- Pop culture often paints married moms as exhausted and unhappy.
- New survey finds married moms the happiest, compared to those who are either unmarried or childless.
- Children seem to boost sense of purpose, meaning.
If you watch TV or pay attention to pop culture, you’ve heard the storyline of motherhood today: Exhausted women who are unhappy and generally struggling. They’re lonely, isolated and don’t feel appreciated.
Married motherhood, in fact, is not always painted in a positive image — and according to a new study by the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University, that common portrayal is not actually true.
In a new study, “In Pursuit: Marriage, Motherhood and Women’s Well-being,” Jean Twenge, Jenet Erickson, Wendy Wang and Brad Wilcox report that the negative view of what life is like for married women may be a “possible factor” for why marriage and childbearing have been declining in the U.S.
“Pop culture portrayals, online forums and media headlines declaring single women without children are happier than married mothers are simply not true,” said Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and one of the coauthors. She added that the study found marriage and motherhood provide deep emotional and social benefits.
“Women are thriving in ways that challenge popular stereotypes,” Wang, director of research at the Institute for Family Studies, told the Deseret News.
The new research suggests that more married women — and especially married women with children — report that they are happy than women who are unmarried. And the share who call themselves “very happy” is twice that of unmarried childless women.
Catching up to reality
The study authors report that “studies consistently find that married people are generally happier than unmarried people. Being married is the most important differentiator of happiness in America, with married people 30 percentage points happier than unmarried people,” they write, citing that same finding in the 2023 “Socio-Political Demography of Happiness,” from the George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy & the State.
You might not know that if you just talk to people about their views on the state of marriage and happiness in general. The survey found a gender divide in the view. Majorities of both men and women agree men who marry and have children fare better than those who don’t.
But just under one-third of women believe that women who marry and have children have happier lives. And 55% of single women believe single women have happier lives than married women.
It’s a different story, the researchers say, when you actually ask the women themselves — married, unmarried, with children and without — about their own lives. The story then is similar to a decade’s worth of data from the American Family Survey, which shows people think marriages in general struggle, but they report they are happy in their own.
The American Family Survey has consistently had a similar finding on family life, as well: Families in general are struggling, but mine is doing well. That tends to be the response in the nationally representative survey, which has been conducted annually as a partnership project between Deseret News and Brigham Young University’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy and the Wheatley Institute.
The new Family Studies/Wheatley report and the General Social Survey, which the authors of the report call “the nation’s leading social barometer,” both find married moms are happier than single women whether they have children or not and happier than married women without children, too. Other research backs that up.
For the new report, the two institutes fielded the Women’s Well-Being Survey in March 2025, asking 3,000 women ages 25 to 55 about aspects of their lives, including happiness, loneliness, touch, whether they find life enjoyable, their sense of purpose and whether they find their lives meaningful.
From pretty happy to very happy
Erickson, a fellow at Wheatley Institute, said the researchers were especially interested in what it takes to move someone from the “pretty happy” level to “very happy.” It’s a journey that more married women made than those in other groups, which directly refutes that pop culture storyline that “we live in a time when people are choosing isolation, when relationships are diminished. The narrative is that married women are less happy. Women fear it,” Erickson said.
“That narrative is not capturing reality,” she said. “We are setting ourselves up for unhappiness if we deny the importance of these relationships.”
The survey found married moms, contrary to popular belief, are somewhat more likely to be happy than the other categories of women. Three-fourths of married mothers say they are at least “pretty happy” and 1 in 5 are “very happy.” The “very happy” share is twice that of women who are single and childless.
Of the unmarried, childless women, 10% say they’re “very happy,” 44% say they’re not very happy and the 47% in the middle are “pretty happy.”
The survey also found that married women in general receive more physical touch and are less lonely than single or childless women.
Additionally, 47% of married mothers and 43% of married childless women say life’s enjoyable, compared to 40% of unmarried mothers and 34% of unmarried women who don’t have kids.
Meaning and purpose
As for a meaningful life, children seem to boost a clear sense of purpose. The researchers found that among those women surveyed, 28% of the married mothers agreed that their life “has a clear sense of purpose,” as did 25% of unmarried mothers. Married women without children had the lowest share at 14%, while 16% of unmarried women without children said they have a clear sense of purpose.
And nearly half of married mothers said their life feels meaningful all or most of the time, compared to unmarried mothers at 43%, married women without children at 41% and unmarried women without children at 32%.
Wang said the survey controlled for education attainment, income and age.
Losing touch
Touch is an important aspect of happiness, according to Intermountain Health, which reports that cuddling, hugging or holding hands all trigger release of “feel good hormones” including oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin. Research links those hormones to a stronger immune system and they’re also credited with improved mood, happiness and greater relaxation. Additionally, health professionals at The Abundance Therapy Center in Los Angeles tout physical touch for boosting mental wellness.
According to the new report, nearly half of married women report high levels of regular physical touch — 47% of married mothers and 49% of married childless women. Just under a fourth of unmarried mothers said that, as do 13% of unmarried childless women.
The report also found that “58% of married mothers and 61% of married childless women say they often receive hugs or kisses, compared to just 36% of unmarried mothers and just 18% of unmarried childless women.”
The questions on touch and hugs and kisses didn’t specify from whom they got touch, Wang said.
The study found those experiencing high levels of physical affection are three times more likely than those with low levels of touch to say they are very happy.
But the report noted that touch has been dwindling for some time. “Americans spent 67 fewer hours per year in face-to-face social interactions in 2017 than they did in 2003; younger Americans ages 15 to 25 spent 140 fewer hours per year.” That, combined with more time online and less time seeing people in person has cut back opportunities for touch.
Touch may be especially important to well-being in a world where so much time is spent in the virtual world, according to co-author Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, who is also a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a sociology professor at the University of Virginia, where he directs the National Marriage Project.
Less touch is not good news, per the report. “The link between touch and emotional well-being in adulthood appears to be an extension of the important role of touch for development beginning in infancy ... Evidence suggests that touch continues to play an important role in bonding, emotional regulation and well-being across the life course.”
Not as lonely
Married women, whether they have children or not, are about half as likely as unmarried women to say that they are lonely often, according to the new data.
Erickson said married women might lose out on some time hanging out with their friends, but their family life offers other social engagement, including volunteer work, church attendance and community connections. They are as likely to say they are happy with their number of friends as are their single counterparts.
Wang called the loneliness findings especially interesting “because we know that loneliness is an epidemic in the U.S. and, according to the Surgeon General’s report a few years back, the impact of loneliness is comparable to obesity and smoking — a public health issue."
She said their survey showed that unmarried women, with and without children, had similar levels of loneliness.
Thoughts on loneliness, per Wang, “have been kind of evolving. In the 1990s and 2000s, a lot of research showed that single women had more social connections, more friends and somehow they’re less lonely.” But recent studies including this new survey suggest that some single women are having a harder time connecting socially and making friends than their married peers.
Wang pointed out that not all the news for mothers is good in this study. Mothers are more likely than women who don’t have children to say they sometimes feel overwhelmed and exhausted at the end of the day. And mothers are also more likely to report they have less time for themselves.