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In the Amish sample, 19% have no children and the rest have children. 33% have between 6 and 21 children. In the general pop, 28% have no children. (That’s going by “number of pregnancies” as a proxy for children). It’s important to learn how to read a simple data table if, in the same reply, you tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Now if you go down to the Psychosocial Hassles Scale, married with children Amish are happier than never married general population women.
We have to look at data because we do not exist in a SAHM culture. So in regards to the n=1, she might be stressed around her children because she never learned the skills of motherhood during her formative years of adolescent cognition. Almost no American adolescents learn this. Or maybe she was taught and internalized antinatal values, that a woman’s worth is in her job or something. This is grilled into minds at a young age. Or maybe she is more easily stressed because her own mother-child was severed early. It really can be anything. Because the important question is whether women would be happier being a at home with kids in a culture which prepares them for this role, versus our current culture which promotes almost the exact opposite values and skills (sedentary studying, avaricious competition, &tc).
Likely those who are finished with motherhood plus the ones who haven’t started.
Apologies, I misstated this.
Sure, but that's a weird comparison. In both populations never married women score higher on psychosocial hassles than the other groups. The difference between married with children and married without is very small in terms of SDs in both populations.
None of this helps us answer the original question - do women find children relaxing or not?
I again repeat that my wife is not a stressed woman.
She, and several of the other mothers I've talked to who have children, also have younger siblings and participated in raising them.
There's a lot of nuance here that you're missing, likely due to your inexperience with family life.
Women generally enjoy raising children, no doubt about it. That's why they have them, and often have more after having one.
Women would be happier at home with young kids assuming that the income they give up makes little marginal difference in the household's consumption habits. That's why high income husbands have wives most likely to stay home. If staying home is too much of a lifestyle downgrade, women prefer to work to maintain their lifestyle.
Once the youngest children are in school, a SAHM's life changes significantly and they have a tremendous amount of free time open up. They often go into part time or volunteering work because sitting alone at home for 7 hours a day with nothing to do is not very fun. Among the rich, this often manifests in nonprofit board membership. There's little appetite for being a SAHM for when the youngest is 13 and mostly wants to hang out with their friends.
None of this indicates anything about whether women find raising children relaxing. There's a lot of things in life that are meaningful and worthwhile that are not relaxing, and are actually in fact quite exhausting. If you've ever had a job you've found meaningful, you should already understand this. If you ever raise (especially young) children, you will understand this infinitely more.
Your arguments about this inevitably end up in a gish gallop of unfalsifiable no true Scotsmen (the women find children exhausting because they've been brainwashed! Or because they weren't raised right! Or it was generational trauma from their mothers!). This is fundamentally rooted in lack of experience with real family dynamics. Internet forums cannot replace this. It's bizarre to be one of the biggest tradposters on the forum when you don't lead a trad life and seem to mostly know the trad life based on looking at Amish people and discord.
I encourage you to remedy this.
When you say that she isn’t stressed, you mean that she isn’t stressed generally speaking. But that generality is in the fulfillment of the tasks of life that she spent 35,000 hours mastering since preschool (school time + homework + ECs). School made her extremely adept and comfortable in the skills of dealing with occupational burdens in corporate America. She may be extremely good at spreadsheeting. This leads to comfortability because humans are comfortable doing what they are trained and reinforced to do. (The Chinese boy manning the cash register at the restaurant will be completely fluent in the stresses of restaurant-running by the age of 12, whereas it would take a 25yo years to develop the same fluency).
But school did not teach her anything that would lead to comfort in the domain of motherhood. That is a totally distinct set of skills that have more to do social habits and stress resilience. School did not have her carry around a doll 24/7 for a few years, or teach her how to sleep with the child so that it doesn’t cry at night. It didn’t teach proper breastfeeding or weening. It didn’t teach her how to speak to a child or how to tell fairytales that makes children behave. She wasn’t taught stress resilience as a caregiver. She wasn’t given any sort of role model relevant to the domain of motherhood, the chief domain of her existence.
I’m assuming that you understand that people are comfortable doing tasks which have been reinforced and tasks which they have been trained to do. I’m assuming that you know that traditional cultures imbue women with this training implicitly or explicitly in adolescence. I’m assuming that you can understand how the study would debunk the claim that motherhood is stressful (the population with tons of children is much less stressed than the one with very few). These are reasonable assumptions. If you want ancecdota you can go to an Amish locale and ask around, I guess.
Why, no, that's not what I mean.
It may surprise you that it is in fact the case that you're mistaken about several of your "no true Scotsmen" assertions about the conditions necessary for a mother to find children relaxing in the context of my wife. It's not your fault, since you don't know her - but one wonders what possesses a man to invent stories about another man's wife.
Comfort isn't the question here. I'm perfectly comfortable doing my job for which I have extensive training. Nevertheless, it is exhausting.
I hope I don't have to explain why you can't compare Amish vs genpop stress and conclude that motherhood isn't stressful. Instead, I'll pretend you reiterated my point about the small gap in stress between married women and married women with children in both groups. I'll go ahead and reiterate what I already said in response to that point, which is that you can find something meaningful, fulfilling, and also utterly exhausting. I also couldn't immediately tell what goes into the hassle assessment, so it's unclear to what extent it even measures what you think it measures.
