Abstract
Using the American Time Use Survey, this chapter explores how mothers and fathers experience specific daily activities utilizing four aspects of subjective well-being. ATUS survey respondents were asked to report how they felt in terms of happiness, meaningfulness, stress, and tiredness while they were engaged in three randomly selected activities they reported from the previous day. We use a simple regression approach and find that mothers are more tired than fathers in each of our aggregated time use activities and report higher stress levels when engaged in paid work, nonpaid work, child caregiving, and leisure activities. However, mothers report greater happiness than fathers when engaged in paid work and leisure. Single nonemployed mothers are particularly unhappy, stressed, and tired, even after controlling for many other characteristics, including education level and household income. Fathers’ subjective well-being also varies by his marital status; single fathers are less happy and attribute less meaning to nonpaid work than married men, and are more stressed while watching TV, but less tired in other forms of leisure than married fathers.
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Notes
- 1.
While our findings may be suggestive of time pressure in some circumstances, our data contain no direct answers to questions about time pressure.
- 2.
The hypotheses of interrupted sleep or mothers naturally requiring more sleep have been explored by other researchers, but are not explored here. However, we do include the total number of activities engaged in each day to control for the hypothesized activity overload of mothers and total hours of sleep on diary day.
- 3.
- 4.
In 2012 and 2013, a global life satisfaction question was also included as well as some day specific health information to help put that day’s emotions is context.
- 5.
Defined as having an own child under the age of 18 living in the household.
- 6.
While we control for nonemployment and marital status among fathers via dummy variables, we do not have sufficient samples sizes to interact employment status and marital status for fathers.
- 7.
For a thorough description of the ATUS see Hamermesh et al. (2005).
- 8.
Kalenkoski and Oumtrakool (2015) and Gimenez-Nadal and Sevilla (2016) use the global life satisfaction measure as a control variable in their regression specification in an attempt to calibrate the individual SWB level responses; this necessitates limiting their analysis to the years 2012 and 2013. Hamermesh (this volume) reports the results of a comparison of married and not married mothers using the ATUS from 2012 and 2013 with the global satisfaction variable as the dependent variable.
- 9.
These percentages are calculated using respondent level weights supplied by the BLS in order to reflect the full population of the United States in 2010, 2012, and 2013.
- 10.
We also repeated our basic analysis using ordered probits and the results were essentially unchanged.
- 11.
Results from the more limited specifications are available from the authors upon request. The results were largely robust to the increasing specificity of characteristics included.
- 12.
One might be tempted to include a respondent’s response to the global satisfaction question as a right-hand side variable in order to calibrate responses, but this question was not asked in 2010. We did estimate each of our models with global satisfaction included for the 2 years as a robustness check, and the results were quite similar. In this chapter, we report the results without controlling for global satisfaction, choosing sample size over calibration, given the large number of other variables we include in the model.
- 13.
Both the mean and the standard deviation account for the sampling errors. Stata commands svy:mean followed by estat sd were used.
- 14.
- 15.
We include total time spent sleeping on diary day even though we do not analyze SWB while sleeping. Many of the other papers in this literature have explored the hypothesis that women’s higher reported tiredness and reduced happiness may be the result of them getting less sleep or more interrupted sleep. We do not include a measure of interrupted sleep.
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Connelly, R., Kimmel, J. (2022). How Do U.S. Moms and Dads Feel About Work and Family?. In: Molina, J.A. (eds) Mothers in the Labor Market. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99780-9_2
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