The Neuroscience behind the ‘Parenting Paradox’ of Happiness

The neuroscience behind the “parental paradox” of happiness

By Anthony Vaccaro edited by Daisy Yuhas

Deciding whether or not to have children can be one of the most important decisions a person makes. Countless factors can influence this choice. How will this affect your finances, relationships or career? Do you feel pressure from your family or community? But one of the simplest and most personal considerations is whether and how having a child will affect a person’s quality of life.

Here, psychologists who study well-being have been confronted with what is sometimes called the “parental paradox”: parents report poorer mood and more stress and depression in their daily lives than adults without children; Yet parents also tend to report greater satisfaction with life in general. How can we make sense of this contradiction?

My colleagues and I have conducted research that can help us answer this question and, in doing so, highlight the complexity of what makes a good life. I am an emotion neuroscientist by training and want to use brain science to understand the messy and complicated feelings people experience in modern life. Feelings such as bittersweet memories of an ex, simultaneous excitement and fear before a performance, or ambivalence about a big life change are not easily quantified in the positive-negative scales scientists use in research. Yet they can tell us a lot about how we process emotions when it matters most. During my postdoctoral training, I worked at the University of Southern California in a laboratory focused on the parental brain. This team followed a group of new fathers through their partner’s pregnancy and their development as parents. I realized that studying these new dads over time would give me the opportunity to study the connection between parenthood and a meaningful life and what happens in the brain as people’s lives change.

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Focusing on the “meaning of life” allowed me to study an aspect of well-being that transcends daily stressors, as parenting is notoriously stressful. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what the meaning of life is, but in psychology it is measured using people’s subjective reports that their lives are coherent and have an overriding purpose. This abstract feeling that “things have meaning” has been shown to be a powerful indicator of overall well-being and mental health, even when people are going through objectively difficult times. According to research, people who feel greater meaning in life are often more resilient in the face of greater mental health challenges that can arise from adverse events such as global pandemics, serious illnesses and war trauma.

In our study, my colleagues and I predicted that most new fathers would report an increase in meaningfulness about six months after the birth of their first child compared to what they reported during their partner’s pregnancy. Instead, among 88 fathers, we found a roughly equal distribution among those whose sense of meaning increased or decreased. Clearly, only about half felt that life was more meaningful because they had become parents. But this was only the first in a series of important pieces of information.

Of our participants, 35 agreed to be scanned with a form of brain imaging called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) before and after the birth of their child. We used these brain scans to calculate the synchronization of each part of the brain with the rest. For people with strong functional connectivity, when activity increases in one area, it also increases in the rest of the brain. Other scientists have conducted fMRI studies in hundreds of people and found that this measure is linked to increased meaning in life, potentially because greater connectivity in the temporal lobe and other emotion-related brain regions allows for better integration of emotional, self-oriented, and abstract thought.

We wondered if this connectivity changes during a major life event, such as having a child, and, if so, whether it relates to the person’s meaning and purpose. By comparing scans conducted before and after our participants became fathers and examining people’s reports of their experiences, we modeled whether functional changes in different parts of a person’s brain predicted either their meaning in life or their feelings (positive or negative) about parenting.

People with positive parental feelings had more connectivity changes in parts of the brain that are important for self-control (the middle frontal gyrus) and empathy (the supramarginal gyrus). Those who had more negative parental feelings showed changes in the sensory cortex and cerebellum, which may be linked to hyperemotional sensitivity to sensory information. (If a baby’s crying still triggers a hyperstress response, parenting is going to be very difficult.) Meanwhile, fathers who maintained or increased their sense of meaning showed increased brain connectivity in regions such as the insular cortex and temporal pole. These areas are crucial for integrating a person’s emotions and senses into their broader sense of identity, suggesting that fathers who engage more effectively in this contextualization process during this new life stage tend to thrive.

With these differences, we can begin to think more deeply about the parental paradox. A father may feel overwhelmed by sleepless nights while contextualizing this within the framework of a meaningful existence. In other words, the difficult emotions people face in the short term may become independent of a feeling of satisfaction in the long term, potentially because distinct brain processes underlie both. Without this cognitive translation, daily stressors may dictate overall feelings of well-being, or the mixing and shifting between positive and negative aspects of parenting may make life overall inconsistent for these fathers. Integrative regions such as the temporal poles and insular cortex allow positive and negative events to fit together, potentially in a framework that facilitates long-term well-being.

This distinction is part of a broader body of research on how people construct what scientists call a “coherent self-narrative,” or the story that individuals tell about themselves. For example, previous research has shown that simply viewing oneself as a “hero’s journey” increases resilience. When a person can place their feelings in a story that is meaningful to them, it doesn’t matter whether a particular situation is positive or negative as long as it fits their long-term goals. It seems that the answer to whether parenting makes people happier therefore has less to do with the children themselves (sorry, kids) and more to do with whether that goal of parenting aligns with the individual person.

A recent analysis of a dataset that followed German adults from 1984 to 2021 actually found no average difference in the well-being of middle-aged adults with or without children, although there was more variability for parents than for non-parents. But what was really interesting were the results in young adults. The most important factor in understanding their well-being was not whether they had children, but how important their well-being was to them. aim to have children. Childless young adults who placed high importance on having children experienced less life satisfaction as they grew older:if their perception of the importance of this goal remained high as they aged.

But these were a minority. Most of these childless adults downplayed this goal as they got older, and their happiness then was no different than that of adults with children. This finding may highlight the takeaway for the fathers in our study and for those wondering whether they want children: meaning can be created regardless of the choice made. The adaptive brain can change courses, reinvent stories, and help people thrive, even when life throws us a curve ball or a baby screams at two in the morning.

Are you a scientist specializing in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed article that you would like to write about for Mind Matters? Please send your suggestions to Scientific AmericanDaisy Yuhas, editor-in-chief of Mind Matters, at dyuhas@sciam.com.

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