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This article advances a couple-level framework to examine how parenthood shapes withinfamily gender inequality by education in three countries that vary in their normative and policy context: the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. We trace mothers’ share of couple earnings and variation by her education in the 10-year window around first birth, using long-running harmonized panel surveys from the 1990s and 2000s (N = 4,117 couples and 28,488 couple-years) and an event study methodology that leverages withincouple variation in earnings pre- and post-birth. Our results show steep declines in her share of couple earnings following first birth across the three countries that persist over several years of follow-up. Declines are smallest in the United States, due to U.S. mothers’higher employment and longer work hours. Declines are also smaller among female partners without a college degree in the United States, where mothers have less work-family support and fewer options to manage work and family on one income. Results shed light on how parenthood plays into gender inequality within couples, and how country context shapes couple dynamics and inequality across households.

Limited research on parental well‐being by child age suggests that parents are better off with very young children despite intense time demands of caring for them. This study uses the American Time Use Survey Well‐Being Module (N = 18,124) to assess how parents feel in activities with children of different ages. Results show that parents are worse off with adolescent children relative to young children. Parents report the lowest levels of happiness with adolescents relative to younger children, and mothers report more stress and less meaning with adolescents. Controlling for contextual features of parenting including activity type, solo parenting, and restorative time does not fully account for the adolescent disadvantage in fathers' happiness or mothers' stress. This study highlights adolescence as a particularly difficult stage for parental well‐being and shows that mothers shoulder stress that fathers do not, even after accounting for differences in the context of their parenting activities.

Research studies and popular accounts of parenting have documented the joys and strains of raising children. Much of the literature comparing parents with those without children indicates a happiness advantage for those without children, although recent studies have unpacked this general advantage to reveal differences by the dimension of well-being considered and important features in parents' lives and parenting experiences. We use unique data from the 2010, 2012, and 2013 American Time Use Survey to understand emotions in mothering experiences and how these vary by key demographic factors: employment and partnership status. Assessing mothers' emotions in a broad set of parenting activities while controlling for a rich set of person-and activity-level factors, we find that mothering experiences are generally associated with high levels of emotional well-being, although single parenthood is associated with differences in the emotional valence. Single mothers report less happiness and more sadness, stress, and fatigue in parenting than partnered mothers, and these reports are concentrated among those single mothers who are not employed. Employed single mothers are happier and less sad and stressed when parenting than single mothers who are not employed. Contrary to common assumptions about maternal employment, we find overall few negative associations between employment and mothers' feelings regarding time with children, with the exception that employed mothers report more fatigue in parenting than those who are not employed.

Adolescents who share meals with their parents score better on a range of well-being indicators. Using 3 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (N = 17,977), the authors assessed the causal nature of these associations and the extent to which they persist into adulthood. They examined links between family dinners and adolescent mental health, substance use, and delinquency at Wave 1, accounting for detailed measures of the family environment to test whether family meals simply proxy for other family processes. As a more stringent test of causality, they estimated fixed-effects models from Waves 1 and 2, and they used Wave 3 to explore persistence in the influence of family dinners. Associations between family dinners and adolescent well being remained significant, net of controls, and some held up to stricter tests of causality. Beyond indirect benefits via earlier well-being, however, family dinners associations did not persist into adulthood.

The share of children living with grandparents has increased in recent years. Previous studies have examined how time with grandparents is associated with child well-being, but we know little about how grandparents fare in their time with grandchildren. We used diary data from the American Time Use Study (ATUS) to examine the association between grandparents’ time in activities with grandchildren and multiple measures of their subjective well-being in those activities. We used a subsample of co-residential grandparents from the American Time Use Study ( N  = 868 individuals; 2474 activities), paying close attention to potential differences between three-generational families (those with parents, grandparents and grandchildren living together) and grandfamilies (which do not include the parent generation). We examined subjective well-being (happiness, meaning, sadness, tiredness and stress) in relation to family type (three-generational or grandfamily) and grandchild presence during the activity, as well as other characteristics of the activity (e.g., type of activity, duration, etc.) and of the grandparent (i.e., demographic variables). This is the first study to address grandparent SWB as affective response to activities in relation to presence of grandchildren during those activities. Results of multilevel models show that grandparents living with their grandchildren experienced more happiness and more meaningfulness when they engaged in activities with their grandchildren compared to spending time alone or with other people. This relationship was partially moderated by family type, such that grandfamily grandparents experienced less happiness in time with grandchildren than alone, relative to grandparents in three-generational families.

