Parents without children in USA are happier than those with children

Parents in the United States generally are not as happy as those who aren't parents. Not only that, the U.S. has the largest "happiness gap" among parents compared to non-parents in 22 industrialized countries, according to a report by researchers at Baylor University, the University of Texas at Austin and Wake Forest University.

The report -- prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families housed at the University of Texas at Austin -- poses the question: "Why?" The answer: The relative lack of workplace "packages'' of policies such as paid sick time, paid vacation, flexible work hours and paid maternal or parental leave, said co-researcher Matthew Andersson, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology at Baylor University and formerly a researcher at Yale University's Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course.

"The United States, without any standard paid leave available to mothers or parents -- or any standard vacation or sick leave to support raising a dependent child -- falls strikingly behind all the other countries we examined in terms of providing for parents' happiness and overall well-being," he said.

In countries in which such policies are mandated by the government or industry, a smaller gap exists between parents and non-parents. "In fact, in those places, parents might be slightly happier," Andersson said.