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Several years ago, my then-girlfriend (now wife) and I traveled to upstate New York to meet some of my graduate-school friends who’d had their first baby six months earlier. At the time, we were undecided on whether we wanted kids of our own. That weekend we watched my friends parent their baby together like a well-oiled machine, discussing his needs and shuffling around the house to meet them while the four of us laughed and caught up. We marveled as Eric made us pancakes and eggs on a griddle with one free hand while he held the baby cooing against his chest, so that Sara, who was nursing, could nap. “I mean, I’m more tired than I’ve ever been, but I also love it,” she told me later as I rocked the baby. “Being a parent has unlocked a new level of joy.”
To any prospective parents wondering if it’s possible to be happy while parenting, a new study from Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies may be encouraging. Researchers found that when controlling for education, income, and age, almost twice as many married mothers consider themselves “very happy” (19 percent) compared with unmarried women without children who are in otherwise similar life situations. (Rates of “very happy” are 10 percent for unmarried women without children, 11 percent for married women without children, and 13 percent for unmarried women with children.) These findings are consistent with the results of a much larger study carried out by NORC at the University of Chicago, the 2022 General Social Survey, which also found a happiness advantage among married people, including married mothers.
On a gut level, it makes sense. Today, I have a wife who loves me and has my back, emotionally and financially. I have a toddler who leaps into my arms when he sees me and takes in the world with infectious delight. Despite the exhaustion of working full time with limited child care, the stresses of parenting, and a deep despair about the political direction the United States is headed in, I’d probably tell a pollster I’m very happy with my life.
But, as I told the lead author of the report, San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge, I’d also want to add some caveats. “I think most of us would,” agreed Twenge.
Twenge, who is not affiliated with the Wheatley Institute or Institute for Family Studies, is much better known for her research on generational differences and technology’s impact on our lives. Shared research interests, Twenge said, first connected her with Brad Wilcox, University of Virginia professor and fellow at IFS, several years ago. They partnered on this most recent survey to explore the reasons that more married moms consider themselves “very happy.”
They found that despite some caveats, like wishing for more time to themselves and being more likely to be overwhelmed, married moms enjoy a combination of conditions that set them apart from other women: They are less lonely, receive more physical touch, and find greater meaning in their lives than other women, on average. Twenge says these happy examples would have made a difference for her when she was deciding whether to have kids in the early 2000s.
That brings us to the authors’ larger agenda: dispelling cultural myths they believe at least partially account for falling fertility and marriage rates in the U.S. “One possible factor,” they write in the report, trying to explain this phenomenon, “is the way marriage and parenthood, particularly for women, are portrayed in the media and in online discussions.” They cite headlines in the Guardian, Forbes, and Psychology Today, as well as a Reddit thread that all drew on analysis by researcher Paul Dolan proclaiming that single, childless women are happier than other women. That’s not what either the GSS or Twenge and Wilcox’s new research shows (Dolan’s methodology and interpretation of data from the American Time Use Survey have been criticized by disinterested observers, as well as by people, including Wilcox, who are on the other “side” of this never-ending debate). “This is a survey of real women who told us how happy they were,” said Twenge. “These rumors out there that say the opposite don’t have a basis in any kind of research.”
But as an increasingly powerful movement promotes getting married and having kids as a panacea (“It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority,” says the foreword to Project 2025), an examination of research touting marriage’s benefits is just as critical as this myth-busting. Though a happiness advantage among the married is clear, even this new research can’t prove that getting married and having kids would make currently unhappy people happy. It is likewise unclear whether more information about marriage’s benefits would alter any of the changes in marriage patterns we see today.
In truth, pockets of internet discourse aside, most mainstream culture continues to present having marriage and children as a well-trod path to happiness. Just this week, I’ve been watching cultural texts as diverse as the History Channel’s Alone, Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Orange County, Love Is Blind UK on Netflix, and the newly released film Freakier Friday. All of these contemporary pieces of pop culture include characters whose goals are marriage and kids, or who celebrate the happiness they have gained from these life experiences. Also this week, we got the news that even football star Travis Kelce and singer Taylor Swift are jumping on the marriage train—and who has more embodied the idea of the happy, childless, unmarried woman than Taylor?! The Kelce/Swift wedding announcement went hyperviral. People still love this stuff.
While it’s true that more young people are opting out of these rites than they have historically, according to 2023 polling by Pew Research Center, 69 percent of unmarried adults ages 18 to 34 say they want to get married one day. While 23 percent say they aren’t sure about marriage, only 8 percent say they definitely don’t want to get married. And while young men without kids are more likely than young women to say they want children someday (57 percent vs. 43 percent), about one-third overall say they aren’t sure if they want kids—a reasonable stance, given the instability these young people have experienced. Just 18 percent of childless adults ages 18 to 24 say they definitely don’t want children.
