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Evaluative and hedonic wellbeing among those with and without children at home
Edited by Jose A. Scheinkman, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved December 11, 2013 (received for review June 18, 2013)

Significance
Most people think of their children as making their lives better. Yet many studies have found that those without children value their lives more than those with children. We also find a (small) negative effect, but only once we take into account that people with children have more favorable circumstances that predispose them to have better lives. Parents also experience more daily joy and more daily stress than nonparents. Interpreting such results requires that we think about who chooses to be a parent. If parents choose to be parents, and nonparents choose to be nonparents, there is no reason to expect that one group will be better or worse off than the other once other circumstances are controlled.
Abstract
We document and interpret differences in life evaluation and in hedonic experience between those who live with children and those who do not; most previous literature has concluded that those with children have worse lives. For a sample of 1.8 million Americans of all ages, and without controls for other circumstances, we find little difference in subjective wellbeing between people with and without children. Among those most likely to be parents, life evaluation and all hedonic experiences except stress are markedly better among those living with a child. However, within this group, people who live with children are more likely to be married, richer, better educated, more religious, and healthier, all of which have well-documented positive associations with evaluative and hedonic wellbeing. With statistical controls for these background factors, the presence of a child has a small negative association with life evaluation, although it is associated with more of both positive and negative hedonics. These patterns are replicated in the English-speaking countries of the world, but not in other regions. We argue that the causal effect of children on parental wellbeing, which is the target for most of the literature, is not well defined. Instead, we interpret our rich-country results within a theory of children and wellbeing in which adults sort into parenthood according to their preferences. In poor, high-fertility countries, we find evidence that at least some people have children even when it diminishes their personal wellbeing.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: deaton{at}princeton.edu.
Author contributions: A.D. and A.A.S. designed research; A.D. analyzed data; and A.D. and A.A.S. wrote the paper.
Conflict of interest statement: A.D. and A.A.S. are consulting senior scientists with the Gallup Organization, and A.A.S. is a consultant with ERT.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1311600111/-/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
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