Parental Well-Being Across the Life Course: Gender, Parenting Transitions, and Positive and Negative Work-Home Spillover

• In Event: 504 - Regular Session. Social/Cultural Impacts on Parents and Parenting

Abstract

Social scientists have found that while being a parent can diminish well-being, especially while children are young, having children can be a satisfying and enriching experience as children age into adulthood, suggesting that the benefits and consequences of being a parent ebbs and flows across the adult life course. Recent research has also advocated incorporating multi-dimensional measures of well-being in order to more accurately illustrate both positive and negative ramifications of being a parent. We contribute to the parental well-being literature by using two-waves of nationally representative data (MIDUS I and II, N=1864) to evaluate whether key parenting transitions across the life course (becoming a parent, beginning to parent a school-aged child, an adolescent, a college-aged child, and an adult child) are related to within-person changes in a key, but understudied, measures of well-being: positive and negative spillover between work and home domains. We also pay attention to important gender differences in the experience of parenthood across the life course. We find that experiences at the work-home interface do shift as children age and parents undergo different parenting transitions, and that mothers are more likely to experience the negative ramifications of such transitions, as compared to fathers. Our results confirm that not only is parenthood a key social role that shapes adult well-being, but that the experience of parenthood evolves over a gendered life course to shape men’s and women’s well-being in different ways.

Author

• Katherine Y. Lin, University of Wisconsin - Madison