The Parental-Happiness Fallacy
October 21, 2025
Money is supposed to make life easier. But whether it makes life easier for parents has become a surprisingly contentious question.
A couple of years ago, Pew Research Center published a survey about American parenting that stumbled on a somewhat counterintuitive finding: Lower-income parents were more likely than middle- or higher-income parents to say that they found parenting enjoyable and rewarding “all or most of the time.” The difference was pretty marginal—most parents, regardless of income level, reported finding parenthood enjoyable all or most of the time—but that one data point got people talking. Think pieces proliferated, in which people reflected on why the most disadvantaged parents were “less exhausted and stressed and more rewarded by parenthood,” and why women with more advantages were “the unhappiest mothers,” reporting “the highest levels of dissatisfaction with motherhood.” Simone and Malcolm Collins, the venture capitalists turned pronatalists, hosted a podcast episode on the Pew research, “debunking the bias that poorer people must be miserable raising children” and arguing that “cultural factors like faith and insulation from the childless urban monoculture better enable them to find meaning in parenting.”
