How Parents Fare: Mothers’ and Fathers’ Subjective Well-Being in Time with Children

PWP-CCPR-2014-010

Abstract

The shift towards more time-intensive and child-centered parenting in the U.S. is widely assumed to be positively linked to healthy child development, but implications for adult well-being are less clear. We go beyond prior work on parenthood and well-being to assess the multidimensional nature of mothers’ and fathers’ subjective well-being in time with children. Our emphasis on parenting (activities) as opposed to parenthood (status) draws attention to how the nature and context of time use contribute to differences in parents’ happiness, meaning, sadness, stress, and fatigue. We posit that time with children may elicit more positive and negative feelings than time without children, particularly among mothers, whose greater investments in childrearing may be associated with more strain but also more meaning. Relying on nationally representative time diary data from the 2010 well-being module of the American Time Use Survey (N = 23,282), we find that parents consistently report more positive affect in time with children than without. Mothers report less happiness, more stress, and greater fatigue (but not more meaning) in time with children than fathers, and their greater fatigue is not explained by mediating factors such as the quality and quantity of sleep and leisure, activity type, or solo parenting.