Sunday, November 9, 2008

Happy Family

It's official. Children bring happiness.
A proper understanding of parenting means not choosing between children-as-moral-obligation and children-as-household-accessory, but instead connecting the quotidian demands and pleasures of parenthood with a responsible vision of the good life. Having children is fraught with emotional and material challenges, but in a decent society and a setting of relative affluence, parenting ought to bring satisfaction in the form of measurable and reportable emotional well-being: children ought to make us happy in the least sophisticated sense of the word. If they instead bring distress and depression, we are doing something wrong, as parents and as a culture.
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2 comments:

Enbrethiliel said...

+JMJ+

Children bring happiness.

Was there ever any doubt???

elena maria vidal said...

The girls I went to college with had a lot of doubts about children bringing happiness. I never did though.