Abstract
In the last decades, fathers have become increasingly involved in the daily care of children (Kornrich & Furstenberg, 2013), mainly in couples where mothers participate to the labour market. Although the evidence regarding the possible effects of maternal employment on child development and wellbeing is mixed, some studies have suggested that an increased fathers’ involvement may offset the potentially negative effects of maternal work on child development (Sayer et al., 2004; Raley et al., 2012; Hsin & Felfe, 2014).
We thank an anonymous reviewer for the helpful suggestions and comments. They substantially contributed to improve the quality of the article.
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Notes
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- 2.
In this setting, it is assumed that the time devoted to the production of commodities does not produce utility itself, and that there are no process preferences. This may be the case, for instance, of the time spent playing with children. These questions are discussed in Pollak (2012).
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- 4.
Most of the data are drawn from the Italian Ministry of Health, through its daily news, with additional data provided by the Civil Protection Department at www.protezionecivile.gov.it .
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The resulting final sample of 1725 mothers, who reported information on 2856 children under 16 is due to the exclusion of mono-parental families and the drop of observations with missing values in the main variables used in the regressions, which are generally modest in magnitude.
- 6.
The campaign was conducted on the social media, mostly Facebook, targeting towards working-age women in all Italian regions, both with and without children. For the current analysis only mothers were used. Facebook was the most promising platform to conduct such a survey as about 93% of the Italian population aged 25–54 results to be active on the platform, according to NapoleonCat stat.
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Regarding the number of children for couples, our sample slightly over-represents couples with 2 children, at the expenses of couples with 1 child or with 3 or more children. In terms of geographical distribution, an overrepresentation of northern and central Italy is observed, although southern regions were much less affected by COVID-19, and thus it was expected that we would have lower response rates. Perhaps the most relevant difference concerns the proportion of individuals with a university degree, which doubles the national average for a similarly aged population group. A significantly larger share of individuals are working and individuals of non-Italian nationality are under-represented. Nevertheless, the key variables of interest, i.e., couple’s division of housework and childcare and children’s hours of TV and reading, are very much in line with national statistics, except hours of reading, which are larger in our sample. Supporting statistics on the sample characteristics and comparison with national representative surveys administered by ISTAT are available upon request.
- 8.
A similar variables for fathers is not included because very few of them switched to smart working in the early lockdown period, less than 1.6% vs. 14% of mothers.
- 9.
In Italy there exist 107 provinces, and they represent the smallest territorial administrative units above municipalities. The number of clusters is exceeding the 50 minimum threshold commonly considered to be safe for computing clustered standard errors.
- 10.
The categorical variable takes the following values: −2 for “substantially worsened”; −1 for “slightly worsened”; 0 for “unchanged”, 1 for “slightly improved”; and 2 for “substantially improved”.
- 11.
The variable takes values from 0 for “not progressing at all” to 10 “progressing at the same pace as when she/he was attending classes at school.”
- 12.
The percentage of fathers that switched to smartworking was instead very small, just about 1.6%.
- 13.
Because the lockdown is likely to have had an overall negative impact on both parents’ and children’s well-being, these estimates are likely to underestimate the positive effect of father’s involvement with children. For instance, if a father could spend more time with his children because he lost job, he may not be the happiest carer.
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Mangiavacchi, L., Piccoli, L. (2022). Maternal Employment, Fathers’ Childcare Time and Children’s Wellbeing. In: Molina, J.A. (eds) Mothers in the Labor Market. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99780-9_3
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