Two college professors, Chris M. Herbst and John Ifcher, are challenging the collective, if counterintuitive, wisdom. Being a parent, they say, really does make people happier than the alternative — in part because over the past few decades, those who aren’t parents have been becoming gradually less happy.

Dr. Herbst, an assistant professor of public affairs and social work at Arizona State University, and Dr. Ifcher, an assistant professor of economics at Santa Clara University, set out to critically assess the body of research that led to the generally accepted “parental happiness gap” — repeated findings showing that parents are less happy, experience more depression and anxiety, and are more likely to be unhappy in their marriages than those who are not parents.

….

What the two researchers found, in a paper titled “A Bundle of Joy: Does Parenting Really Make You Miserable?” presented at the annual Population Conference of America, suggests that the balance of happiness is shifting, and that ultimately, we who protest as parents may be proved right. But it’s not necessarily because we’re getting happier. Rather, parents’ happiness has held steady over time, while the absolute happiness of those who aren’t parents responding to questions like “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days — are you very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” decreased from 1972 to 2008.

via Having Children Makes You Relatively Happier, Research Finds – NYTimes.com.