Personally, I believe that there is no more rewarding life experience than having children. Without a doubt there are many things that can make us happy, but none of them compares with all that excitement and feeling of joy, warmth and satisfaction that being a father or mother gives us.
Some time ago we had talked about a study that showed that having children aged mothers’ cells, but we commented that it compensated for it in happiness, and we have found a study that concludes that having children makes us feel happier and more satisfied with our lives .
The study
This research is not new. Actually, it is from a few years ago, but recently it has been released and we liked its results so much that we could not avoid sharing them.
Dr. Katherine Nelson-Coffey, in addition to contributing much research on the subject of language development, was a psychology professor who conducted various studies on parents and the happiness or well-being of life with children .
The study now share, is entitled “In Defense of Parenthood: children are Associated With more joy than misery” (In Defense of parenting: children are associated with more joy than misery) and its objective was to examine the relationship between fatherhood / motherhood and well-being.
This study was carried out in part to analyze how true were those images that some media showed of fathers and mothers feeling “miserable” and dissatisfied in their life with children, since they have no scientific basis.
Their analysis, which consisted of a review of three studies, revealed that when conducting questionnaires with people with and without children, it was found that those who were fathers and mothers reported higher levels of happiness .
In the first study, it was analyzed whether parents evaluated their life more positively than people without children. In the second, if they felt relatively better on a day-to-day basis than those who did not have children. In the third, if they obtained more positive feelings when taking care of their children, compared to other daily activities.
The results of all the studies, and that formed the conclusion of this research, is that contrary to what may be thought, fathers and mothers (but especially fathers) reported higher levels of happiness, positive emotions and meaning of life , than people without children.
Of course, this does not imply that not having children prevents people from being happy, as there are many ways to be happy and to seek satisfaction as individuals. It is simply a study that reaffirms once again that which sometimes we have no words to express: having children gives us great satisfaction and fills us with loving and positive emotions .
Photo | iStock
Via | Motherly
In Babies and more | Being a mother can be very difficult, but it is certainly a wonderful experience
