From Me to You: Time Together and Subjective Well-Being in the UK

Abstract

Time together as a family is a crucial dimension of family life. However, its impact on personal happiness is not well understood. I use the United Kingdom Time Use Survey 2014–2015 to study how time spent with partners and children affects daily subjective well-being. Overall, I find that family time, couple time, and time alone with children contributes significantly to mothers’ and fathers’ well-being. I show that the activities that families share together mediate an important part of the enjoyment of time together but do not entirely explain this association. This suggests that beyond what families do together, families enjoy being together. I find that fathers enjoy family time more than mothers do. I demonstrate that the unequal division of labour during family time explains this discrepancy. I conclude by discussing the recent transformations of intimate relationships.

Home-based work, time allocations, and subjective well-being: gender differences in the United Kingdom

“…While direct quantitative comparisons to existing analyses, using instant well-being, are not easy (as different surveys use different affective scales), results shown in Table 5 are qualitatively similar to those in Song and Gao (2020), who conclude that WFH is related to decreased instant happiness (using the American Time Use Survey). Conversely, results differ from estimates in the US by Gimenez-Nadal et al (2020, Hamermesh (2020), andVagni (2022), who found that WFH is related to increased instant happiness and life satisfaction, driven by togetherness and time spent with the partner and/or children.…”

“…The dependent variable is the enjoyment experienced while doing paid work activities (Columns (1-2)), unpaid work activities (Columns (3-4)), and leisure activities (Columns (5-6)). WFH are defined as those workers devoting zero minutes to commuting to/from work An alternative analysis would rely on estimating individual fixed effects models, exploiting the diary structure of the episode sample as if it were a panel survey (Song and Gao 2020;Vagni 2022), to partially take into account the heterogeneity of time allocation decisions, as well as inter-personal differences in scales (Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Frijters 2004). However, being a WFH is an individual-constant variable for the individuals in the sample, which prevents us from estimating fixed effects models.…”

Transition to Parenthood, Gender and Well-Being: A Longitudinal Study of the United Kingdom

“…This greater role burden has been linked to a deterioration in mothers' mental health (Gunderson & Barrett, 2017;Rizzo et al, 2013;Ross & Van Willigen, 1996), particularly when the mothering role conflicts with work responsibilities (Hewitt et al, 2006;Matysiak et al, 2016). Research also indicates that mothers feel less happy, more stressed and more fatigued than fathers do while spending time with their children (McDonnell et al, 2019;Musick et al, 2016;Nelson-Coffey et al, 2019;Roeters & Gracia, 2016;Vagni, 2021).…”