New study suggests parenthood increases meaning in life but leaves everyday happiness largely unchanged

A recent study suggests that having children tends to have a minimal impact on a person’s day-to-day happiness and life satisfaction. Instead of providing a permanent emotional boost, parenthood provides evidence of a slight increase in a person’s sense of meaning in life, particularly for women. The findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Evolutionary Psychology.

Evolutionary biology proposes that human emotions evolved to motivate behaviors that help people survive and pass on their genes. Because having children is the primary way humans pass on their genetic material, evolutionary theory predicts that parenthood should make people feel happier.

“Having children is one of the most important decisions in people’s lives, and many people ask: will having children make me happier?” said Menelaos Apostolou, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Nicosia. “That question is what motivated me to conduct this study.”

“The answer our results support is that parenthood is unlikely to produce a permanent change in a person’s baseline level of happiness, or in their other positive and negative emotions, or in life satisfaction,” Apostolou explained. “Put simply, having children is unlikely to make people permanently happier (or less happy). This is surprising, given that most parents would agree their children are the most important thing in their lives.”

Psychologists often divide emotional wellbeing into two main categories to understand these feelings. Hedonic wellbeing refers to the daily experience of positive emotions, like happiness, and the absence of negative emotions, like sadness or guilt. Eudaimonic wellbeing refers to a deeper sense of meaning and purpose in a person’s life. While these two concepts are related, they do not always respond to life events in the exact same way.

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Previous research on how children affect these two types of wellbeing has yielded mixed results. Some studies suggested that parents experience more positive emotions and a stronger sense of purpose than nonparents. Other research indicated that having children might actually lower a person’s happiness or life satisfaction slightly.

The authors of the current study noticed a recurring issue in much of this past research. Many older studies did not properly account for a person’s relationship status. People in intimate romantic partnerships tend to report higher levels of emotional wellbeing than single individuals. People in relationships are also much more likely to have children than single people.

Failing to separate romantic partnerships from parenthood can skew the data. Parents might appear happier simply because they are more likely to be in a romantic relationship, rather than because they have children. The scientists designed their analysis to account for this variable and get a more accurate picture of how parenthood itself affects emotions.

To explore this topic, the researchers analyzed a large dataset containing responses from 5,556 participants. This sample included 3,350 women and 2,189 men from ten different countries, including China, Greece, Japan, Peru, Poland, Russia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine. The average age was about 33 years old for the women and 36 years old for the men.

The participants completed several standardized questionnaires to measure different aspects of their mental states. The surveys asked them to rate their overall life satisfaction, their current levels of happiness, and their general optimism. The researchers also measured specific positive and negative emotions, including joviality, self-assurance, guilt, and sadness.

To capture eudaimonic wellbeing, the surveys included a ten-item questionnaire asking participants to rate their sense of meaning in life. The researchers also assessed relationship satisfaction among the participants who were married or in a romantic partnership. When analyzing the data, the authors explicitly adjusted their statistical models to account for each person’s age, sex, and relationship status.

The scientists found that parents and nonparents showed almost no differences in their daily experiences of happiness, sadness, or overall life satisfaction. When they adjusted for relationship status, the apparent emotional benefits of having children largely disappeared. The data suggests that being in a romantic partnership is a much stronger predictor of daily happiness than having a child.

While day-to-day positive emotions did not change much, the study provides evidence for a small shift in eudaimonic wellbeing. Parents reported slightly higher levels of meaning in life compared to nonparents. This slight increase in a sense of purpose was more pronounced for women than for men. The researchers noted that this specific finding aligns with the idea that raising children requires a long-term sense of direction.

Additionally, the researchers observed a slight negative effect on romantic partnerships. Participants with children reported slightly lower relationship satisfaction than those without children. The researchers noted that the financial costs, time demands, and general stressors of raising a child likely place a strain on romantic bonds.

Because the lack of emotional shifts contradicts widespread beliefs about parenting, the researchers closely examined their data. Apostolou noted that people might question if these results are accurate.

