Having Kids Destroys Lives, Study Confirms

"Does having kids ruin your life? Ask a parent whose kid just did something adorable and you'll get one answer; ask a parent up at four in the morning trying to sooth a baby that's been screaming for hours and you'll probably get another. Now scientists have weighed in, and their take on the question is more or less this: both of those answers are kind of exactly right.

In a study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers tried to provide the definitive take on the issue of how parenthood affects life satisfaction, a subject that has produced conflicting results in other studies. Some say it's the key to happiness while others say it's pretty much the road to emotional ruin.

Angus Deaton, an economist at Princeton University in New Jersey, and his colleague Arthur Stone, a psychiatry researcher at Stony Brook University in New York, examined data from the Gallup-Healthways Well-being Index, a trove of information on nearly two million Americans, and other Gallup data from countries around the world."* The Young Turks hosts Ana Kasparian and Ben Mankiewicz breaks it down.

*Read more here from Dave McGinn / The Globe And Mail: