Do babies come with a satisfaction guarantee?
Madeline Fry Schultz
Mothers across America are experiencing Betty Draper-level breakdowns, at least according to the legacy media. Headline after headline during the pandemic offered the same story: Like the fictional 1950s housewife from Mad Men, women with children were reaching a breaking point.
If you looked to the internet during the pandemic to see how married women and mothers were faring, you’d get headlines such as Forbes’s “Moms Are Not Okay: Pandemic Triples Anxiety and Depression Symptoms in New Mothers” and Bloomberg’s “Women Who Stay Single and Don’t Have Kids Are Getting Richer.”
As is usually the case, there’s reality, and there’s the ideology-based spin. As Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang write for the Atlantic, these headlines don’t tell the true story.
“As tough as motherhood was during COVID, mothers were both happier and more financially secure than childless women during the pandemic,” the authors report. “This gap existed before COVID, but it continued during the worst days of the pandemic and has remained since then. This phenomenon is especially noteworthy because moms, and parents more generally, used to be less happy than childless adults as recently as the 2000s.”
At a time when COVID-19 lockdowns were keeping people apart, marriage and children provided a built-in community for women, keeping them from feeling entirely alone. Contrary to what appears to be popular belief, marriage and motherhood do not automatically come with depression and angst.
Motherhood, of course, can be incredibly difficult. But the one thing that makes it hard is doing it without a spouse. Wealthier mothers reported more satisfaction than poor mothers, but this isn’t simply an issue of class.
“A staggering 95 percent of rich moms had a husband or partner at home during the pandemic, as did 81 percent of middle-class moms,” Wilcox and Wang write. “But only 55 percent of poor moms had a partner, according to the 2021 Current Population Survey. And despite all the media coverage discounting or minimizing the importance of marriage during COVID, mothers with partners were generally happier: In 2020, 75 percent of married mothers were somewhat or completely satisfied with their lives versus 58 percent of their unmarried peers.”
What all this means is that given the choice between marriage and motherhood versus a single, child-free life, women should not be so quick to listen to the doomsday headlines. Highs and lows are a part of life, and while motherhood may induce more stress, it also brings more joy.