The Parental Happiness Gap Before and After the Start of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Scholarship on the "parental wellbeing gap" finds that while parents had tended to report lower levels of subjective wellbeing than non-parents, the parental wellbeing gap had narrowed or disappeared altogether in more recent years. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, presented unprecedented challenges to parents that may have resulted in a widening of this gap once again. This project aims to examine this possibility by drawing on two waves of data from the General Social Survey (GSS) that captured the survey year prior to (2018) and after (2021) the start of the pandemic. Analyses assessing parental happiness-a widely used measure of subjective wellbeing-revealed that the gap reemerged in 2021, although parents reported higher levels of happiness than non-parents. This pattern, however, was driven by smaller decreases in the happiness of parents compared to non-parents, suggesting that parents experienced factors that buffered some of the harmful effects of the pandemic. Non-parents, on the other hand, experienced greater negative experiences resulting from the pandemic. These findings highlight the need for such factors to be explored in future research.