Parents in US not as happy as those without kids: study

Parents in the US are generally not as happy as those without kids due to relative lack of workplace policies such as paid sick time, flexible work hours, paid vacation and parental leave, according to a new report.
The US also has the largest "happiness gap" among parents compared to non-parents in 22 industrialised countries, researchers said.
"The US, 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," said Matthew Andersson from Baylor University in the US.

Parents are generally not happy in the US because of the relative lack of workplace "packages" of policies such as paid sick time, paid vacation, flexible work hours and paid maternal or parental leave, he said.
In countries in which such policies are mandated by the government or industry, a smaller gap exists between parents and non-parents, researchers said.
"In fact, in those places, parents might be slightly happier," said Andersson.

While some critics say that good family support policies come at the expense of non-parents, they actually improved happiness of everyone in the country, "with an extra happiness bonus for parents of minor children," the report said.

The same was true of subsidised child care, which might be assumed to only benefit parents, it said.
"Another striking finding was that giving money to parents in child allowances or monthly payments had less effect on parental happiness that giving them the tools - such as flexible work time - to combine employment with parenting," the report said.
Besides gathering policy information of the countries, researchers took into account each country's gross domestic product and fertility rate to ensure the findings did not simply reflect economic status.
They tested a number of hypotheses, among them whether more unexpected births and larger families might be associated with parents being less happy than non-parents. But those factors were relatively unimportant, the study showed.

The research also found that Americans are not generally an unhappy people. On a scale from 1 to 10, they hover in the 8 to 10 range, compared with, for example, France, where people tend to rate their levels from 5 to 7.
The findings appear in the American Journal of Sociology.