“Having parented successfully in the past may rank as a satisfying accomplishment retrospectively; but the bulk of research finds that being a parent, while it is happening, does not increase life satisfaction and may reduce it.”

The modern style of parenting is not just exhausting for adults; it is also based on assumptions about what children need to thrive that are not supported by evidence from our evolutionary past. For most of human history, people had lots of kids, and children hung out in intergenerational social groups in which they were not heavily supervised. You

The more money you make, the less likely you are to place ‘being a parent’ at the center of your identity. Part of this probably has to do with the fact that middle and upper-income people are more likely to understand their identity  as  their job, but even that doesn’t fully explain this stat. Instead, I’d argue that bourgeois parents