Space & Innovation Does Having Children Make People Happier? parenthood, children, child, parents

Does parenthood suck the joy out of life, or is it the key to happiness? It looks like it's a draw: People with children in the home are about as satisfied with their lives as those who don't have kids at home, a new study suggests. "Parents tend to value their lives more highly than people without kids, but they're different in lots of ways: They're richer; they're better educated; they're healthier," said study co-author Angus Deaton, an economist at Princeton University. "Once you control for those things, there's essentially no difference in life evaluation." Why Parents Are Pushy The findings, published today (Jan. 13) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that people who choose one lifestyle over another will be pretty satisfied with their decision. "People who have children, by and large, want children," Deaton told LiveScience. "People who don't want children are people who, by and large, don't want to have children. And why would you expect one set to be happier than another?" (7 Things That Will Make You Happy) Conflicting results Studies on parenthood have come up with conflicting results. Some studies show that for young parents, happiness declines with the birth of each additional kid but that people with big families have more joy in midlife. Other studies have found that parents are happier than nonparents. And still other work has found that children put a damper on marital satisfaction. PHOTOS: Bad Animal Moms Deaton and his colleague Arthur Stone, a psychiatry researcher at Stony Brook University in New York, looked at Gallup survey data from 1.8 million Americans, as well as from 1.07 million people in 161 countries throughout the world. Survey participants indicated whether they had children in the home and answered several other questions, including one in which they rated their lives using a ladder scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being the best life possible and 0 being the worst. They also answered questions about whether they felt happiness, smiling, anger, worry and other emotions "a lot" or "not" the day before.

Overall, people with children at home tended to rate their lives higher than those without kids at home. But after controlling for other variables that are linked to life satisfaction - such as income, health and level of religiousness - that difference melted away. The study can't fully answer the question of whether parents are happier than nonparents, because it didn't distinguish empty nesters, noncustodial parents and others who have children but don't live with them, Deaton said. Choice is key In the modern day, having children is largely a choice, said Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick in England who was not involved in the study. Do Bad Economics Lead to Bad Parents? "Choosing either can lead to happiness, and different people choose different routes in life," Oswald told LiveScience. And what about the grandmas and busybodies who tell those planning not to have kids that they'll be so much happier once they do? For people who don't want kids, "it may well be that yes, they would be just as happy without kids, particularly if they have things in their life that would be just as fulfilling," said Carol Graham, an economist at the Brookings Institution who was not involved in the study. But there is one clear (if potential) benefit of rearing children: grandkids. "There's quite a lot of evidence that grandchildren do make you happier," said Oswald, who just had a grandchild. "You can see why intuitively: Grandparents get a lot of the benefits without having to get up in the middle of the night." Original article on LiveScience. Top 12 Warrior Moms in History 10 Scientific Tips For Raising Happy Kids 8 Ways Religion Impacts Your Life Copyright 2014 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

People with children are richer, better educated and healthier, research shows. But it doesn't necessarily mean they're happier.

Dads often get a bad rap in the animal kingdom, but many animal moms engage in behavior that would never be celebrated in a Mother’s Day card. Here, we highlight just a few, beginning with this mustachioed mom. Female mustached tamarins sometimes kill their babies. “Genetic analysis enabled us to show that the mothers themselves take the lives of their own offspring,” said Yvan Lledo-Ferrer, an Autonomous University of Madrid researcher who co-authored a study on the primates. Lledo-Ferrer, however, explained that mothers perpetrate infanticide that have poor prospects for survival due to the social make-up of particular groups. Nevertheless, it's pretty horrific. The moms sometimes just pick up an infant and toss it to the ground from a tree branch high above the forest floor.

Like a chimp mom version of Bonnie and Clyde, sometimes chimpanzee mothers cooperate with their daughters to kill other chimps. In the 1970s, noted primatologist Jane Goodall documented this behavior in Passion and Pom, a deadly mother/daughter murdering duo. She and her team observed them killing and cannibalizing at least two infant offspring of other females. Simon Townsend and colleagues of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, believe that the killings result when females are under pressure to compete for foraging areas. Not all female chimpanzee mothers and daughters do this, as the peaceful-looking pair in this image shows.

Some zebra finch mothers like to fool around. There is some equality here, as male zebra finch dads can do this too. “This means a male and a female will hang out together as a couple; they will build nests together and share other forms of bonding,” Wolfgang Forstmeier, a researcher in the Department of Behavioral Ecology and Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, told Discovery News. “They may also, however, engage in extra-pair mating behavior.” As if that isn’t bad enough for the offspring, Forstmeier’s investigations found that promiscuous behavior can be inherited. “The study provides a good explanation for what we see in humans,” Forstmeier said. “Statistics have shown that promiscuous parents are more likely to sire sons and daughters with a greater tendency to cheat.”

Mothers sometimes risk their own lives for the sake of their children. When times are tough for female kangaroos, however, they may sacrifice their offspring. This can happen when kangaroo mothers have three or so young at different stages of development: one in the body, one in the pouch, and one that lives mostly outside of the pouch. A starving or otherwise physically stressed female kangaroo may leave the older infant to his own devices and ditch the pouch, leading to the possible death of multiple offspring at a time.

In the case of lions, it is not so much what they do that’s bad, but what they don’t do. When a dominant male takes over a pride, he may kill numerous cubs less than 2 years old to rid himself of competition. The lioness allows this to happen, and even may go into heat, permitting the takeover male to start his own family with her. Photos: Lions Captured in the Wild

Giant panda moms don’t mean to be bad, but sometime they cannot help it. Weighing up to 280 pounds, these large mammals have incredibly tiny offspring. At birth, most cubs typically weigh just 3.5 to 7 ounces. Giant panda mothers have been known to squash their infants by stepping on them or rolling over them in their sleep. Photos: A Summer of Panda Pregnancies

The pregnant seahorse shown here is actually a male. Seahorses are another example of animal mothers being bad not for what they do, but what they don’t do. In this case, males take care of nearly everything, with pregnancies being exceptionally physically challenging, as this photo suggests. “The most advanced form of male parental care is found in the seahorses, where a brood pouch has evolved that resembles a placenta, and male seahorses even go into labor,” Peter Teske, a postdoctoral researcher in Macquarie University’s Molecular Ecology Lab, told Discovery News. Photos: Small World Under the Sea

Queens and workers of the appropriately named Dracula ant chew holes into the colony’s own larvae, feeding on the insect’s “blood.” The behavior is technically called larval hemolymph feeding. It surprisingly does not kill the larvae, but it doesn't help them much either. Photos: Faces of Bees, Flies and Friends

Many sharks consume members of their own species, and Galapagos sharks are no exception. Hungry shark mothers are not too picky. If one finds a small shark to eat, it’s usually dinner time before any further investigation takes place to see if the small shark is a relative. Photos: Five Fantastic Animal Fathers