Abstract
This article investigates whether and how having a child impacts an individual’s subjective well-being, while taking into account heterogeneity in family attitudes. People with different family orientations have different values, gender attitudes, preferences toward career and family, and expectations about how childbearing can affect their subjective well-being. These differences impact fertility decisions and the effect of parenthood on an individual’s life satisfaction. We define three groups of people based on their family orientations: Traditional, Mixed, and Modern. Applying propensity score matching on longitudinal data (British Household Panel Survey), we create groups of individuals with very similar socioeconomic characteristics and family orientations before childbearing. We then compare those who have one child with those who are childless, and those who have two children with those who have only one child. We show that parents are significantly more satisfied than nonparents, and this effect is stronger among men than among women. For men, we do not find significant differences across family orientations groups in the effect of the birth of the first child on life satisfaction. Among women, only Traditional mothers seem to be more satisfied than their childless counterparts. Women who have a second child are never more satisfied than those who have only one child, regardless of their family orientations. Traditional and Mixed men experience a gain in life satisfaction when they have a second child, but this effect is not found for Modern men.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
See Amin et al. (2015) for a discussion on the monozygotic twins fixed-effects estimators.
In previous analyses, we also tried to match individuals three, four, and five years before the treatment, but we were able to observe diverging patterns of life satisfaction resulting from anticipation effects only in the year before the treatment. Thus, we opted to match two years before childbearing in order to follow individuals and their life satisfaction for a longer period after childbearing.
In principle, t can assume values in {–1, 0, 1, . . . , 11}.
The average lag between the start of the observation period and the year of matching is 2.8 and 1.1, respectively, for the analyses on the first and second child. The average number of years of follow-up after matching for the two analyses is 3.8 and 5.1, respectively.
This assumption, which is a weaker version of the so-called unconfoundedness or conditional independence assumption, can be written for identification of ATT in our case as: E[Y(0) t |D 0 = 1, X –2, Y –2] = E[Y(0) t |D 0 = 0, X –2, Y –2] (see, e.g., Arpino and Aassve 2013).
The question about happiness is as follows: “Have you recently been feeling reasonably happy, all things considered?” Responses range from 1 (much less happy than usual) to 4 (more happy than usual).
References
Aassve, A., Goisis, A., & Sironi, M. (2012). Happiness and childbearing across Europe. Social Indicator Research, 108, 65–86.
Amin, V., Behrman, J. R., Kohler, H. P., Xiong, Y., & Zhang, J. (2015). Causal inferences: Identical twins help and clarity about necessary assumptions is critical. Social Science & Medicine, 127, 201–202.
Arpino, B., & Aassve, A. (2013). Estimating the causal effect of fertility on economic wellbeing: Data requirements, identifying assumptions and estimation methods. Empirical Economics, 44, 355–385.
Athey, S., & Imbens, G. W. (2006). Identification and inference in nonlinear difference-in-differences models. Econometrica, 74, 431–497.
Billari, F. C. (2009). The happiness commonality: Fertility decision in low-fertility settings. In UNECE (Ed.), How generations and gender shape demographic change (pp. 7–38). New York, NY, and Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations.
Billari, F. C., Philipov, D., & Testa, M. (2009). Attitudes, norms and perceived behavioural control: Explaining fertility intentions in Bulgaria. European Journal of Population, 25, 439–465.
Caliendo, M., & Kopeinig, S. (2008). Some practical guidance for the implementation of propensity score matching. Journal of Economic Surveys, 22, 31–72.
Clark, A. E., Diener, E., Georgellis, Y., & Lucas, R. E. (2008). Lags and leads in life satisfaction: A test of the baseline hypothesis. Economic Journal, 118, F222–F243.
Diener, E., Suh, E. M., Lucas, R. E., & Smith, H. (1999). Subjective well-being: Three decades of progress. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 276–302.
Dolan, P., Peasgood, T., & White, M. (2007). Do we really know what makes us happy? A review of the economic literature on the factors associated with subjective well-being. Journal of Economic Psychology, 29, 94–122.
Friedman, D., Hechter, M., & Kanazawa, S. (1994). A theory of the value of children. Demography, 31, 375–401.
Goldstein, H., & Healy, M. J. R. (1995). The graphical presentation of a collection of means. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A, 158, 175–177.
Hakim, C. (2000). Work-lifestyle choices in the 21st century. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Hakim, C. (2003). A new approach to explaining fertility patterns: Preference theory. Population and Development Review, 29, 349–374.
Haller, M., & Hadler, M. (2006). How social relations and structures can produce happiness and unhappiness: An international comparative analysis. Social Indicators Research, 75, 169–216.
