Expert psychologist challenges anti-marriage narratives: data shows marriage, motherhood boost women’s happiness

After years of cultural claims that marriage and children make women less happy, psychologist Jean Twenge reported in a Sept. 3 Atlantic article that new survey data show married mothers are the happiest group of women.

Alongside her colleagues Jenet Erickson, Wendy Wang, and Brad Wilcox, Twenge reported on the results of a nationally representative survey of 3,000 American women YouGov conducted in March. 

“What we found contradicts the negative messages that I had come across: Married mothers are actually happier than unmarried women and married women without children,” explained Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University who has written several books.

In the survey, 19% of married mothers described themselves as “very happy.” That compared with 11% of married women without children, 13% of unmarried mothers, and 10% of unmarried women without children. Twenge noted that these differences remained even after controlling for income, education, and age.

The conclusion marks a sharp turn from the messages she herself once encountered. 

“When I was deciding whether to have children, in the early 2000s, most of what I read about the prospect was negative,” Twenge recalled. “If you want to be happy, these writers warned, don’t have children. You might not want to get married, either — after all, marriage, research suggested, mostly benefits men.”

Now, as both a researcher and mother of three, Twenge pointed to meaning and purpose as key drivers of happiness among mothers. Married women raising children were the most likely to agree that their life “has a clear sense of purpose” (28%), compared with about 15% of women without children. 

“There are many reasons people choose not to have children or not to get married, but false messages about happiness should not be one of them,” Twenge said.

Reflecting on her own experience, she wrote, “Yes, you’re going to be tired and overwhelmed, but there’s a deep knowledge that you’re doing something important with your life: You’re nurturing a human being.”

She warned, however, that negative cultural narratives about family life are shaping a generation. In a survey she analyzed for her book Generations, from the late 2000s to the early 2020s the number of 18-year-old women who expected to have children dropped 11 percentage points.

She argued that “negative messaging about marriage and motherhood is likely at the root of these Gen Z shifts, along with a pervasive pessimism about everything, egged on by social media, that borders on doomerism.”

Twenge concluded that while marriage and motherhood bring very real challenges, they also offer profound rewards. 

“The articles I read long ago were right that parenting (and marriage) can often be exhausting,” she said. “But they ignored the sense of meaning that comes from parenthood and the connection of physical touch at the core of family life. After all, an AI boyfriend can’t hug you back — to say nothing of an AI child.”