The parenting happiness penalty
Turns out, parenthood isn't exactly how it was sold in the brochure
Last week, I wrote about how parents are statistically less happy than people without children, and I wanted to dive a bit more into why that might be, and what we can do about it.
I joined an online Q&A with a well-known writer a while ago, and I asked them, “How do you make time for a consistent writing habit amongst all the pressures of life?” Jokingly, they answered, “Don’t have kids.” Erm, yeah, too late…
I have a five-year-old and a two-and-a-half-year-old. I love them more than my own life (as it is obligatory that one must state before embarking on any discussion of the realities of parenting), but they are a lot. The two-year-old isn’t sleeping through the night yet, and is currently toilet training. I’m also one year into what appears to be a long-term project to convince him that he doesn’t have to pick up everything that he sees and that everything that he does pick up does not need to be thrown onto the floor. He loves to paint, but he mostly enjoys painting himself rather than the paper. The five-year-old, meanwhile, has just started her second year at school, which is pretty emotionally draining for her. And therefore also for me. They are both beautiful and clever and funny and interesting and insightful and curious and creative and adorable… and they want my constant attention. Often at the exact same time.
That means there isn’t much time left over for me. Between looking after the children and running a business, and potentially trying to have some kind of relationship with my husband and my friends, I’m left with little time and energy to do the things that fill my cup - things like writing. Or, you know, taking a shower.
The happiness penalty
Parents are, apparently, around 12% less happy than non-parents (although the figures vary between different studies, and also different countries - more on that later!). But essentially all the research shows that there is a statistically significant drop in happiness associated with parenting, and it hangs around until the children leave home, at which point parents’ happiness returns to levels closer to those of non-parents (some studies suggest they remain a little lower, though, probably because you continue to worry about your kids - maybe you even worry about them more when you don’t know where they are and what they’re doing all the time - and many parents still have to financially support them even after they’ve moved out).
It seems shocking to us, as a society, that this would be the case, because we associate parenting with great joy and fulfilment and beautiful, smiling Instagram photos. But I kind of feel like that’s the point. We’re sold this idea that parenting - motherhood especially - will be a magical experience, where we spend our days frolicking in fields with children who are enchanted by the sight of a ladybird, and then baking cookies with gleeful little ones who will get flour on their noses and then give us a huge hug and tell us how much they love us. Our hearts will swell so much we won’t know how they don’t burst.
Now look. I’m not saying that never happens. My son has a habit of coming up to me, throwing his arms around me and saying into my neck, “I love you in the whole wide world.” (I think he means most in the world. I’m going with that, anyway.) When I was ill a little while ago, my daughter made me a card that said, “I’m sorry you’re poorly but I know you’ll get better soon. I love you so much.” I told her I loved it and she asked if I would keep it forever. When I said yes, she asked if, when I die, I’ll hold on to it really tight so I can take it into the stars with me. Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever recover from that one. She also made a picture for me that says “My mummy is the best writer” that is pinned up on the wall next to my desk. My heart really does swell to bursting at these moments. I can feel my ovaries ache when my kids give each other a cuddle, or when they get into bed together so my daughter can read her brother a story. My son loves to put on shows where he plays his guitar and sings what appears to be a rock version of “5 little monkeys jumping on the bed”, which is amazing. I have a video of my daughter when she was maybe 18 months old, copying my husband at pretending to sneeze - they both theatrically say “ah… ah… CHOO” for a while, then she shakes her head in over-the-top disappointment when he says “ah… ah… BOO!” “Oh, Dadda!” she exclaims and puts her head in her hands - and I could watch it for HOURS. There are moments of parenting that are filled with joy.
