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When is the Second One Coming? The Effect of Couple’s Subjective Well-Being Following the Onset of Parenthood

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Abstract

Parenthood has strong effects on people’s life. Some of these effects are positive and some negative and may influence the decision of having other children after the first. Demographic research has only marginally addressed the relationship between subjective well-being and fertility, and even less attention has been reserved to investigate how the subjective experience of the first parenthood may influence the decision to have a second child. Performing log-logistic hazard models using HILDA panel data (2001–2012), changes in couples’ objective life conditions and satisfaction within family and work domains after the first childbirth are related to the timing of the transition to the second parenthood. Results show that partners adopting traditional gender specialization in roles proceed quicker to the second child; however, experiencing dissatisfaction in reconciling, in the couple’s relationship and in the work domain negatively affects mothers’ probability of having a second child in the future.

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Notes

  1. Measures on personality are available in HILDA wave 5 and 9. Variability of the predictors has been tested using Wilcoxon signed-rank test, which tests the equality of matched pairs of observations, where the null hypothesis is that the distributions are the same. The results do not support a decision to reject the null hypothesis.

  2. The three models, Gompertz, Weibull and log logistic, were tested and compared based on their AIC. Log logistic was confirmed to fit the data better than the other models.

  3. During the year of the birth of their first child, more than 50 % of the women in the sample are inactive or unemployed, compared to 20 % of the previous and subsequent years. At the same time, the proportion of part-time working mothers is around 50 % during the first year of the child’s life, compared to 18 % during the year of the first pregnancy.

  4. The model has not been reported for parsimony. Here the time until the second child is modelled including the variables for the hours spent in doing housework for both partners, and a dummy variable taking value 1 if the couples are doing their fair share or 0 otherwise.

  5. The inclusion of satisfaction with the partner relationship does not change the magnitude and the significance of the other predictors and vice versa.

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Acknowledgments

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).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DONDENA Centre for Research on Social Dynamics, Bocconi University, Via Guglielmo Roentgen 1, 20136, Milan, Italy

    Francesca Luppi

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  1. Francesca Luppi
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Correspondence to Francesca Luppi.

Additional information

This paper uses unit record data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. The HILDA Project was initiated and is funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS) and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (Melbourne Institute). The findings and views reported in this paper, however, are those of the author and should not be attributed to either DSS or the Melbourne Institute.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 6, 7 and 8.

Table 6 Variables for adjustment to parenthood in family and work life spheres
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Table 7 Distribution of the main covariates in the sample (Total sample N = 1498)
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Table 8 Distribution of the control variables in the sample (total sample N = 1498)
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Luppi, F. When is the Second One Coming? The Effect of Couple’s Subjective Well-Being Following the Onset of Parenthood. Eur J Population 32, 421–444 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-016-9388-y

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