Final Report Summary - SWELL-FER (Subjective well-being and fertility)
Conventional wisdom arguably suggests that parenting is satisfying for parents: individuals in early to mid-adulthood often claim to look forward to entering parenthood and having children. Even in highly developed societies, where childbearing has become optional, financially expensive and is often associated with considerable trade-offs in terms of professional careers and pursuing other goals in life, parenthood has remained an important aspect of the lives of most adults. In sharp contrast to the conventional wisdom about the effect of parenthood on happiness, scientific studies in psychology, economics and demography have questioned the notion that children and childrearing increase the subjective well-being of their parents. Quite on the contrary, many have shown that parenting can be much less rewarding than what one would expect. The project SWELL-FER (Subjective Well Being and Fertility), that ran from 2013 to 2019, utilized available cross-sectional comparative data sets such as European Social Surveys and EU-SILC (European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) and available panel surveys, such HILDA: Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia; SOEP: German Socio-Economic Panel; BHPS: British Household Panel Survey; SHP: Swiss Household Panel; the US PSID: Panel Study of Income Dynamics; KLIPS: Korea Labor and Income Panel Survey; the German PAIRFAM: Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics; RLMS: Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey; ERHS: Ethiopian Rural Household Survey. The project also explored new and methods unconventional data, such as sentiment analysis of Twitter data. With these data sources, the project examined subjective well-being and demographic behaviors, with a particular focus on fertility in advanced societies, across time and space. Overall, the findings of this project reject the notion of a simple, uniform, and unidirectional relationship between childbearing and life satisfaction. This is important, because the existing literature seemed to have come to a conclusion that the relationship is necessarily negative. This project rejects this rather simplistic idea. The results confirm a two-way relationship between well-being and fertility. Whereas a higher well-being always favour reproduction, at least in low fertility societies, parenthood does not necessarily bring happiness. In the last case, it very much depends on gender and whereabouts parents live. The overall idea of the project is that the effects of fertility on individuals’ SWB are diverse, depending on parity and on individual, couple and country contextual factors, and therefore, family policies must be designed accordingly to effective and relevant. For instance, we establish that the effect of SWB on fertility is predominantly significant for the progression to the second birth. Having a second child (in contrast with the first, which is strongly determined by a biological component as it gratifies basic human needs), is a question of quantity, where the decision is very much a function of the circumstance surrounding the event of becoming a parent the first time around – and importantly – its aftermath. The fact that SWB following the first child matters for the progression to the second birth means that this parity should constitute the main target for family and fertility policies. A key moderating factor that has been overlooked in previous research, is the level of work–family conflict. From a policy perspective, a central goal for any modern welfare state should be to decrease the difficulties parents experience in everyday life while raising their children. Reducing the conflict between work and family will not only stimulate employment and fertility, as has been shown previously, but, as we demonstrated in this project, it also improves parental life satisfaction. We also find that although individuals’ personality is a strong component of the variation in SWB – the effect of SWB on fertility, is not determined by Personality Traits. This fact that reported variation in SWB associated with childbearing behaviour, is not only a matter of differences in personality traits, is undeniably an important finding, not least because it suggests that there is room for policy measures that could sustain individuals’ SWB, and, consequently, fertility levels.