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What is making American parents so unhappy?

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Children might bring joy, pride, and a considerable tax break — but they don’t necessarily bring happiness.

So says a soon-to-be-published study, which found that parents in a majority of the 22 industrialized countries claimed to be less happy than their non-parent counterparts. The largest discrepancy, however, was in the US, where parents reported being 12 percent less happy than those without children.

The report — which was conducted by Jennifer Glass of the University of Texas-Austin, Robin Simon at Wake Forest University, and Baylor University’s Matthew Andersson — is slated to appear in the September issue of the American Journal of Sociology.

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For the researchers, the lingering question was, why the happiness gap?

In an effort to explain it, they examined a number of factors, ranging from unplanned parenthood to family size to cultural understandings of society’s obligations to children.

What they found was that it wasn’t unexpected births or large broods that tended to move the needle. Instead, the reported levels of happiness came down to a country’s family-support policies — things like paid sick and vacation leave, child care costs, and work schedule flexibility.

The more amenable the policies, the happier the parents.

“The two that consistently popped out were paid sick and vacation days and the cost of child care,” said Glass.

According to a briefing on the study: “The negative effects of parenthood on happiness were entirely explained by the presence or absence of social policies allowing parents to better combine paid work with family obligations. And this was true for both mothers and fathers. Countries with better family policy ‘packages’ had no happiness gap between parents and non-parents.”

Indeed, the eight countries in which parents reported being happier than non-parents (Portugal, Hungary, Spain, and Norway topped the list) boast policies conducive to parenting, Glass said, while America’s relative lack of parental happiness could be explained by the country’s notably limited policies.

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“We’re the only industrialized country left that does not have at least a 4-6 month paid leave for mothers and fathers,” Glass said.

Additionally, the study found that countries with favorable parental policies improved the happiness of not just parents, but non-parents, as well.

“Policies such as guaranteed minimum paid sick and vacation days make everyone happier, but they had an extra happiness bonus for parents of minor children,” the briefing stated.


Dugan Arnett can be reached at dugan.arnett@globe.com.