Fathers’ Changing Contributions to Child Care and Domestic Work in Very Low

Abstract

Comparing a cluster of European countries that have recently experienced very low fertility with other industrialized countries, we hypothesize a connection between fertility behavior and fathers’ increasing participation in unpaid work. Using cross-national time use data we find significant evidence of recent increases in the contribution of younger, more highly educated fathers to child care and core domestic work in very low–fertility countries that have recently experienced upturns in fertility. The pace of these increases exceeds that found in the comparison group of other industrialized countries. We interpret these findings as suggestive evidence for a process of cross-national social diffusion of more egalitarian domestic gender relations, in particular among more highly educated fathers, acting to facilitate a turnaround in the pattern of postponed and foregone fertility which has characterized lowest low– and very low–fertility countries.

Keywords

child care family demography father–child relationship household labor gender family

Introduction

Following the baby boom, fertility has diverged among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. One group, from southern, eastern, and central Europe, experienced total fertility rates (TFRs) at the “lowest low” (less than 1.3) or the “very low” (less than 1.5) level (Billari & Kohler, 2004; Kohler, Billari, & Ortega, 2002). Another group, despite some fluctuation, saw a stabilization of TFRs not far from the replacement level. Despite the fact that fertility levels remain quite different cross-nationally, the recent evidence points toward an upturn of fertility in the group of countries that experienced TFRs below 1.5, that is, in the very low– and lowest low–fertility countries (Myrskylä, Kohler, & Billari, 2009).

Research on fertility has flourished as a consequence of these challenging trends (Balbo, Mills, & Billari, 2013), and significant efforts have been devoted to attempts to explain the development of low fertility and the recent upturn (Goldscheider, Oláh, & Puur, 2010; Goldstein, Sobotka, & Jasilioniene, 2009). The role of ideational change in shaping fertility and family choices has repeatedly been emphasized by the proponents of the “second demographic transition” (SDT) theory, Lesthaeghe and Van de Kaa (see, e.g., Lesthaeghe, 1995). According to SDT theory, low fertility is seen as a consequence of the general movement toward highly individualized patterns of family formation and dissolution. However, the lack of an explicit gender perspective within SDT theory, in which women’s and men’s differential ability to focus on self-realization and on individual autonomy play a relevant role, has been criticized (Bernhardt, 2004).

At the same time, gender scholars were referring to a “stalled revolution”; women made wide gains in the public sphere of employment in developed countries over the past half century, but on many fronts the progress made appeared to be slowing in the late 1990s and 2000s (England, 2010; although see also Goldin, 2006). One theory is that this stalling is due to the fact that neither the institutional context nor men themselves appear to have adapted sufficiently to women’s new engagement in the labor force. Although women’s lives have become more like men’s, the reverse has not been the case. Only through an equal movement by men into what have been traditionally considered “women’s work” and a corresponding institutional support of this move will the movement toward gender equality continue.

It is increasingly recognized that the reversal in declining fertility in the very low– and lowest low–fertility regimes is conditional on gender equality: Countries ranking high in development, as measured by health, income, and education, but low in gender egalitarianism continue to see declining fertility (McDonald, 2000; Myrskylä, Kohler & Billari, 2011). The switch to a focus on gender equality may be regarded as something of a paradigm change away from SDT theory, which had become an established reference point in discussion of the causes of fertility decline (Bernhardt, 2004). The argument runs that where fathers contribute more to the daily routine tasks of housework and child care, women are more able to consider either starting a family or proceeding to a second (or higher order) birth while still being able to meet their employment and family commitments (Goldscheider & Kaufman, 1996). This narrative links to a theoretical perspective in which gender equality may have different effects on fertility as the economic role of women changes over time (McDonald, 2000). First, when gender equality in the labor market increases, fertility may decrease due to the rising opportunity costs to women of having children. Later, as advanced societies acknowledge the issues working mothers and couples with children face in combining employment with family life, increasing gender equality may be pivotal in facilitating the development of institutions and social norms that assist in combining work and family, facilitating an upturn in fertility (Goldscheider, 2000; Mills, 2010).