If that last group is basing that decision on some perception that parenthood might not bring them happiness, they may have gotten that idea not from the media, but from the people they’ve met IRL. It’s worth noting that the majority of married mothers themselves are not very happy, even according to this new research. If 19 percent of married mothers are “very happy,” according to Twenge et al., then 81 percent of married mothers would not say that about themselves. There are hints at what the other married mothers say in a May blog post from IFS that used some results from the same survey that’s presented in this week’s new report to critique singer Chappell Roan’s April comments that mothers of young children are in “hell.” Without controlling for age, income, and education, the survey apparently found 21 percent of married mothers are very happy. The greatest share of married mothers (54 percent) considers themselves to be “pretty happy,” as is the case for women in all other categories (51 percent of those married without kids and unmarried with kids, and 47 percent of those unmarried without kids are pretty happy). About 24 percent of married mothers, more than the number who are very happy, said that they are “not too happy.” That finding may relate to the roughly 70 percent of divorces that women initiate. In other words, married motherhood might make you very happy, or it might not.
One of the most contentious debates in the field of social psychology is the difference between correlation and causation, especially when it comes to life circumstances and well-being. Do marriage and kids make people happier, or do happier people tend to get married and have kids?
This problem is called the selection effect—the idea that happier people “select” into marriage and children, while less happy people are less likely to do so. A 2021 longitudinal study published in the Journal of Family Psychology tested for selection vs. causation in the finding that married people have better physical and mental well-being, and found: “Findings are more consistent with selection effects (i.e., better-adjusted individuals are more likely to get married).” They do, however, see some evidence that marriage causes happiness, but find that is limited to a temporary boost in well-being in the run-up to the wedding.
When I asked whether their findings in this new report might be attributed to a selection effect, Twenge pointed me to a 2019 study that Wilcox originally brought to her attention, which used the British Household Panel Survey to more closely examine the correlation between marriage and happiness. They found that even when they controlled for individuals’ premarital well-being, married people were more satisfied, and that this advantage lasted the duration of their marriages. The researchers attribute this happiness to the friendship that comes with marriage. Still, other research finds a mix of selection and causation at play. Both explanations are probably true: Happier people are more likely to get married, and the companionship marriage offers brings protection from stressors they encounter down the road.
Would it be better if more people had that kind of protection? Absolutely. But it might be even better if we lived in a society where people did not need so much protection. After all, happiness has overall been trending down since the early 2000s, a complex phenomenon Twenge has also studied. That decline in happiness coincides with a decline in marriage rates, marriage advocates will tell you. But that decline in marriages is most apparent for men earning median or below-median incomes. According to analysis from Brookings, “in the bottom 25th percentile of earnings, where earnings have fallen by 60 percent, half of men are married, compared with 86 percent in 1970.” One study has found that the marriage gap between men with college degrees and men without college degrees shrinks in places with lower incarceration rates and joblessness. If you want to improve people’s lives, you might start by improving their economic opportunities.
Take my own situation, for example. I was already an above-median income earner before I got married. Now married to someone who also has above-median income-earning potential, I am even more secure economically (though my same-sex marriage is not exactly what many in the marriage advocacy movement have in mind). The calculations don’t work out the same for two people who are low earners. It is no wonder then that low income earners are less likely to wed and more likely to divorce, despite valuing marriage and possessing similar relationship skills. Marriage is not a guarantee of future happiness.
“It is important to note that we’re talking about averages here,” Twenge told me. “I wouldn’t want anyone to take this as ‘Everybody should get married, and everybody should have children.’ ”
But Twenge’s partners on the study dispense the “marriage and kids” prescription regularly. Wilcox wrote a 2024 book titled Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. In a glowing review of Get Married, published at one of Wilcox’s employers, IFS, the reviewer contrasts her ultimately happy decision to get married and have kids with an unnamed friend’s decision instead to focus on her career, drink lattes, and ultimately be sad (no, seriously). The review ends with the imperative to “Read Wilcox’s new book. Then, get married, get pregnant, and be happy.”
In a press release announcing the findings of this month’s new study, co-author Wendy Wang, director of research at IFS, says, “Women are often told that staying single and child-free leads to the happiest and most fulfilling life.” Yet if anyone is telling women what to do to find happiness, it is the study’s partners themselves, in promoting marriage. An article IFS published on its website describing the findings is headlined “Why Young Women Shouldn’t Ditch Marriage.”
Where advice fails, the Trump administration is currently devising ways to pressure people into marriage and kids, pledging to prioritize federal transportation dollars for places with above-average marriage and fertility rates. The administration is also said to be considering a host of other carrots they could dangle in front of the American public to make them have more kids, including a national motherhood award for women who have six kids or more. Their signature domestic legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, did a few good things for families with young children, including some increases in tax credits. (It should be said that experts point out that children from the lowest-income families do not benefit from these credits.) As for affordable child care, paid family and medical leave, and other substantive policies parents around the world rely on, the administration has balked.
Though these new findings on married mothers’ relative happiness are sure to end up in this administration’s hands, it is obvious that increasing society’s total happiness is not their goal. If it were, we’d see an economic-security-first approach to domestic policy, not tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, cuts to young people’s health insurance, and a war being waged on immigrant families, including those who are married with children. Insofar as Trump and his allies care about families at all, it is clear some families matter a whole lot more than others.
So when it comes to headlines promising happiness if you make any one life decision, here’s my advice: Be sure to read the fine print. Then get married. Have kids. Or don’t.
