Photo Courtesy: Flickr- Adwriter

Some cheery news to end the week with.

A Harvard researcher has conducted a study on married couples and happiness,  and he’s come up with the conclusion that married couples are happy – only as long as long as they don’t have kids!  Once kids enter the picture, all happiness, according to his distinguished brain, flies out the window to return home only when the brats have left home.   Here’s the article.

He says, and I quote…

…parents’ desire to get a return on the time and money they have invested in their children is part of the reason they persuade themselves that their offspring are enhancing their lives.

There’s more enlightening wisdom.

Money was part of the reason couples believed their children brought them happiness.    Psychological studies have shown that people appreciate products more if they pay more for them.

And, yet more words from the Buddha…

“We pay for (children) in time, attention, blood, sweat and tears – what kind of idiots would we be to devote all of that to the rearing of our young if they’d didn’t bring us some happiness?”

Gee, I didn’t know I was that miserable.  And here I was thinking my child enriched my life in ways money couldn’t measure.  I think I should go shoot myself.

Am I over reacting?  Do any of you feel this way?  Of course, being a parent isn’t always  a bed of roses, and as adolescence looms on the horizon, there are doubtless many more tear-your-hair-out moments ahead,  but to say that having kids decreases your happiness…?!!