Recent findings associate the fertility upturn of the first decade of the 21st century in the very low– and lowest low–fertility countries with younger, more highly educated cohorts (Myrskylä, Goldstein, & Cheng, 2013). High levels of educational attainment have also long been recognized as one of the variables most closely associated with increases in men’s contributions to domestic work and care (Coltrane, 2000). In this article, we build on this background, investigating cross-national trends in father’s contributions to child care and core domestic work by educational level, with the focus on a cluster of central and southern European countries (Spain, Italy, Germany, and Slovenia) that have recently experienced TFRs below 1.5 (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Total fertility rates by country, 1970-2010.

We postulate a social diffusion effect whereby changes in gender attitudes among more highly educated younger cohorts go together with changes in the contribution of the fathers of young children to domestic work and child care. We compare trends by education in fathers’ contributions to child care and core domestic work in the very low–fertility group of countries to a group of countries from the Liberal and Nordic clusters (Esping-Andersen, 1990). The macro-level differences between these groups of countries correlate with both gender attitudes and levels of women’s economic participation. Nordic countries are generally considered to have the most gender equal social policies and society, whereas very low– and lowest low–fertility countries are recognized as being the most traditional in terms of gender relations and attitudes (Esping-Andersen, 2009; Guo & Gilbert, 2012).

Background

Gender Equality, Low Fertility, and the Second Demographic Transition

For the proponents of the SDT, recent family and fertility choices in advanced societies are shaped by ideational changes that have spread since the 1960s. These ideational changes involve the rejection of institutional control, the accentuation of individual autonomy, and the rise of self-realization needs (Surkyn & Lesthaeghe, 2004). They are seen as occurring over different periods, and with differing intensities (Van de Kaa, 1997), although the underlying notion is that the SDT will eventually spread even to less advanced societies (Lesthaeghe, 2010). These changes are regarded as explaining the postponement of fertility, lower fertility, and childlessness, either as a primary causal factor (Lesthaeghe, 1983) or in combination with other factors (Billingsley, 2010). However, it has recently been recognized that, for women, the rejection of institutional control, the accentuation of individual autonomy, and the rise of self-realization needs may be incompatible with gender-unequal households. Through a focus on women’s ideational change, SDT theory might prove to be compatible with the thesis that domestic gender equality contributes to maintain fertility above very low levels (McDonald, 2000).

The relationship between gender equality within the home and fertility behavior has been documented in recent studies, although some of this evidence is suggestive rather than direct. First, it has been shown that the contributions of men to domestic labor are positively related to country-level gender-egalitarian attitudes (Gauthier & DeGusti, 2012; Knudsen & Wærness, 2008). For example, the Nordic countries display both a high gender equality value and high levels of paternal time spent with children, and at the other end of the scale, ex-communist eastern European countries display a low level of gender equality and low levels of paternal time (Gauthier & DeGusti, 2012). Changes in country-level gender egalitarian attitudes have, in turn, been found to be related to changing fertility: Myrskyla et al. (2011) find evidence for the importance of economic development in combination with country-level measures of gender egalitarianism in affecting fertility behavior.

At the micro level, direct evidence that a highly gendered distribution of household work lowers fertility intentions is provided by Tazi-Preve, Bichlbauer, and Goujon (2004) for Austria, and by Mills, Mencarini, Tanturri, and Begall (2008) for Italy. Oláh (2003) shows that household-level gender equality accelerated the transition to second births in Sweden, whereas Torr and Short (2004) find, using U.S. data, that the probability of having a second child is higher in families with either very low or very high gender equality. Using time use data, a direct link between higher fertility and men’s greater contributions to household labor across a selection of OECD countries was made by de Laat and Sevilla-Sanz (2011). However, reflecting the lack of data with information both on fertility behavior and time use, their “fertility” variable was an estimate constructed from current household composition information.

