The Happiness of Parents and Non-Parents Are Pretty Much the Same

There have been countless studies about how having kids impacts peoples' lives and their happiness. Most of them show that becoming parents makes people less satisfied with their lives and less happy. This isn't surprising. Kids change things. People don't like change. Therefore, they end up less happy. But a study has shed a new light on how kids impact their parents: Specifically, it all depends.

Arthur Stone of Stony Brook University and Angus Deaton of Princeton University set out to see what the correlation was between parenting and life satisfaction. The duo decided to undertake this study because of how often previous reports have claimed that parenting makes everyone unhappy. For their report, Stone and Deaton crunched data from Gallup's Well-being Index, which collected answers from almost two million Americans about their emotional state. The Index featured answers gathered from 2008 to 2012. Focusing on people between the ages of 34 and 46, Stone and Deaton noted that people who were parents said they were happier than those without kids.

The atypical finding, however, was due to the fact that the parents in the study were also well off in pretty much every area of their lives. They had more money, were healthier and didn't partake in vices (like smoking) as often as people without kids. Seeing that this was an issue, the duo controlled for those factors. When they did, they found that, now get ready for this: Parents and non-parents are pretty much the same. "We find that in terms of life evaluation, people with kids and people without kids are not very different," Stone told The Los Angeles Times.

The main difference? People with kids experience a lot more of everything than those without them. That includes the highs and the lows. According to Stone and Deaton, parents experience more positive emotions like joy and happiness than their childless counterparts...along with more negative emotions, like anger and stress. Still, as the duo wrote in their report: "No matter what the controls, children are always associated with both more positive and more negative emotions."

Despite this practical and sensible finding, Stone and Deacon's report will not be the last one on parents and non-parents. In fact, there was another study released that same week — by researchers in the United Kingdom — that found couples without kids have better relationships than those with kids. According to that report, "childless married and unmarried participants are happier with their relationship and their partner than parents."

Here's our suggestion: If you want to have kids, you should. If you don't, you shouldn't. That way you won't be unhappy afterward! Also, there shouldn't be any more of these studies, because there are so many variables that it's impossible to tell if people are truly happy or not. Yes, we realize we're living in a dream world.

[Image via Flickr - Mike Baird]