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Does Work Make Mothers Happy?

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Abstract

The paper explores the link between employment and subjective well-being among mothers with children under 3 years of age. It uses a pooled sample from the ESS 2004–2014 data from 30 European countries. Analyzing multiple measures of subjective well-being, the paper shows that homemakers are generally happier than full-time workers. No significant differences between homemakers and part-time workers were found. Contrary to our expectations, homemaking was positively associated with happiness particularly among mothers who left higher quality employment for childcare. Though some variation across countries exists, it is not linked to the provision of formal childcare, duration of parental leave, or tax system.

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Notes

  1. The data from 2004 and 2006 use different measures of income deciles that are not directly comparable with later waves. Thus, imputed values based on the original variable were used (for more see http://www.talkstats.com/archive/index.php/t-44664.html).

  2. For more see https://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/docs/methodology/ESS_weighting_data_1.pdf.

  3. A good instrument must be significantly linked to the explanatory variable but cannot be associated with the dependent variable. Unfortunately, the subjective well-being was generally associated with most other variables in the dataset. Finally, we used 1 individual level instrument (universality as defined in the Schwartz’s value scale] and two country-level characteristics (additional measures of childcare availability and parental leave benefits) that were not correlated with subjective well-being. Nevertheless, F-test shows that these instruments are relatively weak.

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Acknowledgements

Work on this article was supported by grant from the Czech Science Foundation (GACR GB14-36154G).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Jilská 1, 110 00, Prague 1, Czech Republic

    Dana Hamplová

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  1. Dana Hamplová
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Correspondence to Dana Hamplová.

Appendix

Appendix

See Fig. 1 and Tables 7 and 8.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Source: ESS 2004–2014

Distribution of happiness in selected countries.

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Table 7 Estimated coefficients from multilevel mixed effects regressions with the dependent variable subjective well-being (linear measure, rank, binary measure at 8th decile cut-point, binary measure at 9th decile cut-point), all mothers with a child 0–3, Happiness.
Full size table
Table 8 Estimated coefficients from multilevel mixed effects regressions with the dependent variable subjective well-being (linear measure, rank, binary measure at 8th decile cut-point, binary measure at 9th decile cut-point), all mothers with a child 0–3, Satisfaction.
Full size table

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Hamplová, D. Does Work Make Mothers Happy?. J Happiness Stud 20, 471–497 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-018-9958-2

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