Parents often report being less happy than child-free people, but kids aren't the problem. A lack of childcare and family leave is.

• Researchers found parents have a greater sense of well-being than nonparents but are less happy.
• The emotional rewards are overshadowed by the stress of living in countries with a lack of support.

For at least 30 years, studies have repeatedly found that people without children are happier than parents in the United States and in many developed countries. More recent research has found that parents are not only less happy when their children are young and the demands of time, energy, and money are greatest, as might seem logical. American empty nesters also report lower levels of happiness than older nonparents.

Researchers studying American adults could find no type of parent — with or without custody; biological, adoptive, or step; of young or adult children — who reported a greater sense of well-being than nonparents. In the United States, parents report themselves to be 12% less happy than people without children. This is the biggest happiness gap between parents and nonparents in the developed world.

To be clear, this is not because of the actual children. Children may be exhausting, but they are also joyous, curious, adorable, energetic beings that represent our future and enliven our present. Parents credit parenthood with giving them purpose, a sense of satisfaction, an identity, and meaningful social relationships. Parents may report lower levels of happiness than nonparents, but other studies have suggested that people who have children have a greater sense of purpose or meaning and are more satisfied with their lives.

Lack of family leave and childcare are part of the problem

The problem is not the children. The problem is the society parents have to parent in. "The emotional rewards of having children," a group of researchers recently explained, "are overshadowed by the stress associated with contemporary parenthood." Specifically, the emotional rewards are overshadowed by the stress of parenting in countries that don't have policies that support parents, like subsidized childcare that allows parents to work and generous paid time off that allows parents to spend time with their kids.

These two policies alone — affordable childcare and paid time off for illness and vacation — have the power to fully erase the happiness gap between parents and nonparents, even in the absence of other supportive policies like maternity leave and guaranteed health insurance. In France, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, countries that have these policies and more, parents are happier than nonparents by as much as 8%. "The policy context of nations explains up to 100% of the parenthood disadvantage" in happiness, the researchers concluded.

In spite of widespread concern across the political spectrum about America's declining birthrate, we've done little to correct the policies that make parenting an unhappy endeavor. Nearly half of mothers under 34 do not qualify for the Family and Medical Leave Act, a 1993 law that guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave. Among mothers 35 to 44, just 62% qualify. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 23% of American workers qualify for paid parental leave of any length.

In late 2021, with Democrats holding the House, the Senate, and the White House, lawmakers failed to pass a law that would have provided a meager four weeks of paid maternity leave for many, but still not all, working women. For comparison's sake, according to data from the World Policy Analysis Center at UCLA, the global average for government-mandated paid maternity leave is 29 weeks. If you've ever adopted a puppy, you'll know that dogs, mammals that reach young adulthood in the span of a single year, are generally not taken from their mothers until they're eight weeks old.

Rising costs and low standards of healthcare add to the issue

And it's not just maternity leave. Healthcare, for us and our children, still comes and goes with employment, and its quality and cost hinge entirely on the generosity of our employers. Elder care really exists only if you can pay for it, meaning that many of us have found ourselves caring for aging parents, financially and otherwise, before we ever had a chance to contemplate children.

The US Supreme Court's 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has ushered in efforts in nearly half of states to curtail women's ability to terminate a pregnancy should something terrible happen to her or the child, making pregnancy and birth all the riskier in a country that already ranks well behind most developed nations in maternal mortality.

Our jobs come home with us on the phone in our pocket, demanding our time and attention during the evenings and on weekends. Wages have been stagnant for decades, and the rising costs of childcare and housing and student-loan payments grow ever harder to cover.

School shootings are so prevalent in the United States that districts across the country regularly hold active-shooter drills — drills that, according to researchers at Georgia Tech, cause trauma of their own. Anxiety, depression, and other symptoms of poor mental health are more common in children who go through them.

Oh, and then there's the climate, which barely makes headlines even when, as in the summer of 2021, wildfire from enormous conflagrations in the American and Canadian West blackened skies from Chicago to New York City to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, or in the summer of 2022, when Alaska had the worst fire season in recorded history and heavy rains wiped out entire towns in Kentucky and Missouri. In light of our failure to account for the pressures, anxieties, and dangers of modern life, it's possible to argue that the decision to opt out of parenthood is perfectly rational. The decision to have children might be the one more in need of explanation.

Excerpted from "Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother" by Peggy O'Donnell Heffington. Copyright © 2023. Available from Seal Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.