Some surveys of 86 countries showed that happiness tends to decrease for people that have children and are under 40, while people over 40 tend to have increased happiness.

"One study finds that fathers ages 26 to 62 actually get a happiness boost, while young or single parents suffer the greatest loss.", according to this article.

"A recent study examined the link between having children and happiness from two surveys completed by almost 120,000 people (Herbst & Ifcher, 2016). They identified two trends: First, compared with nonparents, parents are becoming happier. Second, nonparents are increasingly reporting lower levels of happiness.", according to another article.

I'm somewhat Conservative but some things Conservatives say really annoy me, such as essentially telling everyone they need to have children or that they'd be happier if they did. Conservatives push very hard for childbearing and get quite upset with other people saying they don't want children and voice it to others.

Well, guess what? I don't care and no one else should! When someone says they don't want children, what exactly do people think a statistic about the happiness of other people is supposed do for that person? Nothing, that's what. Most people came to the decision not to have children through years of contemplation. Some people choose not to have children due to medical conditions so as to not pass something down to their children, some had a difficult childhood in a dysfunctional household and believe they lack the parental skills to give the child a good life, they don't like children, they don't like being in debt, they want to travel and experience the world and consider children a hinderance, etc. Telling someone who doesn't want children that having children for some increases happiness isn't suddenly going to make us change our mind.

Even with these examples, people cite anecdotes about how they felt the same way but having a child changed their life. They didn't like children but they love their own, they originally didn't want children but it made them a better person, etc. These anecdotes aren't convincing. No one is going to change their mind thanks to an anecdote because you can't give the child back if you didn't have the same change as the anecdote.

People, especially Conservatives, really need to stop telling everyone they need or should have kids. There are 8.1 billion people in the world, so we don't need to worry about going extinct any time soon and this isn't the pre-industrial revolution, so we don't need a bunch of children running around helping the farms.