Previous research has widely addressed the gap in well-being between parents and childless individuals. While cross-sectional studies have regularly reported lower levels of well-being for parents, recent longitudinal studies suggest a short-term positive effect with a back-to-baseline adaptation. Whether, why, and how parenthood may affect well-being in older age is, however, still largely unclear. In this paper, a holistic view of well-being developments across the process of aging is combined with a transition-centered, gender sensitive approach to analyze the effects of health decline on the self-reported life satisfaction of parents and childless individuals. Life satisfaction in older age is hypothesized to be influenced by the onset of and coping with health limitations, which themselves may differ by parental status and gender. Using group-specific growth curve analysis based on data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and accounting for selection into parenthood, we demonstrate how the life satisfaction of men and women evolves in the later life depending on parental status. Results show that from age 50 onwards, parents’ life satisfaction develops somewhat less favorably compared to that of childless individuals, but this difference is not significant. However, fathers' health evolves more favorably while they react less negatively to health limitations than childless men. Our results thus suggest that children are a source of social control with long-term positive effects on health and a coping resource in the face of health limitations for fathers but not for mothers.

先前的研究已经广泛解决了父母与无子女个体之间的幸福感差距。虽然横断面研究经常报告父母的幸福感水平较低，但最近的纵向研究表明，回归基线适应会产生短期的积极影响。然而，父母身份是否、为什么以及如何影响老年人的幸福感在很大程度上仍不清楚。在本文中，将整个老龄化过程中的幸福感发展的整体观点与以转型为中心、对性别敏感的方法相结合，以分析健康下降对父母和无子女个体自我报告的生活满意度的影响。假设老年人的生活满意度受到健康限制的发生和应对的影响，这些限制本身可能因父母身份和性别而异。使用基于欧洲健康、老龄化和退休调查 (SHARE) 数据的群体特定增长曲线分析并考虑选择为人父母，我们展示了男性和女性的生活满意度如何根据父母身份在以后的生活中演变. 结果表明，从 50 岁起，与没有孩子的人相比，父母的生活满意度有所下降，但这种差异并不显着。然而，与没有孩子的男性相比，父亲的健康发展更有利，而他们对健康限制的负面反应更少。因此，我们的研究结果表明，儿童是社会控制的来源，对健康有长期的积极影响，也是面对父亲而不是母亲的健康限制时的应对资源。