Listen to the best of the church's music for the season of Lent at Lutheran Public Radio.org

of glory died.

Sacred music for the season of Lent, Lutheran Public Radio.org. Important things are often very difficult.

One of the most important things in the world is the task of parenting children, being mother, being father.

What factors make those jobs seem more difficult or more easy. The answers might surprise you. Welcome back to

Issues, etc. I'm Todd Wilkin, joining us to discuss a new survey on parenting, Dr. Lyman Stone,

Director of Research for Democratic Intelligence, Senior Fellow and Director of the Pronatalism

Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

He's author of a recent column for IFS titled Hard Parenting, Better Relationships, New Evidence.

Lyman, welcome back.

It's always good to be with you.

Why ask parents how difficult it is to be a parent?

A lot of parents feel like it's pretty difficult. I think all of us at times feel like it's pretty difficult. That perception of difficulty, I mean, it comes up

culturally, there's lots of conversation about this. You get a group of parents

together and inevitably it seems like conversation ends up going there at some point.

So beyond the fact that we just think parenting is valuable

and important and we think it's worthwhile to understand what's going on with parenting,

we also happen to know that when people feel that parenting is very difficult, they're

less likely to go on to have more children or to have any children at all. And so we were

interested in seeing what kinds of things shape parental

difficulty or perceived difficulty, partly so we could understand what kinds of things are going

into childbearing decisions. What did you discover overall when you asked parents that question?

...