Mary Eberstadt responds to a series of “Why Parents Hate Parenting”-type stories:

today’s fashionable misery over childrearing also has deeper roots in the long-running Western rebellion against the command to be fruitful and multiply.
Living under the terms of that rebellion, as most modern people have since the invention of the Pill fifty years ago, is incurring costs that are now only beginning to be understood. Parents today are older – and older parents, while richer, are also less energetic than younger ones, less patient, and more likely to get sick themselves. They are more likely than the parents before them to live away from extended family – nature’s original and still best answer to the eternal babysitting problem. They are also far more likely to have small families rather than large ones – thus also missing out on nature’s original and still best answer to the household drudgery problem, too.
Interestingly, the same studies demonstrating today’s parental unhappiness also bear out insights put to canvas in 1840 by famedlandscape artist Thomas Cole. His four-part “Voyage of Life” series beautifully illustrates a human fact that social science has lately come to verify: in general, babies and children are happy, old people are happy – and middle-aged people are likely to be miserable. What the summer’s complaints about children really goes to show is that the modern flight from the natural family is only making many of them even more so.