A study by sociologists at the University of Zurich shows that increased equality has a positive effect on mothers and fathers.
Thanks to greater freedom to strike an individual balance between caring for children and working in paid employment, mothers and fathers today are happier with their lives than parents were 20 or 30 years ago.
The researchers investigated what effect these changed societal expectations have had on the life satisfaction of mothers and fathers. For their empirical work, they evaluated data from the long-term study of the Socio-Economic Panel at the Institute for Economic Research Berlin (DIW), which are representative for Germany. It contains data on more than 18,000 women and almost 12,000 men who were surveyed between 1984 and 2015.
“While in the last few years the prevailing message in the media is that modern parents are under great stress or even regret having become parents, our analysis shows the opposite,” says first author Klaus Preisner.
The greater freedom of choice and the increased equality of mothers’ and fathers’ roles has been encouraged – and in some cases even made possible at all – by modern policies for families. Parental leave enables mothers and fathers to share childcare responsibilities and to be involved in their children’s upbringing.
In addition, subsidized childcare outside the home, such as it exists in Germany, also makes it easier for families to combine parenthood and employment. Klaus Preisner also sees another advantage: “These family-friendly political measures are not only significant for equality between the sexes. They are just as important for their role in improving life satisfaction of parents and thus ultimately of children.”
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