In a 2016 study published in the American Journal of Sociology, the sociologists Jennifer Glass, Robin Simon, and Matthew Andersson compared the happiness of parents and non-parents in 22 wealthy countries. The United States had the largest happiness gap between parents and non-parents of any country in the study. In some of the others, including Norway and Hungary, the gap ran in the opposite direction. Parents in those countries were happier than non-parents.
What the analysis found, when it tried to explain the variation, was that the gap between countries was largely accounted for by social policies. Specifically, by the availability of paid time off, affordable childcare, and the kinds of arrangements that allow paid work and family obligations to coexist. The countries where parents were unhappy were the ones where these supports were thin. The countries where parents were happy were the ones where the supports were generous. The United States, on this measure, sat at the bottom of the table.
We are writers and parents, not clinicians or policy researchers. What follows is a reading of the research literature on parental well-being, not therapeutic, medical, or political advice. The article reports findings; it does not prescribe policy.
What the 22-country comparison actually showed
The Glass, Simon, and Andersson paper drew on data from the European Social Surveys and the International Social Survey Programme. It compared parents and non-parents within each country, controlled for income, age, marital status, and several other factors, and looked at self-reported happiness across the 22 countries in the dataset.
The United States had the largest parental happiness disadvantage. The authors describe the pattern as “parenting as a stressor buffered by institutional support,” meaning that the stress of parenting is real in every country, but the consequences of that stress for parental well-being depend heavily on what the country around the parents looks like.
This is a single study, not settled consensus. The dataset draws on surveys from 2006 to 2008, which means the post-COVID parental landscape, which by every available account has worsened, is not represented. The basic finding, however, has been replicated and extended in subsequent comparative work, and the headline result, the United States as the country with the largest gap, has been confirmed in adjacent research.
What the 2024 advisory documents
In August 2024, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a formal advisory titled Parents Under Pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents. Surgeon General’s advisories are reserved for public health challenges requiring national awareness. The 30-page document was the first such advisory issued on parental mental health.
The headline figures are notable. 48 percent of parents in the United States reported that most days their stress was completely overwhelming, compared with 26 percent of other adults. 41 percent reported being so stressed they could not function on most days. Roughly one in four parents reported a period in the previous year when they could not cover the cost of basic needs, including food, rent, or mortgage payments. In 2021 to 2022, nearly 24 percent of parents in the United States had a diagnosable mental illness.
The advisory’s framing is structural. The cited stressors are financial insecurity, the cost of childcare, time scarcity, social isolation, technology and social media pressures, and a youth mental health crisis. The recommended actions, on the policy side, include paid family and medical leave, affordable childcare, and access to mental health care. The framing is, in other words, consistent with what the Glass paper had argued eight years earlier.
What “structural” actually means here
The cultural conversation about parental unhappiness in the United States has tended to focus on individual-level factors. Time management. Parenting style. The right philosophy. The right schedule. The right approach to screen time. The right balance of activities and rest.
None of these is unimportant. But the comparative research suggests they are not where the gap between American parents and parents in other wealthy countries actually lives. The gap lives in policy.
The United States is one of the only wealthy countries without nationally guaranteed paid parental leave. Childcare costs in the U.S. routinely exceed the cost of in-state college tuition. The country has no nationally subsidized system of early childhood education comparable to those in much of Europe. The infrastructure of support that, in the Glass 2016 paper, predicted whether parents were happier or unhappier than non-parents, is mostly not in place.
The European parents who emerge happier in the Glass analysis are not, by any available measure, raising easier children or feeling deeper love. The variable that explains the difference is what happens to the parents when they leave the house. Whether they can take time off when the child is ill. Whether childcare is affordable. Whether the working day allows them to be present in their child’s life without losing income. The differences are policy differences, and they show up in self-reported happiness data with a clarity that few other social patterns produce.
This video, while not related directly to parenting, delves into why trying to be happy is often the factor that stops happiness altogether. Worth a watch for parents and non-parents alike.
What the research does not show
A few caveats are worth naming about what these findings do and do not support.
The Glass paper does not show that the United States is uniquely cruel to parents or that American parenting culture is broken. It shows that one consistent pattern in cross-national well-being data is explained by social policies. It does not, in itself, prescribe a specific policy response, and reasonable people disagree about which policies would be the most effective.
The Surgeon General’s advisory is, in form, a call to public attention rather than a peer-reviewed empirical study. It draws on multiple data sources and existing research, and the advisory itself notes that it is not an exhaustive review of the literature. The figures it cites are well documented, but a reader who wants to scrutinize the underlying numbers will need to follow the citations into the source surveys.
Neither the Glass paper nor the advisory addresses individual experience. They describe averages and aggregates. Any specific American parent’s situation may be better or worse than the data would predict, and the personal weight of parenting in any one family is not something a national average can capture.
Parents in the United States reading this article, particularly those finding the daily experience genuinely overwhelming, may benefit from speaking with a primary care doctor, a mental health professional, or another trusted local resource familiar with maternal and paternal mental health. The Surgeon General’s advisory cites both the under-diagnosis and the under-treatment of parental mental health conditions as substantial concerns.
Most patterns in cross-country happiness data come with caveats large enough to swallow them. The American parenthood gap is, in the comparative literature, an unusually clean signal. It is also, by every available account, one that has not gotten smaller in the years since the original paper came out.
