THE stress cost of children on moms and dads☆
Section snippets
Background
We ask whether the addition of a child to a family imposes costs that are not accounted for in the immense literatures on the monetary cost of children and on equivalence scales, and thus whether there are hitherto unaccounted factors that affect the decision to have a child or that increase the perceived costs of rearing a child. The literature on equivalence scales focuses solely on the monetary costs of children (e.g., Muellbauer, 1977; Pollak and Wales, 1979; Bourguignon, 1999). The sparser
Theoretical motivation and considerations
Consider a household that combines goods (a vector xj) and the time of each spouse (vectors and ), where m is male and f female, to produce a vector of commodities Zj (j=1, …, N) that determines its current utility:
The maximization of this utility function, given the technologies of household production and the spouses’ wage rates, Wm and Wf, unearned income I, and the vector of goods prices that it faces, Pj, yields a utility-maximizing vector of
Data and descriptive statistics
We use data from longitudinal household surveys in Australia and Germany, the only two countries with such surveys that include information on time and financial pressures in repeated waves. The countries are obviously different linguistically and culturally. Yet they are remarkably similar in terms of the actuality and views of women's roles in the labor market. Thus in 2014 female labor-force participation rates were 71.2 and 72.9 in Australia and Germany respectively, and 38% of female
Preliminary examination of patterns of stress
As a first step toward the estimation of (3a), (3b), (3c), and to obtain a picture of how a birth/adoption alters the time and goods constraints, we examine transitions of the empirical counterparts of λ and µ. Consider columns (1) and (3) of the top panel of Table 2, which show the fractions of the samples for which time stress increased, remained the same or decreased between annual interviews in the HILDA Survey sub-sample, separately by gender and by the indicator for the addition of a
Estimates of models of stress
Table 3 lists least-squares estimates of analogues to (3a), (3b), (3c) using the HILDA Survey (with separate estimates of the impacts on financial stress for husbands and wives). We include and report on the impacts of each spouse's time allocation, weekly earnings (and thus, since work hours are included, implicitly the full prices of their time), the family's unearned income, and the respondent's self-reported health. (See the online Data Appendix for further details of these and the other
Experimenting with the endogeneity of a birth
While we have argued that selectivity into child-bearing will bias downward estimates of the impact of a birth on time and financial stress, we cannot demonstrate that proposition empirically. It is a sensible theoretical assertion about behavior. Our estimates would thus be even more convincing if we could find a satisfactory instrument for birth. Regrettably, neither of the data sets has any other variables that one could not easily argue also affect time and/or financial stress directly, and
Emptying the nest
The theoretical motivation in Section 2 was based on the addition of a child and demonstrated how that demographic change would cause the time and goods constraints facing the household to bind more tightly. The reverse change, the departure of a child, should have the reverse effect: It should decrease the tightness of the constraints and reduce measures of their empirical analogues—perceived time and financial stress. We investigate whether these reverse effects exist and are equal but of
Conclusions and implications
Using data from longitudinal surveys for Australia and Germany, we have demonstrated that a birth causes a rise in mothers’ time stress that is not dissipated over the first few years of her child's life. The increase in fathers’ time stress is much smaller; and we find some weak evidence that a birth increases spouses’ financial stress, with weak evidence that this increase is greater among wives than husbands. This demonstration is not that births affect such inchoate concepts as well-being
Acknowledgements
This study uses unit record data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey and German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). The HILDA Survey project was initiated and is funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (at the University of Melbourne). The German data used in this publication are from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) and were made available to
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Insanity is hereditary. You can get it from your children. [Levenson, 1981]