I was a little surprised to hear, recently, of the apparently well-documented decrease in happiness that people go through upon becoming parents. This news came from my professor, Dr. Ashley Dressel, but as it was the end of class, the subject was left to be discussed at a later date and I was left to do my own research into this seemingly counter-intuitive phenomenon. Among the first two articles I’ve encountered are “Many Parents Are Happier Than Non-Parents – But Not in the U.S.” from Time Magazine (which has its own “Time Guide to Happiness” – who knew?) and “The Depressing Reason Having Kids Doesn’t Actually Make You Happier,” published on MarketWatch.
The reason behind the onset of parental happiness, at least according to these two sources, is money. Specifically, the Time article reports on a life-satisfaction study of 22 Western countries that found Americans were parents unhappiest because they pay so much more for childcare and receive so much fewer paid vacation and sick days. The study is quoted as saying that “Unlike its economically developed counterparts, the U.S. has done little to offset the costs of raising children and ameliorate the incompatibility between employment and childcare.”
The MarketWatch article presents a more recent study, which controlled for the wealth of the parents surveyed in order to better understand the “parental happiness penalty.” The results, perhaps not surprisingly, were that if you remove the element of financial strain, the happiness of parents does not decrease, and is in fact bettered. In the words of the study’s authors, “Controlling for financial difficulties we then find that children now increase happiness. Why else would you have them?”
A possibility for further research, perhaps, would be to find out if child-induced money troubles are indistinguishable from other financial stressors in their effect on happiness, or if there is yet some psychological pain exclusive to bringing one’s offspring into the world.
WHAT IS HAPPINESS? 