University of Zurich: Modern Family Roles Improve Life Satisfaction for Parents.
ENPNewswire-October 9, 2019--University of Zurich: Modern Family Roles Improve Life Satisfaction for Parents
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Release date- 08102019 - 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, a study by sociologists at the University of Zurich has shown.
Modern Family RolesModern Family Roles
The mother looks after the children, the father works full time - these traditional roles stubbornly remained the norm for a long time. But in recent decades, the normative expectations of mothers and fathers have changed. Motherhood is no longer seen as an obligatory part of female identity and fulfillment. It is no longer automatically expected that mothers will give up paid work, and it is becoming increasingly normal for fathers to have a more active role in raising and caring for children.
Discrepancy between public discourse and empirical data
Together with sociologists from Germany, researchers at the University of Zurich (UZH) have now 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 from the UZH Institute of Sociology
In surveys in the 1980s, most mothers were less satisfied with their lives than women without children. The idea of having a 'little bundle of joy' that would bring great happiness - which stemmed in part from the taboo against speaking negatively of motherhood in any way - did not translate to reality for many women. 'With the increasing freedom to choose whether or not to have a child and to shape parenthood more individually, the 'maternal happiness gap' has closed. Today we no longer find a difference in the life satisfaction of mothers and of women without children,' says Preisner.
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