Happy Mothers, Successful Children: Effects of Maternal Life Satisfaction on Child Outcomes∗

While prior research on child development documents that children of two-parent, married families have better cognitive and noncognitive skills compared to other family structures, this literature has overlooked an input that can be directly linked to individual utility; happiness. In this paper, I examine if this positive marriage effect on child quality is actually a happiness effect. By treating life satisfaction and marital status as endogenous in the skill production process, I show that there is a distinct happiness and a distinct marriage effect; marriage increases cognitive skills and decreases conduct problems, while maternal happiness increases social and self-regulation skills to an equivalent of up to £38,000 per year. These tradeoffs between marriage and happiness suggest that they are both important in producing a wide array of child skills at early developmental stages. Thus, policies aiming at promoting healthy and happy marriages can be more effective than policies that just promote marriage, and life satisfaction is an avenue through which non-married mothers can produce high quality children.