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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).
You misunderstand. It's not that I weigh evidence by number of wives. It's that if you don't have a wife and kids you literally have no idea what you are talking about on this topic.
None of these are broken out by married/not married/children/no children. You're way overextending the evidence to look at depression rates among Amish vs genpop and claim this is due to kids relaxing women. That's simply not what the study says.
We're going in circles. As I said:
Which basically puts to rest "women are relaxed by children". If they're relaxed by children, why is there no meaningful change in psychosocial hassles versus married no children?
6+ pregnancies does not mean 6+ children.
The hassle differences exist for all groups. Has nothing do to with kids.
But nothing you’ve posted indicates that you really know anything about this. You don’t mention any studies. You don’t reference anything. You misunderstood the study I quoted.
If we’re comparing one set with a huge amount of married women with children, to another set with a far smaller amount, then we done have to break it down further. The set that maximizes SAHM is extremely happier. If you have better evidence you should post it. Reasonable people work with the evidence they have. You’re criticizing the best study for its imperfection without presenting better evidence.
Happy to see a counter-study
Except, of course, the fact that I know what it's like to raise children, and you don't even have a wife, let alone a child. The life experience gap is massive, and you can't know what you are missing from your side of it.
The evidence you show is that having kids makes little difference to psychosocial hassles for married women, both genpop and Amish. All the benefits are due to being Amish vs being genpop - nothing to do with kids. Even unmarried women have fewer hassles if they are Amish. This is literally what your study says.
Again, why is there no benefit to psychosocial hassles from having kids if kids relax women? why is the only measure that breaks out women by marital and childbearing status show zero effect on the parameter you think is important? This is basically enough to dismiss your claims out of hand.
I will side with the 200+ wives
reduces within cohorts + significant differences between cohorts
A SAHM culture. Younger unmarried Amish statistically likely to be around kids all day btw
Married & kids Amish have fewer hassles than unmarried. When number go up it mean hassle go up
Hassle one metric. Not best metric. Other metrics for between pops. Metric still evidence. Shows having kids reduce hassle in both pops and between pops. Lower for married w kids. 48 = max stress. 12 = absolutely no stress.
Seems clear that you aren't reading my responses so this will be the last one.
No, there's basically zero difference in hassles for married with/without children in each group. The difference in means is tiny compared to the SDs. Differences between Amish and genpop exist for all categories of women.
Meaningless. Married genpop have fewer hassles than single married.
No other metrics besides hassle break out the effect of kids. If you don't like it, please find a better source rather than pretend that it shows something it doesn't.
Better yet - find a wife, have a kid, and let me know how relaxing it turns out to be. I might as well be arguing with an LLM for all the life experience you have in this department. At least the LLM has read more than one study.
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