Looking for info on the impact of having children on happiness

January 23, 2015 2:40 PM

Does having children impact men and women's happiness differently?

Hi Everyone,

I teach sociology and I was talking in class about the impact of having children on happiness. I had a student ask me if the outcome was different for men or women and I can't find any data. The question is what impact does having children have on parents' happiness, with data broken down by gender of parents.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Katie

posted by orsonet to Grab Bag (5 answers total)

Are parents happier? Dads may be, but not moms, singles

Of the three studies, the largest sample comes from 6,906 individuals collected between 1982 and 1999. It found that fathers and parents between ages 26 and 62 were happier, but not mothers, young parents and single parents. There were no differences in happiness between moms and women without children, but young parents and single parents were significantly less happy than childless peers, says co-author Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California-Riverside.

Searching the web for "parents happiness study women men" turns up a number of other references.
posted by mbrubeck at 2:54 PM on January 23, 2015

You will probably find this interesting
From 2003 but looking specifically at happiness in Parents, with discussion of gender differences
posted by KateViolet at 2:57 PM on January 23, 2015

Jennifer Senior addresses this in her "All Joy and No Fun," iirc. Here's a bit from an interview with her that might give you a lead:

But what's so interesting is that one of the most robust findings in the social sciences - and it's been this way for about 50 years - is that children do not improve their parents' happiness. In general, they have a net effect of either zero or they slightly compromise their parents' happiness. There are exceptions but overall the effect is zero to a slight negative. ...

BLOCK: One of the studies that got a lot of attention came from the behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman. And he asked a bunch of working women what activities gave them the most pleasure. And lo and behold, childcare was way down on the list - 16th out of 19.

SENIOR: That study blows my doors off every time I hear somebody repeat it back to me.

(LAUGHTER)

SENIOR: What's truly amazing about Danny Kahneman's study is that when the women were answering this question, they didn't even realize they were ranking childcare so low. Daniel Kahneman did not design this study to determine how happy moms were. He simply wanted to know how happy people were during the day as they were going about doing their daily business.

And only at the end - when everything was all added up - did he discover that parents would have preferred, yeah: napping, answering e-mails, shopping, watching TV...

posted by MonkeyToes at 3:49 PM on January 23, 2015

How Parents Fare: Mothers’ and Fathers’ Subjective Well-Being in Time with Children (.pdf): "Relying on nationally representative time diary data from the 2010 well-being module of the American Time Use Survey (N= 23,282), we find that parents consistently report more positive affect in time with children than without. Mothers report less happiness, more stress, and greater fatigue (but not more meaning) in time with children than fathers, and their greater fatigue is not explained by mediating factors such as the quality and quantity of sleep and leisure, activity type, or solo parenting."
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:17 PM on January 23, 2015

There are lots of studies showing a negative association between the presence of children and marital happiness.
posted by slkinsey at 5:00 AM on January 24, 2015