Children make you happy – if you take it off

What is the sound in the pregnancy is still so beautiful, is in reality exhausting: Hours of screaming, full of diapers, little contact with adults – apart from your own Partner. Scientific studies suggest: children do not necessarily make you happier.

• About half of all couples who divorce, according to the Federal statistical office, minor children. 40 percent of affected couples separate within a year after the birth of the first child.
• Of its own offspring it can make parents even more dissatisfied as unemployment, divorce or even the death of a partner, say researchers from the Rostock Max-Planck-Institute for demographic research (MPIDR) in a study of 2015.
• According to a further investigation, it should also take six years, until the parents can again sleep like you used to before the birth of their child.

Damage to children is really your own happiness? No, say researchers at the University of Heidelberg. You have to wait only. Therefore, parents are happier than Childless, but only if the offspring has moved out, the researchers write in the journal “Plos One”.

For the study, the researchers surveyed 55,000 people over the age of 50 in 16 countries to their mental health and satisfaction. 70 percent of the respondents were married, 91 per cent had children.

The result: parents, whose children had moved out, were slightly more likely to be satisfied in life and reported less likely to have a cloudy mood. They were also happier than their peers who had no children. In the case of parents with children in own household, the opposite was the case. “The positive aspects of Parenthood with age,” concluded the researchers conclude dominate.

Friends make happy as children

Your guess: to be at the same time raising children, work and own needs, means Stress. The kids are self-employed, this responsibility. Instead, the young self takes on the role of Helping and social contact.

Especially the interaction with others seems to play for the satisfaction of an important role. This must take place but not necessarily with children, stress the researchers. So people in a relationship or with a large circle of friends, were more likely to be happy. A further survey in the year 2014 does not fit, make the children happier.

The Heidelberg researchers want to interview the subjects in the coming years, to check how their satisfaction changed. Previous studies suggest that the satisfaction of a person varies in the course of his life. Up to the middle ages, the satisfaction rises steadily, from bags then, in the higher age to be on the increase.