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Description
The shift to more time-intensive and child-centered parenting in the United States is widely assumed to be linked to healthy child development, but its implications for adult well-being are less clear. Using American Time Use Data, Dr. Meier explores modern American parenting and how it is experienced differently for mothers and fathers and across the arch of child development. Then, Dr. Meier zooms in to examine mothering in the context of several 'new normals' for many American mothers: single parenthood and market work.
Findings indicate that parents fare surprisingly well in this new era of intensive parenting, but mothers experience more stress and fatigue and less happiness than fathers, in part because of the different (and less fun) types of activities mothers do with children. Second, despite the hands-on and intensive attention required by infants, parents report higher well-being with the youngest children relative to school aged and especially adolescent children. Here too, mothers shoulder more of the stress of parenting adolescents. Finally, single mothers report the lowest levels of well-being in parenting, but employment seems to buoy their well-being. However, even in the case of reduced well-being, non-employed single mothers are better off when parenting than when engaged in other activities.
Speaker Bios
Ann Meier is Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota and Director of Graduate Training at the Minnesota Population Center. Her research examines inequalities in and between contemporary families, often refuting conventional wisdom about families. Her work on parent-child conflict complicates long-held notions about the benefits of two-parent families. Her research on family dinners deflates popular notions about their unique and universal status as a context of family unity. Her studies on parental well-being suggest that even in the context of ever-increasing parenting expectations, parents derive great emotional benefit from most parenting activities, with advantages for fathers and partnered mothers. In recent work funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Dr. Meier explores trends in couples’ allocation of market work after the birth of a child since 1970 and their role in contributing to aggregate inequality in the U.S. With a group of interdisciplinary collaborators and funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, she works to make the world’s population data accessible, usable and free through the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series which has integrated and harmonized census and survey data from 94 countries, 365 censuses, and over 1 billion person records to date. Dr. Meier earned her Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Please RSVP to lynn.barlow@vuw.ac.nz
For more information contact: Lynn Barlow
lynn.barlow@vuw.ac.nz 04 463 6966