I'm not sure I buy that - Humans can create meaning out of everything - You do not need children for that (there are some that spend years meditating in literal caves and claims that their life is also full of meaning).
So given that we can have two persons with life full of meaning, one of which is feeling down most of the time, and both of them somehow selected this life for themselves - its not quite hard to point at not having children as a better way of life. I speak of course from the point of view of me/solicity - others should have as many children as it is required to keep my precious useless stuff mass produced overseas to keep numbing consumptionism continuing until nothingness takes me back.
This is true, but if you think in terms of evolution and natural selection we should be biologically inclined to have certain desires that motivate us to have children above other desires. "Meaning" is more of a creative term, but in actuality much of how we behave is dictated by biology.
For biological inclination, a sex drive is all that's required to ensure children are produced. Biology doesn't care if you are happy or not afterwards.
A bit of interesting off-topic : I think its a disservice to general knowledge propagation to use personification when taking about systems. People can care, biology and systems in general cannot, they simply have consequences. I blame Richard Dawkins for this (and his very badly titled Selfish Gene)
Caring is part of the system. It is an aspect of the system that only exists because of the system itself. To refuse to analyze this is basically lying to yourself. EVERYTHING is a system.
The children must grow up and reproduce successfully. Not just you... but your children must reproduce as well, so thus you have instincts that shift to forwarding as much resources as possible towards your children.
The parents were asked about long term overall life satisfaction of course. This is obvious. Humans can rate their overall happiness even when their current situation is temporarily not that great.
> for parents, the more time they spent taking care of children, the more meaningful their lives were. (Time spent taking care of children had no relation to happiness and if anything trended toward reducing happiness.)
> These findings illuminate the so-called ‘parenthood paradox,’ which is that most people want to be happy and want to become parents, but those two goals are in conflict insofar as becoming a parent often reduces happiness (e.g. Twenge, Campbell, & Foster, 2003; cf. Nelson et al., in press). Baumeister (1991) proposed that the parenthood paradox can be resolved by proposing that people seek not just happiness but also meaning, and so, they become parents because the gains in meaningfulness offset any losses in happiness. The present findings are consistent with that conclusion
In your study parentd give a lower 1-10 ranking when asked how they feel in a particular moment, on random timers.
When cleaning up shit of someone you love, sure it sucks at that particular moment but your life's full of meaning.