But. The day-to-day is filled with more mundane tasks - like asking them 87 times to put their shoes on so you can leave the house, or dealing with their shock when they’re asked to brush their teeth at bedtime, as if they haven’t been asked to do this every evening and every morning for their entire lives. It’s dealing with tantrums because you gave them the wrong coloured spoon, or because you can’t unpeel the banana that they wanted to peel themselves. It’s trying to get them to school on time when they want to stop to look at all the fascinating leaves. It’s prising them apart when they’re wrestling over a toilet roll tube that is suddenly the most important toy in the universe. It’s not being able to pee in peace because they don’t want you to be away from them for a second. It’s intense sleep deprivation that lasts for years. It’s constant guilt that you’re doing something - or everything - wrong. It’s giving up so much of your old life, your career, your hobbies, your social life, your identity. It’s huge changes to your body and your brain. It’s being touched out and exhausted, and getting every illness going because children are germ factories who sneeze directly into your face.
When you take them on walks through the fields, they will take 10 paces and then announce they’re tired. They will cover themselves - then yourself - in mud, and moan the entire time. If they’re small, they will want to be carried for at least half the journey, which will result in you having an aching back and mud from their boots all over your backside. If you attempt baking with them, they will, if you’re lucky, be engaged for about 3 minutes. Then they’ll get bored and wander off, leaving you to do it all by yourself. They will squabble over who gets to do what job, they will tip twice the amount of flour into the mixture than you actually needed, then they will get more egg on the floor than in the bowl. They won’t like the taste of the end product.
No one warns you about this. They tell you it will be wonderful, and that you don’t want to leave it too late because you don’t want to risk missing out. As a result, we have a huge, Grand Canyon-sized gulf between our expectations and reality. This causes disappointment and anxiety. We also think that, if everyone says it’s so wonderful then everyone else must experience it as wonderful, and if we’re not experiencing it as wonderful then we must be doing something wrong. We judge ourselves harshly and beat ourselves up.
What were you expecting
So why doesn’t anyone warn us? Well, there’s one obvious answer - humanity would be in trouble if people stopped having children. If we told people, women especially, how tough it was, they might decide not to bother. What if they all decided not to bother? There’s been a lot of panic in the press recently about the fact that birth rates in western countries are declining, and all sorts of ridiculous plans to encourage more women to have children, none of which seem to recognise the reasons women might choose not to. Like lack of any real support and the totally unaffordable cost of childcare. There does seem to be a sense that society needs to keep telling women that motherhood is magical because it needs them to procreate.
Another contributing factor, according to social scientist Nattavudh Powdthavee, is what’s called a “focusing illusion”. Big things, like your child’s first steps or the first time they say they love you, are so momentous that we tend to focus on these when we think about what it will be like to be a parent. The day-to-day mundanities don’t register in our imaginations, even though they will make up the bulk of the parenting experience. Whilst the momentous occurrences are amazing, they’re rare and fleeting enough to not make that big an impact on our overall levels of happiness. This is also influenced by the messages we receive from society - because we’re starting from the belief that children bring happiness, we look for confirmation of that belief when we picture what parenthood will be like.
So even if we are warned, we probably won’t really take those warnings in.
We’re also living in - I hate to say it - unprecedented times. Women are gradually clawing their way towards equality in the workplace, but equality in the home is still a distant dream. In cis-het couples, women currently do 67% of domestic chores and 78% of the childcare. Throw in the fact that few households can survive on one income anymore, and you have a situation where women are doing more work outside the home than ever before whilst still doing the vast majority of the work inside the home. And we’re doing it all alone. We constantly hear, “it takes a village to raise a child”, but that is true. Parents never parented in isolation until the industrial revolution, at which point we began to draw more inwards. Now we live in small nuclear families, and it’s seen as a sign of weakness or just not the done thing to ask for help. For all of human history, we parented in communities, supporting one another. But for the last hundred years or so, our communities have gradually been eroded. Now we’re trying to cope alone, whilst under more pressure.
We also probably tend to idealise our pre-child lives once we’re in the throes of parenting stress. In the same way that we imagine only the best parts of parenting before it happens, once childfree life is taken away, we play only the highlights reel in our heads. We think we’d be doing constant exciting and glamorous things - fancy parties, exotic holidays, luxurious spa breaks - on a daily basis, instead of lying on the sofa watching TV and feeling bad about the amount of pizza you’ve just eaten. We’re never comparing like for like - mundanities for mundanities. We compare the very best of what we don’t have to the worst of what we do.
