I questioned the media and accidentally went viral.

I woke up to a million views on a post I wrote about a headline in the Daily Mail.

Read the full X thread here

Last month the Daily Mail ran an outrageous headline claiming that having children doesn't make you happy. Then they went a little further and said ACTUALLY kids "will ruin your relationship". I didn't need a degree in statistics to know that was wrong. I've been married almost 12 years. I have four kids. I know what joy looks like on a Saturday morning with a toddler in my lap, and I know what exhaustion looks like at 11 p.m. after a long day with all of them. I know which life I'd choose if I had to live it over again a thousand times. And I knew, the moment I read that headline, that somebody was asking me to reject the evidence of my own eyes and ears.

Now, I should confess something before I go any further. There is a reason these headlines work on tired parents. For a fleeting moment, they make you wonder if all those social media posts you scroll past (the kid-free brunches, the endless globetrotting, the couples in white linen on a beach somewhere enjoying some peace and quiet) actually have something to them, and whether everybody else really is happier than you. That flicker of doubt is exactly what the propaganda machine is designed to produce. The machine counts on exhaustion.

It counts on you being too busy with real life to check its work.

But I did have the time. So I checked.

I clicked through the article, found the actual study, got to the link buried in the study that had the actual dataset, downloaded it, and opened the spreadsheet. After a little category sorting, I was shocked at what I found:

Married parents won 8 out of 9 categories. Look for yourself. It is right there in their own data. Not only that, married parents reported being happy 53 percent of the time, compared with 42 percent for single childless adults. They reported being unhappy only 21 percent of the time, compared with 33 percent for single childless adults. They topped the list on meaning, on life satisfaction, on optimism, and scored lowest on guilt and sadness.

Even single parents (people raising kids alone, in the hardest possible version of the job) scored higher on meaning in life and overall happiness than single adults with no children at all. When even the broken version of the arrangement outperforms having no kids, that tells you something about how significant the thing actually is.

The Trick:

So how did the researchers turn their own data into a headline claiming children don’t make you happy? Without getting super technical, here’s what they did.

They saw the same numbers I just showed you: Married parents on top of almost everything. But that’s not the kind of finding that lands a research paper in the Daily Mail. So they went looking for a different way to read it.

Instead of comparing the groups that actually exist in real life (married parents, single parents, married couples without kids, and so on), they decided to ask a narrower question: forget about kids for a second, are people in relationships happier than single people? And of course they are. That’s not news. Anybody who has ever been single or married knows that. So they noted the obvious and moved on.

Then came the move. They took that finding and used it to explain away the kids. Their reasoning went something like this: “Well, parents are more likely to be in relationships, and people in relationships are happier, so maybe the parents in our study aren’t really happier because of their kids. Maybe they’re just happier because they’re more likely to be married.”

So they ran the numbers again, this time treating the relationship as if it were doing all the work. With the relationship doing the heavy lifting in their model, the boost from kids shrank. And even slightly dipped on one measure (day-to-day relationship satisfaction). Now, for what it’s worth, even after all this statistical reshuffling, kids still showed a real positive effect on meaning in life but that didn’t make it into the headline either. I digress.

That was the moment the headline got written. Get the relationship. Skip the kids. The Daily Mail picked it up from there.

Here is what the whole exercise misses. You don’t get to claim credit for everything marriage gives people while pretending kids aren’t central to why marriage exists in the first place. For almost everybody who has ever gotten married, building a family is one of the main reasons you got married. People don’t get engaged, walk down the aisle, and then sit down a few years later to decide whether kids are a lifestyle option that suits them. You can’t measure what marriage contributes independent of kids when kids are the reason most people get married. The two things were always one project. Trying to split them apart and then evaluate the pieces is like trying to split a marriage into “love” and “commitment” and ask which one is really doing the most important work. The question itself is broken.

Nowhere in the article does it mention that the happiest people in the entire study (on 8 of 9 measures) were married couples with kids. It skipped the fact that even single parents (people raising kids ON THEIR OWN) were happier and found more meaning than single adults with no kids. And it refused to acknowledge something that literally any parent already knows about raising children: it is hard, but worth it.

Of course parents would report slightly lower day-to-day relationship satisfaction during the years they’re raising young kids. Raising kids can be hard on a marriage in the short term. That isn’t news, and it isn’t a scandal. The honest question is whether that fact actually matters when every other measure (meaning, overall life satisfaction, happiness, hope) moves in the right direction after children. That is the better headline: for married couples with kids the day-to-day got harder but somehow their life got better.

The distance between “Married Mothers and Fathers Won Everything” and “CHILDREN DON’T MAKE YOU HAPPY” is so enormous that no honest researcher and no honest journalist gets there by accident. Somebody was steering. That is a pre-written headline with the data getting squeezed until it fits.

Nobody is Neutral:

Here is the bigger point I want you to leave with. We are living in a moment when the institutions that are supposed to inform us (universities, research journals, major media) have shown again and again that they are not neutral on questions about marriage, family, and children. They have a worldview, and that worldview mostly runs against the things most human beings have always known about how to build a good purposeful life. When a headline lands in your feed telling you that marriage is a trap, or that kids are a drag on your happiness, or that the traditional family is a myth, the right response is curiosity. Slow down and fact-check. Ask who funded the study, what the researchers actually measured, and whether the headline matches the data. Ask whether anyone you love, who has actually lived the thing being measured, would recognize the conclusion. At this point, the elites have earned our skepticism. They are not owed our trust just because they have degrees and platforms, and they are especially not owed it when what they are telling us contradicts what our own eyes, our own lives, and our own great-grandparents already knew to be true.

So have the kids. Stay married. Raise them together. Not because a study said so, but because you already knew, and the data, when you read it yourself, just happens to agree.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.