Published: March 23, 2009 03:47 pm      

THEREFORE I AM: Kids stress out parents? Well, duh!

This just in: According to an expert, children can add stress and strain to a marriage. In other news, further expert studies have indicated that the sky is in fact blue, Paris Hilton is a tad spoiled, peanut butter and chocolate taste great together, and the Middle East has issues. Thank goodness we have experts to tell us these things.

I recently read a column in The New York Times by Stephanie Coontz titled “Till Children Do Us Part.” If you were on the fence about whether to have children, Coontz probably shoved you hard to the greener, no-kids side. The facts are hard to dispute. She reported that “more than 25 separate studies have established that marital quality drops, often quite steeply, after the transition to parenthood.”

Well, yeah, OK, maybe I can see that, but how are those studies defining “marital quality?” Any parent worth his weight in pacifiers will tell you that having kids changes your lives in ways that non-parents can’t fathom. Carefree weekend trips? Gone. Quiet time at home after a long day? Gone. Staying in bed on a rainy day and watching an entire season of “The Jeffersons” on DVD? Gone. On the surface, those things may indeed lead to happier marriages by some people’s reckoning, but a parent with perspective knows there’s a lot more to it than that.

One of the things I’m always telling my kids is that nothing good is easy. Being a responsible parent is tough, no doubt about it, but it’s the tough that makes the whole process worthwhile. I want the tough. I want the challenge. So does my wife. If we wanted sleepy Saturday mornings and week-long trips to nowhere in particular, we wouldn’t have had kids. Minute by minute, moment by moment, perhaps marriages without children are happier in the sense that they have more freedoms to explore what makes them happy, but when I step back and look at the big picture of life, I’m confident that having kids brings us more happiness and satisfaction than anything else we can think of.

Coontz’s column isn’t all grim news about having kids, however. It seems a little forethought can go a long, long way. “The average drop in marital satisfaction was almost entirely accounted for by the couples who slid into being parents, disagreed over it or were ambivalent about it. Couples who planned or equally welcomed the conception were likely to maintain or even increase their marital satisfaction after the child was born.”

When I talk to my friends who are considering having children, I tell them that being a good parent is the greatest thing you’ll ever do. It’s also the most difficult thing you’ll ever do. This, of course, is presuming you actually invest yourself in the process. Go to any school in America and you’ll see kids whose parents aren’t interested in being good parents. Those parents are going through the motions via the path of least resistance. Nothing good is easy. You can spot those kids in about 12 seconds.

I also was surprised to read that parents spend more time with their children than they did 40 years ago. So that’s where the added stress is coming from! Don’t get me wrong — kids are wonderful, but they can wear you down to the nub. In this area, perhaps I am an expert. Before kids, I worked at the Chronicle in a relatively high-stress job that involved cranking out a newspaper each day, every day. When we had our kids, I quit my job to take care of them and my wife went back to work. Toiling away in a newsroom can be stressful, but it’s a cakewalk compared to staying home with two kids, especially when they were younger. They’re 6 and nearly 8 now, so the stress level is reduced — somewhat. When they were 1 and 3, however, I’d have two or three aneurisms a day.

Will a daily dose of spine-twisting stress affect a marriage? Gee, what do you think? The key is to just keep paddling.

Years ago the Peace Corps billed itself as “the toughest job you’ll ever love.” Maybe it is, but parenthood is right up there.

David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@tds.net.