Last month I made a wisecrack on Twitter (it’s been known to happen) in response to a Wall Street Journal graphic that struck me as rather beside the point. The graph declared, “It will cost $254,340 to raise someone born in 2013 to age 18.”

My response:

This illustrates the difference between a cost study and a cost/benefit analysis.

As a parent and an economist, I could tell that figure wasn’t cost net of benefits. I’d be hard put to quantify the benefits, as many and as varied as they are, but suffice it to say they dwarf the costs.

And mine cannot be an unusual reaction. People the world over continue to choose having children. Population continues to grow. And as economist Julian Simon observed, the more people, the more social problems being solved, the better off we tend to be, collectively.

We’d fast be extinct if the benefits of having children didn’t (and couldn’t be expected to) exceed the costs.

So tell that to these researchers:

Ask the vast majority of American parents, and they will tell you that having kids has made them happier.

The problem with this claim, as common as it is, is that research suggests it just isn’t true. —

Mull that over a second. Now proceed.

— People who have kids in the United States and in many countries around the world report being less happy than people who don’t have kids. Being a parent gives people a sense of purpose and meaning, as well as lifelong social connections. But for some reason, it doesn’t appear to bring American parents more happiness.

Now, new research has shed light on why this might be. In research that will be published in the American Journal of Sociology in September, Jennifer Glass of the University of Texas, Robin Simon of Wake Forest University and Matthew Andersson of Baylor University looked at an expansive data set from 22 European and English-speaking countries to find out how and why parents and non-parents in individual countries rate their happiness. …

Cutting to the chase:

They conclude that U.S. policies – or, more accurately, the lack of them — are likely to be the fundamental cause, by increasing the cost and the amount of stress and anxiety that parents feel.

The United States provides minimal assistance to parents, including paid parental leave, mandatory paid sick and vacation days, subsidized child care, and work schedule flexibility, they say. And parenthood is also unusually expensive in the United States, due to the high cost of private education and a lack of public subsidies for childcare. In 2012, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that a middle-income American family is likely to spend $234,900 to raise a child born in 2011 to age 17. If the kid goes to college, that figure may double. …

“What we found was astonishing,” the researchers write in a briefing that explains their findings. “The negative effects of parenthood on happiness were entirely explained by the presence or absence of social policies allowing parents to better combine paid work with family obligations.”

There is something strange about arguing that happy people are actually lying about it, according that is to the parameters within which you measure happiness. To the researchers, it’s a clarion call for more government interventions, of course, of course.

It strikes me that they’re unwittingly admitting to severe research limitations. To paraphrase Hamlet’s observation to Horatio, there are more things in parental happiness than are dreamt of in your philosophy.