Mothers' and Fathers' Well‐Being in Parenting Across the Arch of Child Development

Abstract

Limited research on parental well-being by child age suggests that parents are better off with very young children, despite intense time demands of caring for them. This study uses the American Time Use Survey Well-Being Module ( = 18,124) to assess how parents feel in activities with children of different ages. Results show that parents are worse off with adolescent children relative to young children. Parents report the lowest levels of happiness with adolescents relative to younger children, and mothers report more stress and less meaning with adolescents. Controlling for contextual features of parenting including activity type, solo parenting, and restorative time does not fully account for the adolescent disadvantage in fathers' happiness or mothers' stress. This study highlights adolescence as a particularly difficult stage for parental well-being, and it shows that mothers shoulder stress that fathers do not, even after accounting for differences in the context of their parenting activities.

Mothers’ and fathers’ well-being while parenting: does the gender composition of children matter?

“…Prior research suggests that variation in contextual features of time influence parental well-being (McDonnell et al, 2019;Meier et al 2018;Musick et al 2016;McDonnell et al 2019). We expect this to be particularly true for mothers, whose parenting time in relation to child gender composition, is characterized by less desirable elements (Lundberg et al, 2007;Mammen, 2011).…”

“…More recently, following new developments in wellbeing measures, scholars have begun using experience-based assessments of well-being that are more focused on capturing affect and ask respondents how they felt in reference to specific daily activities (in line with prior literature we'll refer to these measures as experienced or momentary well-being ;Larson & Csikszentmihalyi 2014). This approach allows scholars to account for fluctuations in well-being that occur during the day (Negraia & Augustine, forthcoming) and capture how contextual factors-activity type and presence of others, for example-matter for shaping emotions (McDonnell et al, 2019;Meier et al, 2018;Musick et al, 2016). A key finding of this line of work is that parents report greater happiness and meaning during time spent with their children than without them ; yet, they also rate this time as more fatiguing and stressful (Nelson et al, 2014;Offer, 2016).…”

Unpacking the parenting wellbeing gap: the role of dynamic features of daily life across broader social structures

“…Survey factors included: whether the diary was collected on a weekday (=1) or a weekend (=0); a summer month (0=no, 1=yes), or holiday (0=no, 1=yes); year of interview (dummy coded); and order in which the well-being questions were asked (dummy coded first through fifth). Analysis Plan Following other studies Meier et al 2018), we modeled the outcome variables continuously. We used linear regression to predict each well-being measure separately, resulting in a total of five models.…”

“…At the same time, the macro-context also conveys cultural norms of social development and values around children of different ages (Brown, Larson, and Saraswathi 2002). Experiences with young children, which emphasize closeness, are deemed emotionally "priceless" (Zelizer 1994) and more satisfying than experiences with older children (Nomaguchi 2012;Meier et al 2018), whereas adolescence, which is a period of autonomy (Steinberg and Morris 2001), is perceived to be less satisfying for parents. Thus, we also expect that parents' greater levels of positive emotions in housework and leisure are greater when their children are younger than when they are older.…”

“…Thus, we ran the risk of our nonparent sample including parents of adult-children (i.e., empty-nesters). Similar to other work using this data (Meier et al 2018) we also do not include in the analysis respondents aged 20 or younger to limit the share of adolescent and late adolescent parents from the parent sample, for whom raising children can be particularly challenging and detrimental to one's wellbeing (Myrskyla and Margolis 2014; Mollborn 2017).…”