A Theory of Children and Happiness

There exists a device for clearing a young child's stuffy nose called a NoseFrida.  It is a thin medical hose attached to a tapered tube.  The end of the hose goes in the parent's mouth.  The tapered end of the tub in the child's nose.  You place it there, and suck in with your lungs, sucking the snot right out of your child's sinus cavities.

To whomever reading this, I hope you too will one day love another human being that much.

When you become a parent, your own happiness becomes tied directly to the happiness of your child.  The number of miserable experiences increases: sleepless night, disgusting messes, constantly dealing with another person's excrement and stomach bile and mucus.  You are no longer able to do most things you used to enjoy (like maintaining a blog), because your time becomes quite devoured.  So by any objective measure, you should become less happy.  And probably on the average you do.

But you also experience periodic moments of intense joy.  And the moments of intense joy can be caused by something as silly as a ladybug existing.

For me, as an adult, happiness is a very complicated thing.  It is some mix of how much I've slept, my relationship with my wife, my recognition at work, time talking to friends, interesting entertainment, the numbers in my bank statement, and overall things in the world going the way I want them.  It's hard to be happy as an adult.

But it's laughably easy to make a small child happy.  Almost any trivial thing will create gasps of elation and giggles of joy.

And seeing the beaming smile of my son or my daughter is all it takes to bring me a deep though momentary happiness, apart from whatever else may be the case in the world.

I find myself liking things I could have never cared about before, like dogs and trucks and tractors and unicorns.  And songs about dogs and trucks and tractors and unicorns.  I find myself becoming excited for every animal I see.  Not for the sake of any of these things, but for getting to see the excitement it will bing my children.

My theory is that being a parent makes it possible to once again experience the childlike happiness of seeing a garbage truck empty the trash.  The simple happiness at the novelty of things that have to me become boring.

It is so easy to make them happy, and thereby easy again to make me happy.