Many empirical studies find parents to be less happy than non-parents and parenthood to exert a
negative effect on subjective well-being (SWB). We add to these findings by arguing that there is a key
moderating factor that has been overlooked in previous research, the work-family conflict. In this paper
we assesses the effect of parenthood on individuals’ SWB, taking into account that the birth of a child
means an increase in work-family tensions, which may be substantial for some parents and relatively
weak for others. To this end, we estimate fixed-effects models using panel data from the Household,
Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. We find that childbearing negatively
affects SWB only when parents, and mothers, in particular, have to face a heavy work-family conflict.