17th August 2012 | by MFC Team
Breaking News: People with kids are happier than people without kids
Think parents are miserable and unhappy? Not so, according to a recent research study conducted across three universities including the University of British Columbia. A study on a large sample of Canadian and US men and women examined whether parents evaluate their lives more positively than childless adults, whether parents feel better than childless adults day-to-day, and whether parents experience more positive feelings while taking care of their children versus when they’re busy with other daily activities.
The results suggest that contrary to popular beliefs about the personal and relationship costs of having children, parents report higher levels of overall well-being, happiness, and positive emotions. Interestingly, the parents were happier when they were taking care of their children than when they were doing other daily tasks. It was very interesting to note that in this study, those parents who were older and married were happier than parents who were younger or unpartnered.
Read the entire research article here.
Having gone through three years of trauma associated with unexplained infertility, I’m just now coming to terms with the fact that I will never be a parent. It makes me really sad that society continually perpetuates the “parent vs. non-parent” debate. Too often factors are oversimplified. Happiness is a deeply complex emotion and to link it directly to one factor, does it a true disservice. I’m childless AND I’m happy – I try every day not to attach those two factors too closely to each other.
Perhaps I misread the paper, but it seemed to me that both of the first two studies (the ones that compared parents to non-parents) combined people who are childless by choice with people who are wanting to have kids but are not parents. I wonder what the results would have been if they had formed their comparison groups in that manner (i.e., people who have achieved their goal of being a parent vs. people who have not achieved their goal of wanting to be a parent vs. people who have achiever their goal of not being a parent)?