Hoffman, L. W., & Hoffman, M. L. (1973). The value of children to parents. In J. T. Fawcett (Ed.), Psychological perspectives on population (pp. 19–76). New York, NY: Basic Books.
Hoffman, L. W., & Manis, J. D. (1979). The value of children in the United States: A new approach to the study of fertility. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 41, 583–596.
Imai, K., & Kim, I. S. (2014). On the use of linear fixed effects regression estimators for causal inference. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. Retrieved from http://imai.princeton.edu/research/files/FEmatch.pdf
Imbens, G. W. (2004). Nonparametric estimation of average treatment effects under exogeneity: A review. Review of Economics and Statistics, 86, 4–29.
Imbens, G. W. (2014). Matching methods in practice: Three examples (NBER Working Paper No. 19959). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47, 263–291.
Kan, M. Y. (2007). Work orientation and wives’ employment careers: An evaluation of Hakim’s preference theory. Work and Occupations, 34, 430–462.
Keizer, R., Dykstra, P. A., & Poortman, A. R. (2010). The transition to parenthood and well-being: The impact of partner status and work hour transitions. Journal of Family Psychology, 4, 429–438.
Kohler, H.-P., Behrman, J. R., & Skytthe, A. (2005). Partner + children = happiness? The effects of partnerships and fertility on well-being. Population and Development Review, 31, 407–445.
Kravdal, Ø. (2014). The estimation of fertility effects on happiness: Even more difficult than usually acknowledged. European Journal of Population, 30, 263–290.
Margolis, R., & Myrskylä, M. (2011). A global perspective on happiness and fertility. Population and Development Review, 37, 29–56.
Margolis, R., & Myrskylä, M. (2015). Parental well-being surrounding first birth as a determinant of further parity progression. Demography, 52, 1147–1166.
McLanahan, S., & Adams, J. (1987). Parenthood and psychological well-being. Annual Review of Sociology, 13, 237–257.
Myrskylä, M., & Margolis, R. (2014). Happiness: Before and after the kids. Demography, 51, 1843–1866.
Nelson, S. K., Kushlev, K., English, T., Dunn, E. W., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2012). In defense of parenthood: Children are associated with more joy than misery. Psychological Science, 24, 3–10.
Normand, S.-L. T., Landrum, M. B., Guadagnoli, E., Ayanian, J. Z., Ryan, T. J., Cleary, P. D., & McNeil, B. J. (2001). Validating recommendations for coronary angiography following acute myocardial infarction in the elderly: A matched analysis using propensity scores. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 54, 387–398.
Pollmann-Shult, M. (2014). Parenthood and life satisfaction: Why don’t children make people happy? Journal of Marriage and Family, 76, 319–336.
Pouwels, B. J. (2011). Work, family, and happiness: Essays on interdependencies within families, life events, and time allocation decisions (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Rosenbaum, P. R. (1984). The consequences of adjustment for a concomitant variable that has been affected by the treatment. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A, 147, 656–666.
Rosenbaum, P. R., & Rubin, D. B. (1983). The central role of the propensity score in observational studies for causal effects. Biometrika, 70, 41–55.
Rosenbaum, P. R., & Rubin, D. B. (1985). Constructing a control group using multivariate matched sampling methods that incorporate the propensity score. American Statistician, 3, 33–38.
Rubin, D. B. (1974). Estimating causal effects of treatments in randomized and nonrandomized studies. Journal of Education Psychology, 66, 688–701.
Schoen, R., Kim, Y., Nathanson, C., Fields, J., & Astone, N. M. (1997). Why do Americans want children? Population and Development Review, 23, 333–358.
Sweeting, H., Bhaskar, A., Benzeval, M., Popham, F., & Hunt, K. (2014). Changing gender roles and attitudes and their implications for well-being around the new millennium. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 49, 791–809.
Veenhoven, R. (1996). Developments in satisfaction research. Social Indicators Research, 20, 333–354.
Zimmermann, A. C., & Easterlin, R. A. (2006). Happily ever after? Cohabitation, marriage, divorce and happiness in Germany. Population and Development Review, 32, 511–528.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Letizia Mencarini and Arnstein Aassve for their useful comments. Moreover, the authors are very grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editor for the careful review of the manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Funding
The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the European Research Council under the European ERC Grant Agreement no StG-313617 (SWELL-FER: Subjective Well-being and Fertility, P.I. Letizia Mencarini).
Appendix
Appendix
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Balbo, N., Arpino, B. The Role of Family Orientations in Shaping the Effect of Fertility on Subjective Well-being: A Propensity Score Matching Approach. Demography 53, 955–978 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-016-0480-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-016-0480-z