Consider it an early Father’s Day present, guys: your kids — yes, the ones who wake you up in the middle of the night and demand to be fed three meals a day — are actually making you really happy. Really. Being a parent, especially a dad, appears to confer greater levels of happiness, positive emotion and meaning than being childless, according to new research to be published in Psychological Science. “If you have a dinner party, are parents at that party happier than non-parents at that dinner party?” says Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at University of California, Riverside, and the paper’s senior author. “Our analyses show they are happier and think about meaning more in their life.” Parents were found to be happier during the day when they were involved in caring for their kids than when they were doing unrelated tasks, for example. Especially joyous? Older and married parents. It bears noting that this is hardly the last word on the subject. Other studies have found exactly the opposite — that parenting is a pain — but the authors of the current paper, from U.C. Riverside, the University of British Columbia and Stanford University, write that “the scientific basis for these claims remains inconclusive.” One 2004 paper, for instance, concluded that working mothers in Texas preferred watching television or cooking to parenting; other studies have found that moms exercise less and eat worse than women without kids and that being a parent correlates with greater depression and more marital dissatisfaction. As is true in much of academia, however, a lot depends on how you ask the question. Lyubomirsky’s research slices the data a bit differently, comparing how parents and non-parents stack up in terms of overall well-being. “We are not showing in this paper that having kids makes people happy, but I think this might give people hope that parents are not miserable,” she says. (MORE: Kid Crazy: Why We Exaggerate the Joys of Parenthood) Lyubomirsky has been baffled by the research suggesting that parents are discontented; in psychology, it’s … Continue reading Parents — Especially Dads — Are Happier than their Childless Pals. (Happy Father’s Day.)