“One question that naturally arises is whether this result is real, or whether it just happened to show up in this particular sample, or whether it is the product of flawed statistical analysis,” Apostolou said. “Future replications will help settle this, but in my opinion the result is real, for several reasons.”

“First, the sample was large and cross-cultural, and the results were consistent across different cultures,” Apostolou explained. “Second, because I found the outcome so surprising, I tried many different analytical strategies, and the result held up every time.”

He added that ongoing work continues to support these findings. “Third, I have conducted further studies (not yet published) using different measures and different research designs, all leading to the same conclusion: parenthood has no permanent positive or negative effect on emotional wellbeing in general, or happiness in particular,” Apostolou said.

The authors describe their findings as a neutrality paradox. Evolutionary theory strongly predicts that people should feel immense joy from passing on their genes. Yet, the data suggests that baseline happiness remains largely neutral for parents.

To resolve this paradox, the researchers propose that emotional responses to children are meant to be temporary motivators rather than permanent states of mind. For example, a parent might feel an intense spike of joy when a child graduates from school. This brief surge of happiness acts as a reward for their investment of time and resources.

If that joy became a permanent baseline, the parent would lose the emotional motivation to keep helping their child succeed in the future. Emotional mechanisms are designed to push people toward actions that help their offspring thrive. A permanent state of satisfaction would stop a person from taking further action.

Because these intense emotional spikes are relatively infrequent, they do not show up as permanent changes on large-scale surveys of daily happiness. Parents easily remember these powerful moments of joy when asked about their children. Still, these brief moments do not drastically alter their average day-to-day emotional baseline over the course of an entire lifetime.

“I am a little worried about this result, because it could discourage people from becoming parents or be used as an argument against having children,” Apostolou said. “The logic would go: given the considerable costs that parenthood involves, if it does not make you happy, then the reasonable thing to do is not to have children. So it is important to be clear about what this study does and does not tell us.”

“The study says that parenthood is unlikely to produce a permanent increase in happiness or in other positive emotions, so a permanent boost in happiness is not one of the rewards of parenthood,” Apostolou continued. “But this does not mean that children are not an important source of happiness and other positive emotions. They absolutely are; it is just that these emotions tend to be short-lived and tied to the moments we spend interacting with our children.”

“In my view, the real reward of parenthood is something else,” Apostolou added. “By having children, people create individuals they care about deeply and who, in turn, care deeply about them.”

“Having people in your life whom you love unconditionally and who love you back unconditionally is a major positive life outcome, and it is the primary reward of parenthood,” Apostolou said. “That reward is simply not something our study was designed to capture.”

The study relied on self-reported data, which means participants might have been biased in how they answered the surveys. People sometimes rate their own happiness differently than an objective observer might. The data was also collected using convenience sampling. This means the participants might not perfectly represent the broader populations of their respective countries.

Future research could address several variables that were not measured in this analysis. For example, the age and number of a person’s children could strongly influence their daily stress levels and emotional states. A parent of a newborn might experience very different emotions than a parent of an adult child.

The scientists also suggest looking at financial status and education levels in future studies. These economic factors likely interact with the demands of raising a family in significant ways. Investigating these missing details could provide an even more accurate understanding of how parenthood shapes the human experience.

The study, “Is Parenthood Contributing to Emotional Wellbeing? The Neutrality Paradox and a Possible Resolution,” was authored by Menelaos Apostolou, Mark Sullman, Agata Błachnio, Ondrej Burysek, Ekaterina Bushina, Fran Calvo, William Costello, Tetiana Hill, Maria Galatiani Karageorgiou, Yanina Lisun, Denisse Manrique-Millones, Oscar Manrique-Pino, Yohsuke Ohtsubo, Aneta Przepiórka, Burcu Tekeş, Andrew Thomas, Yan Wang, Mads Larsen, and Sílvia Font-Mayolas.