Overview
- Drawing on surveys of more than 5,000 people in ten countries, the paper in Evolutionary Psychology found parents reported similar day-to-day emotions and overall life satisfaction as non-parents.
- The team measured two kinds of wellbeing, with hedonic covering daily feelings such as joy or sadness and eudaimonic capturing a sense of purpose or meaning.
- Mothers showed a slight uptick in purpose, though the signal reached clear statistical strength only for mothers in Greece.
- Parents reported marginally lower satisfaction with their romantic relationship, pointing to small strains linked to time, cost, and stress.
- The authors suggest children create brief emotional highs that do not lift average mood over time and they caution that the cross-sectional, self-reported data limit firm causal claims.