One of the more depressing findings out of the happiness literature has been that kids are about as good for a marriage as repeatedly keying your partner's car. When a couple has kids, marital pleasure plummets. And despite all the talk of empty nest syndrome, evidence actually shows that couples become happier when their children leave the house. In other words: The brats ruin our lives. But instead of admitting that forthrightly, we tend to say we love our kids and just grow to hate our partners.Or so the research seems to say. But Stephanie Coontz has a nice op-ed complicating the case. She focuses on a study conducted by Philip and Carolyn Cowan of UC Berkeley. They pulled apart the data to group the couple's by their approach to having children. "Some couples," they found, "plan the conception and discuss how they want to conduct their relationship after the baby is born. Others disagree about whether or when to conceive, with one partner giving in for the sake of the relationship. And sometimes, both partners are ambivalent." 
The Cowans found that the drop in marital satisfaction was basically a localized phenomenon: It came among the parents who didn't share the same outlook on parenthood. But "couples who planned or equally welcomed the conception were likely to maintain or even increase their marital satisfaction after the child was born." More interestingly, the financial strains matter. "Once a child arrives," writes Koontz, "lack of paid parental leave often leads the wife to quit her job and the husband to work more. This produces discontent on both sides. The wife resents her husband’s lack of involvement in child care and housework. The husband resents his wife’s ingratitude for the long hours he works to support the family."Which is all to add a bit of meat to the earlier post on the arguments for including family planning in the stimulus. When you deny poor families access to reproductive planning, the results are pretty predictable: A heavy increase in unwanted pregnancies and unplanned births. This comes atop the existing class-based disparities in family planning, as the graph shows (via). And the data we have suggests that the results of that will be predictable: More broken marriages, leading to more single-income parents, leading to more poverty and income stagnation and reliance on safety net programs. What the Republicans did in removing the provision from the stimulus wasn't end access to family planning. It was to make it harder for the poor to access family planning, and thus to localize the economic and social effects of unwanted pregnancies in low-income neighborhoods. Meanwhile, it's of course an article of faith on the right that one of the central economic problems facing these communities is too many single parents and too few nuclear families.
The Cowans found that the drop in marital satisfaction was basically a localized phenomenon: It came among the parents who didn't share the same outlook on parenthood. But "couples who planned or equally welcomed the conception were likely to maintain or even increase their marital satisfaction after the child was born." More interestingly, the financial strains matter. "Once a child arrives," writes Koontz, "lack of paid parental leave often leads the wife to quit her job and the husband to work more. This produces discontent on both sides. The wife resents her husband’s lack of involvement in child care and housework. The husband resents his wife’s ingratitude for the long hours he works to support the family."Which is all to add a bit of meat to the earlier post on the arguments for including family planning in the stimulus. When you deny poor families access to reproductive planning, the results are pretty predictable: A heavy increase in unwanted pregnancies and unplanned births. This comes atop the existing class-based disparities in family planning, as the graph shows (via). And the data we have suggests that the results of that will be predictable: More broken marriages, leading to more single-income parents, leading to more poverty and income stagnation and reliance on safety net programs. What the Republicans did in removing the provision from the stimulus wasn't end access to family planning. It was to make it harder for the poor to access family planning, and thus to localize the economic and social effects of unwanted pregnancies in low-income neighborhoods. Meanwhile, it's of course an article of faith on the right that one of the central economic problems facing these communities is too many single parents and too few nuclear families. 
