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Direct and indirect impacts of parenthood on happiness

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Abstract

There is an unfavorable evaluation of parenthood whenever the negative indirect impact of parenthood on happiness exceeds the positive direct impact of parenthood on happiness. This situation is also the result of a conflation of these two different effects of parenthood. Public policy can help reinforce the intrinsic meaning of parenthood and reduce the adverse impacts of parenthood on the life domains.

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Notes

  1. Hansen (2012) is the latest survey on the topic of parenthood and happiness. Di Tella et al. (2003), Alesina et al. (2004), Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Frijters (2004), and Stutzer and Frey (2006), for example, obtain a negative relationship between parenthood and happiness, but their findings are incidental to the focus of their study. Angeles (2010), Nelson et al. (2013), and Ashton-James et al. (2014) find a positive relationship between parenthood and happiness.

  2. Happiness can be “evaluative happiness,” “emotional happiness,” or “eudaimonic happiness.” These notions of happiness can have different sets of determinants (Kahneman and Deaton 2010; Baumeister et al. 2013). Evaluative happiness can affect emotional happiness, and vice versa (Kahneman 1999; Schwarz and Stark 1999). In this paper, I use “evaluative happiness.”

  3. If children represent additional hands for household production (e.g., farming) and parental support in old age, then \({{dD} \mathord{\left/ {\vphantom {{dD} {dZ}}} \right. \kern-0pt} {dZ}}\) > 0 (see, e.g., Zelizer 1985; Mintz 2006).

  4. For Ambert (1992), the analysis must include the profile of children (e.g., age and gender). For Deaton and Stone (2014), another consideration is whether children are still living with the parents or not. If a child’s profile X impacts parental happiness, then Eq. 3 modifies into H = F[D(Z(X)), Z(X)], and so Eq. 4 becomes \(\frac{{{\text{d}}H}}{{{\text{d}}X}} = [F_{D} \frac{{{\text{d}}D}}{{{\text{d}}Z}} + F_{Z} ]\frac{{{\text{d}}Z}}{{{\text{d}}X}}\). Parental happiness can be correlated with the amount of time spent on childcare (Kahneman et al. 2004a, b). If so, the time allocation of parents is another item to include in the analysis. Connelly and Kimmel (2015) find that the nature of childcare activities explains the parents’ unpleasant experiences more than the actual time spent in childcare activities.

  5. Using the earlier waves of the World Values Survey, Stanca (2012) estimates a regression model that uses information on what a parent thinks is the ideal number of children to control for unobserved heterogeneity. I cannot replicate Stanca’s procedure because the required information is not available in the fifth and sixth waves of the World Values Survey. I argue that individual-level unobserved heterogeneity associated with the decision to have children is not a major concern in the regression analysis because parenthood is an existing status in the dataset. I also argue that controlling for the clustered nature of the dataset can account (or, at the least, indirectly account) for country-level unobserved heterogeneity like culture.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Ateneo de Manila University, 1108, Quezon City, Philippines

    Edsel L. Beja Jr.

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Correspondence to Edsel L. Beja Jr..

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Beja, E.L. Direct and indirect impacts of parenthood on happiness. Int Rev Econ 62, 307–318 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-015-0231-2

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