Gender Attitudes Among Men Aged 20 to 49 in Low-Fertility Countries

Over a similar time period to the identification of delayed and foregone fertility in the very low–fertility countries, attitudinal data have shown some interesting suggestive signs of change in gender ideology among men of prime child-raising age. In 1994 and 2002,¹ respondents to the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) were asked to what extent they agreed with the statement “A man’s job is to earn money; a woman’s job is to look after the home and family.” The countries of the very low–fertility group are generally found to be among the most traditional in terms of gender attitudes (e.g., Guo & Gilbert, 2012). However, whereas the percentage of men aged 20 to 49 who agreed with this statement was, as expected, higher in these countries across both survey years, the greatest falls in the percentage agreeing between these years also occurred in the very low–fertility countries (Figure 2). The period over which these falls occurred is significant. Referring back to Figure 1, the earlier, 1994, ISSP survey took place at a time when TFRs were at their lowest in the very low–fertility group of countries—around 1.2 to 1.3. By 2002, however, fertility was starting to rise again in these countries. Tellingly, over the period between 1994 and 2002, the percentage of men in the very low–fertility countries agreeing with the statement expressing the traditional male breadwinner model fell by nearly 40% on average (in the countries for which information for both dates was available).

Figure 2.

“A man’s job is to earn money; a woman’s job is to look after the home and family”: Percentage of men aged 20 to 49 agreeing by country.

Fathers’ Contributions to Child Care and Domestic Work by Educational Level

The past few decades have witnessed a clear across-the-board increase in paternal child care time in those industrialized countries for which we have time use data series (Gauthier, Smeeding, & Furstenberg, 2004; Gershuny, 2003; Sandberg & Hofferth, 2001, 2005; Sayer, Bianchi, & Robinson, 2004). Overall, minutes spent by fathers in primary child care on a given day have increased from about 20 to 30 minutes in the 1960s/1970s to 44 to 88 minutes in the 2000s. Men’s time spent in domestic work also displayed an overall upward trend over the past four decades in most industrialized countries for which there are time use data available. In the United Kingdom and the United States, men’s overall contribution to domestic work increased from 90 and 105 minutes per day respectively in the 1960s to 148 and 173 minutes per day by the early 2000s (Kan, Sullivan, & Gershuny, 2011). Similar levels of increase were observed in the continental European and Scandinavian countries.

Concealed within these trends, however, there is also significant heterogeneity (Sayer, Bianchi, et al., 2004). In particular, much research has focused on differences by men’s educational level. With respect to child care, in the United States and United Kingdom, the education gap in paternal time investment widened during the period from the 1960s to the 2000s (Ramey & Ramey, 2010; Sullivan, 2010). In general, high-educated fathers increased their probability of providing primary child care at a faster rate compared to low-educated fathers (Altintas, 2013). In contrast to the widening gap in fathers’ care of children by educational level, Sullivan (2010) demonstrated a convergence over time between the contributions to domestic work of fathers in dual-earner families by educational level in both the United States and the United Kingdom. In sum, within the context of an overall increase, trends in child care show a more marked increase for more highly educated fathers, whereas differences in trends in domestic work by education are more varied according to country.

In what follows, we present some suggestive evidence for a link between rising fertility in very low–fertility countries and increases in the time fathers in these countries devote to child care, especially among those fathers with a college education or above.

Data

Time use data are widely recognized as the most reliable comparative measure of child care and domestic work (see, e.g., Bianchi, Sayer, Milkie, & Robinson, 2012; Hook, 2010). We use data from the Multinational Time Use Study, an international database of large nationally representative time use diary surveys assembled and harmonized by the Centre for Time Use Research, University of Oxford.² The database, which incorporates both the American Time Use Study and Harmonized European Time Use Study data, currently contains more than 50 surveys from more than 20 countries spanning five decades and recording more than 550,000 diary days. There is considerable variation in the modes of collection of these data, so in the Multinational Time Use Study these surveys are harmonized to a common format, providing standardized background and time expenditure variables (see Fisher & Gershuny, 2013). In what follows, we selected OECD countries for which high-quality data are available, including a group of four countries that reached very low or lowest low levels of fertility (Germany, Italy, Spain, and Slovenia).

