Which families are the happiest?
If you’ve ever wondered which families are happiest, you now have your answer. Families with four or more children enjoy the greatest life satisfaction, a landmark five-year study has found.
Perth’s Edith Cowan University researcher, Bronwyn Harman, spent five years interviewing hundreds of parents from a wide range of family types about resilience, social support, self-esteem and life satisfaction. Dr Harman then ranked the different groups of parents based on the scores. The findings indicated that parents with four or more children had the highest ratings across each area.
“With large families, we think they have social support within the family,” Dr Harman said. “The kids are never bored, they have someone to play with and they get independence quite early on.”
The downsides to having a larger family, such as financial stress and workload, were negated by the happiness their large brood of children gave them.
“Parents accept that there is chaos in their lives but it does not negate the happiness they get from their families,” Dr Harman explained.
The families who came second in the life-satisfaction scores, separated by a mere 0.25 per cent, were parents who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer.
“These children are not accidents — the parents have to go to a lot of trouble and expense and forethought – so the child is very much desired,” Dr Harman said, adding, “They see the child as an absolute blessing and something they may not have considered as being possible for them."
And the least satisfied parents? Single dads, who often feel like they are seen as the lesser parent and the instigator of the family break up.
“There is this perception that mothers are the real parents and fathers just sort of help,” Dr Harman said. “There is still no understanding in 2015 that fathers are co-parents that have just as much responsibility for kids.”
While the study finds that family type does affect parent’s happiness and satisfaction in life, Dr Harman is quick to point that there was no “best” family type and in fact, it’s not important to a child’s upbringing.
“It's not the family make-up that makes a difference to how a child is parented, it is the family processes,” Dr Harman said, “Everyone – chill out. It's not important.”
"What is important for kids are things like consistency, boundaries and to know that they are loved, no matter what.”