No Reason to Envy Your Child-free Colleagues
If you’re a parent, it’s easy to view your child-free colleagues with envy as they plan nights out on the town or exotic vacations while you worry about picking up your kids at school on time and shuttling them to soccer practice.
But believe it or not, studies suggest that you’re finding more happiness and meaning in your life than your “unencumbered” co-workers, friends, and acquaintances.
Parents also are happier during the day when they are caring for their children than during their other daily activities, researchers recently found in a series of studies conducted in the United States and Canada.
Recent popular accounts have painted a portrait of unhappy parents who find little joy in taking care of their children. But a new wave of research indicates that suggests parenthood comes with relatively more positives, despite the added responsibilities. Also, emerging evolutionary perspectives suggest that parenting is a fundamental human need.
“We are not saying that parenting makes people happy, but that parenthood is associated with happiness and meaning,” explained Sonja Lyubomirsky, professor of psychology at University of California, Riverside and a leading scholar in positive psychology. “Contrary to repeated scholarly and media pronouncements, people may find solace that parenthood and child care may actually be linked to feelings of happiness and meaning in life.”
Lyubomirsky and her colleagues at UCR and the University of British Columbia discussed their findings on parenting and happiness in a 2012 article published in Psychological Science, the flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
The researchers conducted three studies that tested whether parents are happier overall than their childless peers, if parents feel better moment-to-moment than nonparents, and whether parents experience more positive feelings when taking care of children than during their other daily activities.
The consistency of their findings across all three studies “provides strong evidence challenging the widely held perception that children are associated with reduced well-being.
The study showed that parents are happier when taking care of their children than while doing other daily activities. Fathers in particular expressed greater levels of happiness, positive emotion and meaning in life than their childless peers. (This finding requires further study, the researchers noted, adding that the pleasures of parenthood may be dampened by the increased housework and childcare duties that mothers typically take on.)
Also, older and married parents tend to be the happiest.
“Our findings suggest that if you are older (and presumably more mature) and if you are married (and presumably have more social and financial support), then you’re likely to be happier if you have children than your childless peers,” Lyubomirsky said. “This is not true, however, for single parents or very young parents.”
Overall, the findings show that parenting doesn’t appear to be an inevitable drain on a career and on life satisfaction.
