Parenthood alters your personality but you don’t become more mature

By Jessica Hamzelou

Guido Mieth/Getty Images

Having a baby means new responsibilities, and parenthood should make people more mature – or so the theory goes. In fact, parents’ personalities seem more likely to change in other ways. A study now hints that new mothers become more agreeable and extroverted, and new fathers become a little less extroverted, but more conscientious.

Eva Asselmann and Jule Specht at Humboldt University of Berlin studied socio-economic data collected from 19,875 people in Germany who have undergone yearly assessments since 1984. The volunteers took personality tests four times between 2002 and 2017 …