I'm genuinely puzzled that you don't understand this point. I'm my last post, I assumed that you had worked a job that you doing fulfilling at some point. Am I mistaken on this? Have you never done that? Generally speaking, have you ever done something hard, taxing, exhausting, yet absolutely worth doing?
Has a mother ever told you that raising (especially small) children is relaxing?
I can't help but feel as if your knowledge of childrearing, but also of women's attitudes towards it are entirely symbolic, in the sense that you derive this knowledge entirely from reading words on a screen. Am I correct in this assessment or does the rubber meet the road somewhere?
I’m extrapolating because she’s your n=1, or within your n=5. How else can I respond to your sample? I have to infer from what I know about American life because I have no details.
Yes. But not every moment of it. But that are major moments of relaxation. And traditional cultures find ways to make it relaxing. You don’t think rocking a child to sleep with a lullaby is relaxing to women? Or seeing them jump in puddled in a cute raincoat? Or telling a fun story to make them either behave out of fear or out of reward? I’ll grant it’s also stressful for traditional women, at times, but they have the training that makes it more enjoyable.
Yes but these things often bring relaxation, too. There’s relaxation after a hard bike ride, and you are more relaxed on the whole than never biking. So on the whole, an experience with stress can be relaxing. But not if you’re multitasking two huge stressors, or one huge stressor without previous training. If you told me to unicycle while juggling it would be horribly stressful, but if I mastered it in childhood then I would be a very relaxed clown indeed, happy to show off my neat skills. This is Csikzentmihalyi’s flow state: optimal human mood occurs when doing a challenging thing around the limits of our skill. (The lowest mood is on Sunday mornings when someone lacks a challenge to do). This is the most anxiolytic human state. Alex Honnold is relaxed despite free-soloing mountains all day because he mastered that skill, and I suppose he tells himself that is has “purpose”, but it’s not exactly raising up new life.
There’s only one other way to gain wisdom about this without reading: going around conducting polls. I have not gone around conducting polls in these communities. There’s not another way, as far as I know. Not one that’s reliable.
No, you're engaging in Bulverism. You assume that I'm wrong and work back to reasons why.
That's rather a weaker claim. Almost everything has moments of relaxation. Even the most stressful job you can imagine probably has coffee breaks.
You wouldn't know this since you've never raised a child, but raising a child does in fact involve multitasking a bunch of stressors. This is all squared with multiple children. Again, I strongly recommend you raise a child before forming opinions about what it is like.
In fact, there is a way to acquire true knowledge about the world without symbolic manipulation, and that's by gaining firsthand experience.
I don’t know, I’m just not convinced that your anecdota is valuable here as a generalized principle. There’s no reason for me to think that you have insight into female happiness, nor your wife or female friends. Neither do I think that women have strong insight into their own happiness, because humans are bad at predicting what makes them happy, both male and female. Hence why someone like Csikzentmihalyi can come in and totally revise how we understand peak emotional experiences. And why papers like the Paradox of Declining Female Happiness are important. Imagine how crazy it would be to think that humans can decide nutrition for themselves by taste? So I will err on the side of the Amish. The study indicates their lifestyle make women pretty relaxing even though they babymax.
I'm not talking about happiness. I'm talking about whether they find a particular activity to be relaxing or not.
To whatever extent you doubt my anecdata, consider that you have even less. You don't even have a wife or children of your own!
The study doesn't measure 'relaxation.' As I already stated:
Women of all categories (married, unmarried, kids, no kids) have fewer psychosocial hassles in the Amish population. There's no indication that having kids actually changes psychosocial hassles in either population.
Maybe if the psychosocial hassle score increased for genpop women with children vs genpop childless women you'd have something, but as is you're just grasping at straws to support a conclusion you really want to believe in.
I wonder if I can find a traditional Saudi guy to chime in. If he has three wives, then you would be forced to believe whatever he says on this subject, as that’s 3x the wives and 10x the female relatives. It’s funny to imagine a type of guy who weighs anecdotal evidence by number of wives and is essentially compelled to believe whatever a Salafist says about the relaxation of married women, having no way to argue from an empirical standpoint. (Indeed the empirical evidence suggests that Saudi women are not relaxed, but you would never know this if you only surveyed random men from Saudi Arabia).
It does by way of the % anxiety or depression and the % feeling overloaded are proxies of relaxation. The opposite of relaxation is stress (overloaded) and anxiety. Arguably the depressive symptoms also factors in here.
In both groups, the within-group “married with children” are less hassled than never married. And we can compare between these two sets of groups, one set where 32% has 6+ children and the other where only only 4% has 6+ children, and we find that the one with more children is slightly less hassled while scoring better on anxiety and depression. And given the relationship between life stressors and depression, it’s significant that the group of women of which 32% have 6+ kids has 1/10th the depressive symptoms. We can also extrapolate from the % on psychiatric meds a little (Girlboss Americans are more medicated).
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