‘Happiest married couples are those without children’

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33712, 9 December 1974, Page 4

‘Happiest married couples are those without children’

(N.Z.P.A.-Heuter —Copyright.) ANN ARBOR (Michigan).

A team of American university research experts, striking a blow at the popular belief that childless marriages are incomplete, reports that the happiest married couples are those without children.

As for the pains and sorrow associated with children leaving home to lead their own lives, the team says that' the truth is much the opposite. “The time of the empty nest turns out to be a time of fulfilment,” they say.

Headed by Mr Angus Campbell, Mr Philip Converse and Mr Willard Rodgers, members of the institute for social research of the University of Michigan, has issued a series of findings based on interviews with more than 2000 Americans in 1971.

A chart on people satisfied with life as a whole, as based on the interviews, shows that the happiest are married couples without children.

“People with children find that parenthood involves both costs and rewards, and I during the years of raising

small children the costs appear to be substantial,” the team says. “Parents of young children show a great deal of strain, both personal and ecomic, which gradually subsides as they pass through the stages of later parenthood.

“After the children are grown, and the parents are alone again, their general contentmentt is again high, and their companionship and mutual understanding surpass their pre-parenthood level.”

Despite the growing divorce rate, the experts say, the overwhelming proportion of married Americans are satisfied with their relationship. Fifty-eight per cent of the married people interviewed said that they were completely satisfied, and only 3 per cent said that they were more dissatisfide than satisfied.

According to the chart, the people least happy are those divorced or separated. Next come widows and then — a blow to the so-called “swinging singles” — people not married. “Whatever the psychological costs of i.iarriage, the costa of being single are greater,” the team says. "People who are single generally report a good deal less satisfaction with life than married persons, and

the lack of satisfaction shown by women and men who are divorced or separated is quite remarkable.” There is little support in the study results for the belief that housework casts a pall over the life of the housewife, or that the working wife suffers from the pressures of having two roles.

“But college graduates who are housewives find their lives less rewarding than other housewives and, in particular, less rewarding than the lives of college graduate women who have outside employment,” the report says. The team found that working married women who went to college but stopped short of obtaining a degree often wound up with clerical jobs which they found unsatisfactory.

According to the study, black Americans over the age of 55 are considerably more satisfied with their lives than are younger blacks. Their satisfaction out-distances whites in the same age range. Increased education and income have little effect on the over-all satisfaction of blacks, the team says. Mr James Bracy, a former research assistant at the institute for social research, who analysed the study results on blacks, said: “The

generally-positive evaluation which older £>lack people make of their lives appears to reflect an accommodative attitude, a lifetime adjustment to reality, and an acceptance of life as it is experienced.”