that the cohabiting couples she interviewed could not articulate how they came to be living together. In fact, as she puts it, it seemed like they had no agency in how it happened. Lindsay concluded that the fundamental characteristic of cohabitation was ambiguity, a theme we often discuss. Manning and Smock, Lindsay, and other researchers have noted that, for most couples, moving in together was nothing like a clear decision about what the couple was doing. Thus, it very often is not anything like a how people form a clear commitment. In one of our quantitative studies of cohabitation, we have found that most cohabiters report a process more like sliding into cohabitation than talking about it and making a decision about it.

We believe this sliding vs. deciding dynamic which is quite obvious in how couples come to live together is common in many important relationship transitions, including pregnancy, having children, work, as well as in how couples drift into regular patterns of who does what. In contrast to sliding, commitments that we are most likely to follow through on are based in decisions. In fact, commitment is making a choice to give up other choices. A commitment is a decision. Do we always need to be making a decision about things? I hope not. But when something important in life is at stake, I believe that deciding will trump sliding in how things turn out.

One of the most important implications of the concept of sliding vs. deciding is when this theme is married to our work and thought on the depths of ambiguity in relationship formation these days and our ideas about inertia. What people are often now seeing is that they are sliding through relationship transitions that cause them to increase constraints and lose options before (or without) noticing that they have just entered a more constrained pathway. As a result, we believe that many people are too often giving up options before they have made a choice. That is far from making a choice to give up other choices. That's losing options because one is not noticing an important, or even potentially high cost slide, is not what solid commitment formation is about.

Three theory papers written by me and Galena Rhoades are accessible above at the links: "Sliding vs. Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect", "Commitment: Functions, Formation, and the Securing of Romantic Attachment," and the link labeled "SvD Transition and Risk Model."

Sliding vs Deciding: Scott Stanley's Blog

Monday, October 19, 2015

Are Parents Less Happy? Are Couples with Children Less Happy?

Blog Archive

Privacy Policy