Being poor—and, more so, being poorer than you had expected you would be and having to retrench—stresses you out and makes you unhappy. Blanchflower and Clark decompose the children-make-you-unhappy fact in Europe into a "poverty" and an "other" component, and what they report makes a slot of sense: Children in a well-funcioning family setting are a source of profound happiness, and poverty in particular and stress in general are sources of profound unhappiness:
David G. Blanchflower and Andrew E. Clark: Children, Unhappiness and Family Finances: Evidence from One Million Europeans: "The common finding of a zero or negative correlation between the presence of children and parental well-being continues to generate research interest.... One million observations on Europeans from ten years of Eurobarometer surveys.... Children are expensive, and controlling for financial difficulties turns almost all of our estimated child coefficients positive.... Marital status matters. Kids do not raise happiness for singles, the divorced, separated or widowed...
#noted
