Recent research suggests that having children tends to have minimal impact on a person’s day-to-day happiness and life satisfaction. Rather than producing a permanent emotional high, parenthood provides evidence that, especially for women, there is a slight increase in the sense of meaning in life. The findings were published in a peer-reviewed journal evolutionary psychology.
Evolutionary biology argues that human emotions evolved to motivate behaviors that help humans survive and pass on their genes. Since having children is the main way humans pass on their genetic material, evolutionary theory predicts that humans should feel happier after becoming parents.
“Having a child is one of the most important decisions in life, and many people ask, ‘Will having a child make me happy?'” says Menelaos Apostolou, professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Nicosia. “That question is what motivated me to do this research.”
“The answer our results support is that becoming a parent is unlikely to permanently change a person’s basic well-being, other positive or negative emotions, or life satisfaction,” Apostoloux explained. “Simply put, having children is unlikely to make people permanently happier (or less happy). This is surprising, given that most parents agree that children are the most important thing in life.”
To understand these emotions, psychologists often divide emotional well-being into two main categories. Hedonic well-being refers to the daily experience of positive emotions such as happiness and the absence of negative emotions such as sadness and guilt. Eudaimonic well-being refers to a deeper understanding of the meaning and purpose of life. Although these two concepts are related, we don’t always react to life events in exactly the same way.
Previous research on how children influence these two types of well-being has yielded mixed results. Some research suggests that parents experience more positive emotions and a stronger sense of purpose than non-parents. Other studies have shown that having children can actually slightly reduce a person’s happiness and life satisfaction.
The authors of the current study noticed a recurring problem in many of these past studies. Many older studies did not adequately account for a person’s relationship status. People in close romantic partnerships tend to report higher levels of psychological well-being than single people. Also, people in relationships are much more likely to have children than single people.
Not distinguishing between romantic relationships and parent-child relationships can skew the data. Parents may seem happier, not because they have children, but simply because they are more likely to end up in a romantic relationship. Scientists designed their analysis to take this variable into account to better understand how the parent-child relationship itself affects emotions.
To investigate this topic, researchers analyzed a large dataset containing responses from 5,556 participants. The sample included 3,350 women and 2,189 men from 10 countries, including China, Greece, Japan, Peru, Poland, Russia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine. The average age was approximately 33 years for women and 36 years for men.
Participants completed several standardized questionnaires to measure various aspects of mental status. The survey asked people to rate their overall life satisfaction, current happiness, and overall optimism. The researchers also measured certain positive and negative emotions, including cheerfulness, confidence, guilt, and sadness.
To capture eudaimonic well-being, the study included a 10-item questionnaire asking participants to rate their sense of meaning in life. Researchers also assessed relationship satisfaction among participants who were married or in romantic partnerships. When analyzing the data, the authors explicitly adjusted their statistical models to account for each person’s age, gender, and relationship status.
Scientists have found that there are little differences between parents and non-parents in their daily experiences such as happiness, sadness, or overall life satisfaction. Once they adjusted to their relationship situation, the obvious emotional benefits of having children all but disappeared. This data suggests that forming a romantic partnership is a much stronger predictor of day-to-day happiness than having children.
Although there were no significant changes in daily positive emotions, this study provides evidence of small changes in eudaimonic well-being. Parents reported slightly higher meaning in life than non-parents. This small increase in sense of purpose was more pronounced in women than in men. The researchers noted that this particular finding is consistent with the idea that parenting requires a long-term sense of direction.
Additionally, researchers observed a small negative effect on romantic relationships. Participants with children reported slightly lower relationship satisfaction than participants without children. The researchers noted that financial costs, time demands, and common stressors associated with raising children likely put a strain on romantic bonds.
The lack of emotional change contradicts widely held beliefs about parenting, so the researchers looked closely at the data. Apostolou noted that people may question whether these results are accurate.
“One of the questions that naturally arises is whether this result is real, or just happened to appear in this particular sample, or is it the result of a flawed statistical analysis,” Apostoloux said. “Future replication will help resolve this issue, but in my opinion the results are authentic for several reasons.”
“First, the sample was large and cross-cultural, so the results were consistent across cultures,” Apostolou explained. “Second, we found the results to be so surprising that we tried different analysis strategies and the results were valid every time.”
He added that ongoing research continues to support these findings. “Third, I conducted further studies (unpublished) using different measures and different research designs, all of which came to the same conclusion: parenthood has no lasting positive or negative impact on mental well-being in general and happiness in particular,” Apostoloux said.
The authors describe their finding as a paradox of neutrality. Evolutionary theory strongly predicts that people should feel immense pleasure in passing on their genes. However, the data suggest that baseline well-being remains largely neutral for parents.
To resolve this contradiction, researchers propose that emotional responses to children are meant to be temporary motivations rather than permanent states of mind. For example, parents may feel intense joy when their child graduates from school. This temporary increase in happiness serves as a reward for your investment of time and resources.
If that joy becomes a permanent standard, parents will lose the emotional motivation to continue helping their children succeed in the future. Emotional mechanisms are designed to drive people toward behaviors that help their offspring thrive. When a person is permanently satisfied, they will not take any further action.
Because these intense emotional spikes are relatively rare, they don’t show up as lasting changes in large-scale studies of daily happiness. Parents can easily recall this powerful moment of joy when asked about their children. Still, these brief moments don’t dramatically change the baseline of your average daily emotions throughout your life.
“I’m a little concerned about this result, because it could potentially deter people from becoming parents or be used as an argument against having children,” Apostolou said. “The logic would be this: Given the high cost of raising children, it makes sense not to have children if it doesn’t make you happy. So it’s important to be clear about what this research does and doesn’t tell us.”
“Research shows that becoming a parent is unlikely to produce a lasting increase in happiness or other positive emotions, so a permanent increase in happiness is not one of the rewards of parenthood,” Apostolou continued. “But this doesn’t mean that children aren’t important sources of happiness and other positive emotions; they definitely are. It’s just that these emotions are short-lived and tend to be tied to the moments we interact with them.”
“In my opinion, the real reward of being a parent is something else,” Apostoloux added. “By having children, people create someone they care about deeply, and as a result, they create someone who cares deeply about them.”
“Having people in your life who love you unconditionally and love you back unconditionally is a huge positive outcome in life, and that’s the main reward of being a parent,” Apostolou said. “That reward is not what our study was designed to capture.”
Because this study relied on self-reported data, there may have been bias in the way participants completed the questionnaire. People sometimes assess their own happiness differently than objective observers. Data were also collected using convenience sampling. This means that participants may not be fully representative of the broader population of their respective countries.
Future research could address some variables not measured in this analysis. For example, the age and number of a person’s children can have a significant impact on that person’s daily stress levels and emotional state. Parents of a newborn child may experience completely different emotions than parents of an adult child.
The scientists also suggest that future studies examine financial status and education level. These economic factors can significantly interact with the demands of supporting a family. Investigating these missing details may yield a more precise understanding of how the parent-child relationship shapes the human experience.
The study “Does parental authority contribute to psychological well-being? The neutrality paradox and possible solutions” was authored by Menelaos Apostolou, Mark Sullman, Agata Błachnio, Ondrej Burysek, Ekaterina Busina, Franc Calvo, William Costello, Tetiana Hill, Maria Galatiani Karageorgiou, Yanina Lisun, Denisse. Manrique-Milones, Oscar Manrique-Pino, Yosuke Otsubo, Aneta Przepiolka, Burk Tekes, Andrew Thomas, Yan Wang, Mads Larsen, Sylvia Font-Mayolas.