The real problem
The happiness penalty isn’t universal. In some countries, parents are up to 8% happier than non-parents. Even when there is a happiness penalty, the parents don’t report being unhappy with their children - they still say that their children are a source of purpose and fulfilment. So what’s the problem?
If I tell you that the US has the worst happiness penalty for parents, and that Finland, Sweden and Norway are some of the countries with the biggest happiness bonus for parents, does that give you a clue?
Parents are happier when they are supported by society. In countries that have free or highly affordable childcare, well-paid maternity leave, flexible working, and wider state support for new parents, as well as greater equality in gender roles, happiness flourishes. In countries, like the US and UK, where childcare is extortionate, maternity leave is a joke and businesses are insisting that staff need to be in the office from 9 to 5 at least (and therefore can’t do school runs), happiness plummets.
How a country treats its parents also says a lot about how parents, especially mothers, are viewed more widely in that culture. The UK and the US show almost a contempt for mothers, with constant negative messages about body image, work choices, parenting choices and so on that are designed to make women feel bad no matter what they do. In countries where motherhood is better supported, it seems likely that mothers will feel more valued and respected by society.
Creative solutions
For me, the hardest thing was navigating the identity shift. I had no option but to leave my corporate career, which had been the focus of my life for years and which I hadn’t wanted to leave. I was suddenly trying to figure out what I wanted to do now, how I could build a new business, whilst also figuring out being a mother. My body had changed, my interests had changed, my priorities had changed. I had become a totally different person, and it was scary and confusing.
Writing was a lifeline for me during this time. I hadn’t written much for a while - I’d told myself that writing wasn’t an option as a career and that I needed to put aside my “silly hobby”. But once my daughter was born, I couldn’t stop writing. It poured out of me. I didn’t know what was happening at the time, but when I stepped back later, when I had the capacity, and analysed it, I realised that I desperately needed an outlet to express myself, and a medium in which to rediscover myself. I used to writing to explore how I was feeling, what I needed, who I was now, and to reclaim both power over my life and purpose within it.
This is what has led me to being such an advocate for creativity as a practice. There is so much research to show that it has huge benefits for mental and physical health, and I know firsthand how deeply therapeutic it can be. It also enables people who are navigating these difficult waters to tell their stories, to have their voices heard. It gives them agency at a time when so much of that has been taken away from them. It forces a society that alienates and neglects them to listen to their needs. It also helps them to find each other, in there is so much power in numbers. They can’t tell us all we’re being too emotional.
As I’ve said above, the key to better happiness and wellbeing for parents is better support from society. Until that arrives, however (and hopefully shouting loud through our creative endeavours will help to bring that day closer), we need to find other ways to reduce the happiness gap.
A sense of purpose beyond your children is vital - knowing who you are, what you stand for, and what mark you want to have on the world (no matter how seemingly small and simple) lifts your sense of wellbeing immensely.
Time to nourish yourself is also central to greater happiness. I don’t mean bubble baths and massages, although they can be lovely. I mean time to nurture that very fundamental part of who you are that transcends everything. To connect to your purpose, to express (even just to yourself) what matters to you, to explore your feelings and to deepen your connection to yourself, your community and the natural world. To feel fully within your body and your soul. To have time, and an outlet, that is just, purely, for you.
It doesn’t have to centre around a creative practice, but I do believe, from my own experience and the experiences of others around me, that that’s an excellent place to start.
From one writer mom to another: genius! Also how on earth did you have time to write that?! Now I am collapsing into sleep, goodnight.
Ah! I so so so enjoyed this read! Found the parent happiness bonus so interesting - especially in places like Norway.
Goes to show the village is that important hey!
Thanks for taking the time to write such a thoughtful and thorough exploration. I’m a new subscriber to you and looking forward to future posts too xxx