Cognitive Dissonance in parents - Idealizing Parenthood to Rationalize Parental Investments (Eibach & Mock, 2011).
Many people believe that to be truly fulfilled in life, it is necessary to experience the joys of parenthood. Children are considered an essential source of happiness, satisfaction, and pride (Jones & Brayfield, 1997; Simon, 2008). However, the idea that parenthood involves substantial emotional rewards appears to be something of a myth (Gilbert, 2006). Parents experience lower emotional wellbeing (McLanahan & Adams, 1989), less frequent positive emotions (Simon & Nath, 2004), more frequent negative emotions (Ross & Van Willigen, 1996), lower marital satisfaction (Somers, 1993), and greater depression (Evenson & Simon, 2005) than nonparents do. Parents also misreport their experiences with children as being more enjoyable than episodic assessments suggest these experiences actually are (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004).
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Indeed, cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957) suggests that children’s declining economic value may have been a contributing cause of parents’ increasing exaggeration of children’s emotional value. Research on dissonance theory shows that when investments in ventures are high and external incentives are low, people convince themselves that their costly ventures are intrinsically rewarding (Aronson & Mills, 1959; Brickman, 1987; Kanter, 1972).
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(…) These results support our hypothesis, based on dissonance theory, that parenthood idealization functions to rationalize parental investments. This may help explain why parents believe that spending time with their children is more emotionally rewarding than experience sampling suggests it actually is (Kahneman et al., 2004).
Source:
Eibach, R. P., & Mock, S. E. (2011). Idealizing Parenthood to Rationalize Parental Investments. Psychological Science, 22(2), 203–208. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610397057
When I was a kid I was talking to my psychiatrist with my dad and I mentioned some stuff and he went “let me get an ADHD questionnaire” and Dad was like “I mean, that’s all normal stuff for me” and he went “okay, let me get two ADHD questionnaires”.
