Het is wellicht geen leuk nieuws voor sommigen. Anderen zal het verbazen, vooral zij die nu blij zijn dat het maandag is, zodat de rust terugkomt na een verlengd weekend. Nieuw onderzoek toont echter dat ouders door de band gelukkiger zijn dan niet-ouders. Dit zou dan wel vooral gelden voor de iets oudere ouders.

De onderzoekers nuanceren wel, Sonja Lyubomirsky, professor of psychology aan UC Riverside stelt: “We are not saying that parentingmakes people happy, but that parenthood is associated with happiness and meaning. Contrary to repeated scholarly and media pronouncements, people may find solace that parenthood and child care may actually be linked to feelings of happiness and meaning in life.” (bron)

Belangrijkste inzichten uit het onderzoek:

• Parents are happier when taking care of their children than while doing other daily activities.
• Fathers in particular expressed greater levels of happiness, positive emotion and meaning in life than their childless peers. This finding requires further study, Dunn noted, adding that “the pleasures of parenthood may be offset by the surge in responsibility and housework that arrives with motherhood.”
• Older and married parents tend to be the happiest. “Our findings suggest that if you are older (and presumably more mature) and if you are married (and presumably have more social and financial support), then you’re likely to be happier if you have children than your childless peers,” Lyubomirsky said. “This is not true, however, for single parents or very young parents.”

Het onderzoek, met de nogal opvallende, ietwat minder objectieve titel “In Defense of Parenthood: Children Are Associated With More Joy Than Misery” wordt binnenkort gepubliceerd in Psychological Science, je kan het hier downloaden. Dit is het abstract:

Recent scholarly and media accounts paint a portrait of unhappy parents who find remarkably little joy in taking care of their children, but the scientific basis for these claims remains inconclusive. In three studies, we used a strategy of converging evidence to test whether parents evaluate their lives more positively than do non-parents (Study 1), feel relatively better than non-parents on a day-to-day basis (Study 2), and derive more positive feelings from caring for their children than other daily activities (Study 3). The results indicate that, contrary to previous reports, parents (and especially fathers) report relatively higher levels of happiness, positive emotion, and meaning in life.