Recently New York Magazine featured a cover story entitled All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting.

It’s an interesting look at the conclusion that many social-science researchers keep coming to recently that, contrary to popular belief, having children doesn’t bring happiness but actually makes adults less happy.

From the perspective of the species, it’s perfectly unmysterious why people have children. From the perspective of the individual, however, it’s more of a mystery than one might think. Most people assume that having children will make them happier. Yet a wide variety of academic research shows that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases are less so. This finding is surprisingly consistent, showing up across a range of disciplines. Perhaps the most oft-cited datum comes from a 2004 study by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist, who surveyed 909 working Texas women and found that child care ranked sixteenth in pleasurability out of nineteen activities.

Honestly, I find the whole idea of asking whether having children “brings happiness” as any sort of a YES/NO thing to be kind of a silly, loaded question.

I understand why it’s asked. There’s no doubt that many parents are inclined to paint a unrealistically rosy picture of their lives as parents, particularly if they are one of the first in their peer group to start having children. But it still seems like you could replace “having children” with any major life decision and the answer would be the similar. Does owning an iPad make you happy? Having a big house? A big paycheck? No, happiness doesn’t come from having or doing any one thing, and the things that actually do bring us the most moments of happiness come tempered with moments of pain, frustration, exhaustion or sacrifice.

In my experience, things worth doing always require a lot of you, and are never, ever really guaranteed to bring you happiness with no strings attached. In fact, I tend to think doing anything in the hopes it will make you happy and have no downside is a losing proposition from the start. I don’t care if it’s dropping that excess weight, running a marathon, climbing Everest, acing your SATs, writing a novel, running for elected office, starting your own business, learning a difficult foreign language, winning the Tour de France, or having a happy and healthy life-long marriage. Or, heck, forget raising a child, just the process of carrying and delivering a baby is at times a terrifying, exhausting, blood-soaked experience!

For most people, all of those things require enduring long hours of hard work, and the sacrifice of many other things one may not want to give up. They require a very real shift in priorities. I’m sure for some people the cost ends up just being too high and they regret ever doing it, but those people are in the minority for sure. I imagine that most who endure the cost to attain their goal would say that, whether it “brought happiness” or not, they would do it all over again.

So maybe the question shouldn’t be “are people who have children happier?” but rather “are people who have children more fulfilled?”

I mean this as no judgement against people with no children, but I believe the answer is yes.

More from the article:

About twenty years ago, Tom Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell, made a striking contribution to the field of psychology, showing that people are far more apt to regret things they haven’t done than things they have. In one instance, he followed up on the men and women from the Terman study, the famous collection of high-IQ students from California who were singled out in 1921 for a life of greatness. Not one told him of regretting having children, but ten told him they regretted not having a family.

Kids are a lot of work. They — even the rare “angel baby” like our son — honestly require more time, money, blood, sweat and tears than you can ever really prepare yourself to handle. Just when you’ve gotten a handle on things they progress to a new stage of development and you’re at your wit’s end again trying to figure out what the heck you are doing.

I think that many people do underestimate their ability to handle all of that, but I wouldn’t want anyone to take the decision to have a child lightly or foolishly think that bringing a child into your life is going to make everything better.

For my part, I know is that I am much happier knowing my son than I was before having him in my life, but I’m under no delusion that it means every moment is a happy one. Even if it means I don’t get to go to the movies as much, or that I have to deal with lost sleep, a tighter budget and less personal time, I am much more fulfilled.

And yes, someday I’ll have to deal with (at least) two obstinate teenagers, who will challenge me and keep me up at night worrying.

I’m sure that will suck.

But I’m sure that if you ask me then, in my most lucid moments I can guarantee that my honest answer will still be “It’s been worth it.”