The other OECD countries we include come mainly from two social policy clusters as originally identified by Esping-Andersen (1990): the Liberal cluster (United States, Britain, Canada) and the Nordic cluster (Sweden, Norway, Finland Denmark). France and The Netherlands were also included on the basis of their data sequences and quality. Selecting these countries yields 46 surveys for analysis, with almost all countries³ having at least two data collection points for the period from 1970 to 2011. For the purposes of analysis, these countries are divided into two groups with reference to their TFR levels: the very low–fertility countries versus the others.

Sample and Variables

The sample chosen for analysis was married/cohabiting men aged 20 to 49 years with young children under 5 years in their households. The population of interest relates to the contributions to domestic labor and child care made by fathers in couples, at ages where these contributions might be hypothesized to affect fertility. We did not have direct identifiers of biological relationships between adults and children in the file. However, it is unlikely that men aged 20 to 49 in a household would be the sibling of a child aged 0 to 4⁴. Selecting this group of men, whom we refer to hereafter as “fathers” for convenience, yielded 37,500 diary days for our multivariate analysis from 13 countries (see the appendix for the distribution of diary days by country and survey period). The dependent variable combines primary activity time spent in the care of children with that spent in core domestic work⁵ (measured in minutes per day). It is not normally recommended to analyze these aspects of family work and care together since they display rather different trends (Sullivan, 2013), but in this context there is a clear rationale, since both may contribute to easing the burden faced by employed women. Moreover, for fathers, cross-national trends in core domestic work and child care move in the same direction—upward—whereas for women child care is increasing, but trends in core domestic work are stable or declining (Kan et al., 2011).

Although gender is recognized as the most important determinant of domestic work and child care time, the number and age of children have also been found to have significant effects (Monna & Gauthier, 2008; Sayer, Bianchi, et al., 2004). Employment decreases domestic work and child care time for both parents (although the effects are much stronger for mothers than fathers; Coltrane, 2000; Shelton & John, 1996). Education, on the other hand, is positively and strongly associated with time spent in child care (Altintas, 2013; Guryan, Hurst, & Kearney, 2008; Sayer, Gauthier, & Furstenberg, 2004; Sullivan, 2010). We selected the following as our independent variables: country group (1 = very low fertility, 0 = the rest), a time series variable calculated by an ascending linear sequence of numbers starting from 0 for the earliest survey year in 1970 (to measure the general trend over time), a control for weekend/weekday completion of the diary (1 = weekday, 0 = weekend), educational attainment (1 = college-educated, 0 = below),6 age and age squared, employment status (1 = employed, 0 = not employed), and number of children younger than 18 years in the household.

Analyses

Figure 3 shows trends in the minutes per day spent in core domestic work and child care over the period 1970 to 2010 for married/cohabiting men aged 20 to 49 years with a child aged younger than 5 years in the household for the 13 countries being studied. In the context of an across-the-board increase in fathers’ contributions, it can be seen that the trend was also strongly upward in the very low–fertility countries (distinguished in the graph as solid lines). Italian fathers stand out as doing rather less than others, and the point estimate for Slovenia is also rather low, but in contrast, Spanish fathers contributed among the greatest amount of time to domestic work and child care by the late 2000s. These trends are consistent with what is already known about increases in both child care and domestic work time for men over the past 40 years, discussed above.

Figure 3.

Average daily minutes in core domestic work and child care by married/cohabiting men aged 20 to 49 with a child younger than 5 years in the household.

To assess whether we can discern effects of education concealed within these general trends (which might point to a process of social diffusion), we need to turn to multivariate models. Table 1 shows a sequence of nested ordinary least squares regression models estimating minutes per day spent by fathers in core domestic work and child care. Model 1 includes the very low–fertility country indicator, the time variable, and the control for week/weekend day diary.⁷ As is evident from Figure 3, the general linear trend over time in these fathers’ contributions to core domestic work and child care is positive, and as expected, the effect of a weekday compared to a weekend day is strongly negative. Controlling for these effects, the effect of being in a very low–fertility country is also negative, reducing the minutes spent in core domestic work and child care by 6 minutes per day.

