There's a strange anecdotal contradiction with the research. Although much research says otherwise I'm finding that anecdotally people disagree with my statement and they actually end up have multiple children indicating that the first one was an enjoyable experience.

I think what's going on is that those research studies are picking up on unbiased measures of happiness.

In general if you ask people if children make their lives happier, they answer yes. However if you ask the same people about there overall happiness on a 1-5 scale people with children score lower then people without.

This makes sense from a biological perspective. Having an extra person to take care of; who only takes advantage of your hard earned resources without contributing does not give you any intrinsic form of happiness in any context unless this extra person is your child. Your body produces chemicals to counteract the unhappiness to satisfy your biological imperative but the main stressors are still their and can be measured in a survey that asks you questions about your happiness without the context of children.

It's hard to say if it actually is better to have kids. Is it like falling in love? Are we better off with the ability to fall in love?

As of this writing, my initial post has negative three votes which indicates general disagreement. Obviously, I don't have kids so I can only observe the phenomenon from an impartial standpoint.