Hey folks
i'm writing a term paper about the influence of parenthood on life satisfaction. Since it's my first term paper with STATA ever i'm pretty confused with the OLS-regression and the variables (yes i'm still a poor little bachelors student).
I'm using a german dataset called ALLBUS with 3490 observations. Since i'm only interested in parents, I dropped all non-parents from my sample by creating a variable parent no/yes and then "drop if parent==0" which leaves 2230 obs. Then i created variables "general life satisfaction"=dependent (0-10; only dropped the missings), "number of children" = independent (1-9; including biological and adopted/step-children), and two seperate dummy-variables "child_biological" = independent (1=at least one biological child) and "child_adoptedstep" = independent (at least one stepchild or adopted child). I'm controlling for gender (dummy), age (centred), relationship yes/no (dummy), employment status (categorial), household income (centred and log) and status of health (1-5).
When i regress e.g. general life satisfaction and number of children, adjusted r-squared is negative and really really small (<-0.00), the same thing happens with the dummy variables for biological and adopted children so for all my independent variables but not for the variables which i control for.

What did I do wrong? Is it okay to just drop all the non-parents from the sample? Might there be a problem with the adopted/step-children since theres only 60 people who have at least one? Do i have to recode the variable for number of children into a categorial variable since there's very few people who have more than 4 children (less than 50)?

It might be pretty basic and pretty confusing at the same time but I'm happy for all the help that i get!

Greetings, Alex
(ps. sorry for my english I'm from Germany)