When you have a child, it’s often described as the happiest moment of your life. Indeed, it can be more emotionally intense than anything else the human brain can experience.
But the moment you become a parent is just that: a moment. You then spend the rest of your life as a parent. And that’s a different proposition.
Almost every society and culture prioritises, emphasises, reinforces and celebrates the importance of parenthood. However, the reality of parenthood is increasingly at odds with such deeply entrenched assumptions and beliefs, as research reveals the persistent existence of the ‘parent penalty’.
Put simply, in numerous surveys into the overall happiness of multiple populations, parents constantly report being less happy overall than adult non-parents.
Most developed countries report that parents are less happy, and have lower wellbeing, than non-parents. The biggest happiness gap between parents and non-parents is seen in the USA.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, parents in Portugal are slightly happier than non-parents, closely followed by Hungary, Spain, and Norway.
The parenting gap
Why does this happiness penalty exist? And why would it vary so much between countries?
At the neurological level, the parent-child emotional bond is an intense and significant but also complex and demanding one.
Maintaining a child’s wellbeing through your own emotional engagement can mean the highs are very high, but the lows are very low. The process is often mentally taxing, draining and not something non-parents have to go through. And this may be reflected in the data.
However, looking at the wider picture, various factors in developed countries have, over several decades, negatively affected access to jobs and careers, housing, communities, resources and infrastructure, and so on.
Accordingly, it’s ever more challenging and stressful for typical individuals to keep themselves afloat and secure, let alone achieve the long-term aspirations our cultures instil in us (for instance, a well-paid, enduring career, or owning a home).
And if modern life is stressful enough for an individual, being responsible for raising and providing for children is logically going to significantly add to the stresses and the demands on you, while simultaneously reducing your autonomy and options.
This is arguably backed up by the different countries’ data.
The US is known for being an individualistic society that prioritises personal independence, so it has comparatively little social support provision. This means few, if any, of the many burdens of parenthood are reduced, while demands and expectations remain the same.
Meanwhile, despite clear ideological differences in cultures, countries like Portugal and Hungary provide significant government-regulated support for parents, presumably reducing stress and increasing wellbeing.
To be clear, none of this is conclusive, for various reasons. Happiness and wellbeing surveys are far from an exact science.
Much of the data is old, and besides different societies and cultures have very different attitudes and approaches to community and family support, which won’t necessarily be accounted for in surveys.
Heck, maybe there’s a link between the fact that the country with the happiest parents is also the one that’s decriminalised drugs. Who can say?
But if any conclusion can be made, it’s that parenting is one of the hardest jobs there is, and while developed countries invariably acknowledge this, many seem increasingly disinclined to do anything about it.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Rhonda Price, Powys) 'In which country does having a child make you unhappiest?'
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