Table 1.

Ordinary Least Squares Regressions Estimating Daily Minutes Spent in Core Domestic Work and Child Care for Men Aged 20 to 49 With a Child Aged Younger Than 5 Years in the Household.

	Model 1 b (SE)	Model 2 b (SE)	Model 3 b (SE)	Model 4 b (SE)
Intercept	83.93*** (2.08)	13.30 (22.09)	18.67 (22.04)	16.83 (22.01)
Very low fertility	−6.17*** (1.68)	−3.44* (1.70)	−27.30*** (5.97)	−27.65*** (5.97)
Time	1.98*** (0.06)	1.51*** (0.07)	1.26*** (0.09)	1.32*** (0.09)
College		27.25*** (1.66)	14.29** (4.20)	13.22** (4.22)
Age		7.18*** (1.29)	7.18*** (1.28)	7.27*** (1.28)
Age squared		−0.10*** (0.02)	−0.10*** (0.02)	−0.10 (0.02)
Has two children		6.73*** (1.68)	7.01*** (1.68)	7.15*** (1.68)
Has three or more children		4.29 (2.20)	4.94* (2.21)	4.96* (2.21)
Employed		−67.39*** (4.34)	−67.32*** (4.34)	−67.25*** (4.33)
Weekday	−42.88*** (1.30)	−42.67*** (1.30)	−42.70*** (1.31)	−42.72*** (1.31)
Very low fertility × time			0.90*** (0.22)	0.74** (0.22)
College × time			0.51** (0.15)	0.44** (0.15)
Very low fertility × college				12.95*** (3.68)
Adjusted R²	.07	.1	.1	.1
N	37,500	37,500	37,500	37,500

Note. Clustered standard errors in parenthesis. Weights are applied to represent the population distribution accurately.

Source: Multinational Time Use Study.

***

p < .001. **p < .01. *p < .05.

Model 2 of Table 1 adds the set of socioeconomic and demographic variables. When adding these other variables, the effects of weekday, time, and being in a very low–fertility country remain significant. The effect of being college educated has a strong positive effect on the performance of core domestic work and child care, adding 27 minutes a day. The effects of education are important for the idea of a social diffusion of gender-egalitarian attitudes and behavior affecting fertility. Age also has a positive relationship with minutes spent in core domestic work and child care although the squared term indicates a dropping off at later ages, probably connected to the ages and distribution of children. Having a second child adds to fathers’ time spent in core domestic work, by 7 minutes a day. Finally, the effect of being employed as opposed to not employed has, as expected, a strongly negative effect on contributions to domestic work and child care.

Model 3 adds two interaction effects with time: the effect of being in the very low–fertility group of countries by time, and college education by time. The coefficient for the former is strongly positive, indicating that the effect of being in a very low–fertility country increases the positive slope over time in the minutes spent in core domestic work and child care for these fathers. The coefficient for the interaction of being college educated and time is also positive, though less convincing in terms of minutes added. This indicates that being college educated has a stronger positive effect over time on contributions to core domestic work and child care—an important finding for the hypothesis of social diffusion. The strength and significance of the other independent variables remain largely unchanged. Finally, we tested whether there was any interaction between being in a very low–fertility country and being college educated (Model 4). It can be seen that the very low–fertility group by college interaction survives all the other effects in the final model, being positive in sign and significant at p < .001. This means that the positive effect over time of having a college education on father’s contribution to domestic work and child care time is more pronounced in the very low–fertility countries.