Eighty-two percent of children under age 18 live with at least one sibling, and the sibling relationship is typically the longest-lasting family relationship in an individual's life. Nevertheless, siblings remain understudied in the family demography literature. We ask how having a sibling structures children's time spent with others and in specific activities, and how children's time and activities with siblings vary by social class, gender, and age. We use time diary data from the US Panel Study of Income DynamicsOChild Development Supplement (PSID-CDS), comparing the time use of children with and without siblings and presenting regression-adjusted descriptive statistics on patterns among those with siblings. Children with siblings spend about half of their discretionary time engaged with siblings. They spend less time alone with parents and more time in unstructured play than those without siblings. Brothers and more closely spaced siblings spend more time together and more time in unstructured play. For example, boys with at least one brother spend five more hours per week with their siblings and over three more hours per week in unstructured play than boys with no brothers. The presence and characteristics of siblings shape children's time use in ways that may have implications for child development.

Empirical evidence and conventional wisdom suggest that family dinners are associated with positive outcomes for youth. Recent research using fixed-effects models as a more stringent test of causality suggests a more limited role of family meals in protecting children from risk. Estimates of average effects, however, may mask important variation in the link between family meals and well-being; in particular, family meals may be more or less helpful based on the quality of family relationships. Using 2 waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 17,977), this study extended recent work to find that family dinners have little benefit when parent–child relationships are weak but contribute to fewer depressive symptoms and less delinquency among adolescents when family relationships are strong. The findings highlight the importance of attending to variation when assessing what helps and what hurts in families.

Parenthood is an impoverishing life event for many families in America, with negative implications for healthy child development. Changes over the past four decades in public support, earnings prospects, and family arrangements of new parents have left open questions about trends in economic security and strategies for making ends meet after a first birth. Our study examined trends from 1983–2019 in the month-to-month dynamics of income and income inadequacy around the transition to parenthood. We used fifteen panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (N = 10,988 individuals and 267,345 person-months), leveraging monthly measures of total income, varied sources of income, and the income-to-poverty ratio in the year before and two years after first birth. We find that family income around first birth has increased over time, but only among college-educated couples, and almost entirely due to changes in mothers’ and fathers’ earnings prior to birth. Parenthood income penalties have been largely persistent over time, and among those without a college degree, there has been little improvement in income either just before or after the transition to parenthood since the 1980s.

This article addresses open questions about the nature and meaning of the positive association between marriage and well-being, namely, the extent to which it is causal, shared with cohabitation, and stable over time. We relied on data from the National Survey of Families and Households (N = 2,737) and a modeling approach that controls for fixed differences between individuals by relating union transitions to changes in well-being. This study is unique in examining the persistence of changes in wellbeing as marriages and cohabitations progress (and potentially dissolve) over time. The effects of marriage and cohabitation are found to be similar across a range of measures tapping psychological well-being, health, and social ties. Where there are statistically significant differences, marriage is not always more advantageous. Overall, differences tend to be small and appear to dissipate over time, even when the greater instability of cohabitation is taken into account.

Objective This study examines the relationship between telecommuting and gender inequalities in parents' time use at home and on the job before and during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Background Telecommuting is a potential strategy for addressing the competing demands of work and home and the gendered ways in which they play out. Limited evidence is mixed, however, on the implications of telecommuting for mothers' and fathers' time in paid and unpaid work. The massive increase in telecommuting due to COVID‐19 underscores the critical need to address this gap in the literature. Method Data from the 2003–2018 American Time Use Survey (N = 12,519) and the 2020 Current Population Survey (N = 83,676) were used to estimate the relationship between telecommuting and gender gaps in parents' time in paid and unpaid work before and during the pandemic. Matching and quasi‐experimental methods better approximate causal relationships than prior studies. Results Before the pandemic, telecommuting was associated with larger gender gaps in housework and work disruptions but smaller gender gaps in childcare, particularly among couples with two full‐time earners. During the pandemic, telecommuting mothers maintained paid work to a greater extent than mothers working on‐site, whereas fathers' work hours did not differ by work location. Conclusion In the context of weak institutional support for parenting, telecommuting may offer mothers a mechanism for maintaining work hours and reducing gender gaps in childcare, while exacerbating inequalities in housework and disruptions to paid work.