Daily HealthBeat Tip - June 21, 2007

Marriage and motherhood

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

If a woman does not become a mother, can she still live happily ever after? A researcher at the University of Michigan examined that.

Sociologist Amy Pienta looked at survey data supported by the National Institutes of Health, on the generation that mothered the baby boom. And just the term ``baby boom’’ says how important motherhood was then. The study was for the International Journal of Aging and Human Development.

 Pienta says that, at midlife, whether women were mothers wasn’t the deciding factor in whether they were happy. It was whether they had a partner:

"The importance of being married, in our study, sort of swamps or overrides the importance of whether you’ve decided to have children or not."  (6 seconds)

Pienta says the least happy, loneliest and most depressed women were mothers who were single, divorced or widowed. 

Learn more at hhs.gov.

Last revised: June, 21 2007