To illustrate these effects we plotted the daily minutes spent in core domestic work and child care by education predicted by Model 4 over time, for a 34-year-old employed and married man with two children on an “average” day (shown in Figure 4).⁸ First, the effect of education is evident—even increasing somewhat—throughout the period 1970 to 2010. However, for each level of education, over the period covered by these analyses the two sets of lines representing the very low–fertility countries catch up with and even cross (in the case of those with college education) those representing the rest of the countries. In the period from 1970 to the early 1990s the predicted minutes in domestic work and child care for employed and married fathers of two children from very low–fertility countries were less than that for their equivalents from the other countries, regardless of education. However, during the 1970s, predicted minutes in domestic work and child care for fathers with a college-level education in the very low–fertility countries began to exceed that of equivalent non–college-educated fathers from the other countries, and by the late 1990s they started to exceed that of equivalent college-educated fathers from those countries. In addition, predicted time spent in domestic work and child care by fathers with no college education in the very low–fertility countries caught up with that for fathers with no college education in the other countries by the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

Figure 4.

Predicted daily minutes in core domestic work and child care by educational level and country fertility status.

From the perspective of identifying a process of social diffusion, the timing of the crossing of the predictions for college-educated, married, employed fathers in the very low–fertility countries with that of their counterparts in the other group of countries is significant. The period during which the predicted time spent in core domestic work and child care by these college-educated fathers in the very low–fertility countries began to exceed that of their counterparts in other countries—the mid- to late 1990s—coincides with the big change in gender attitudes among men from the very low–fertility countries shown in the ISSP data over the period 1994 to 2002 (Figure 2). It also coincides with the period during which TFRs began to rise again in the very low–fertility countries (Figure 1).

Conclusions

Using cross-national time use diary data we analyzed fathers’ contributions to domestic work and child care. We found significant increases in the contributions of younger, more highly educated fathers’ to child care and domestic work in those very low–fertility countries that have recently been experiencing upturns in fertility. The pace of these increases exceeds that found in a comparison group of other industrialized countries, including Nordic, continental European, and North American countries. We interpret these findings as suggestive evidence for a process of cross-national social diffusion of more egalitarian domestic gender relations, facilitating a turnaround in the pattern of delayed and foregone fertility that has characterized the very low– and lowest low–fertility countries.

An obvious weakness of the article is that we are not in a position to establish a clear causal relationship between fathers’ contributions to core domestic work and child care, and fertility behavior, since no cross-national data exist that directly link fertility to time use diary data over this period of time. For the same reasons, we are not able to discern whether the effects we identify are related to the timing, or to the eventual number, of children. Nevertheless our findings are suggestive of a link between changing fertility, educational level, gender attitudes, and fathers’ contributions to domestic work and child care, and contribute to a growing body of research documenting the importance of changing gender relations in explaining recent changes in fertility.

Footnotes

Appendix

Number of Diary Days by Country and Period for Multivariate Analysis: Married Men Aged 20 to 49 Years With at Least One Child Younger Than 5 Years in the Household (N = 37,500)

	1970-1975	1976-1984	1985-1989	1990-1994	1995-1999	2000-2004	2005-2011
Canada	224	198	638	525	484
France	524				781		1,468
United Kingdom	1,193	607	401			829
United States	554		126			2,070	5,318
Denmark			170			386
Netherlands	861	1,305	1,758	1,563	1,668	559	713
Norway		541		474		486
Finland		806	846		440
Sweden				676
Italy			822			901
Germany				1,941		1,292
Slovenia						489
Spain						1,901	962

Note. A total of 442 low-quality diaries were excluded from analysis; 102 cases listwise deleted due to missing information on employment status or educational attainment.

Source: Multinational Time Use Study.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The writing of the contribution was supported by the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council, Large Grant No. RES-060-25-0037.

Notes

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Fathers’ Changing Contributions to Child Care and Domestic Work in Very Low–Fertility Countries

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Background

Gender Equality, Low Fertility, and the Second Demographic Transition

Gender Attitudes Among Men Aged 20 to 49 in Low-Fertility Countries

Fathers’ Contributions to Child Care and Domestic Work by Educational Level

Data

Sample and Variables

Analyses

Conclusions

Footnotes

Appendix

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

Notes

References