Our results are interesting in light of recent studies documenting widespread declines in happiness over the past few decades in the US For example, Herbst (2011) finds that both men and women’s happiness declined between 1985 and 2005; and Stevenson and Wolfers (2009) find that women’s happiness declined absolutely, and relative to men’s, between 1972 and 2008. In contrast, we find that parents do not experience an absolute drop in happiness and are becoming happier relative to their childless peers. This finding builds on previous research that focused exclusively on low-income single mothers, and found that their absolute and relative happiness (compared to low-income single childless women) increased over the past few decades (Herbst 2012; Ifcher and Zarghamee 2014).

. . . .The past few decades have witnessed a flurry of parental happiness research. Much of this research finds that parents are less happy than non-parents. In this paper, we critically assess this body of work and careful reexamine the relationship between parental status and SWB [subjective well-being], allowing the relationship to vary over time. Using two nationally representative repeated cross-section surveys, we find evidence that parents’ relative happiness is increasing over time, a finding that appears to be driven by the absolute decline in non-parents’ happiness.