The rise of intensive parenting: Trend and implications for work-family research

Termin

19.05.2026, 10:00 – 11:30 Uhr, in Präsenz, Online-Teilnahme möglich

Referent

Dr. Chen-Hao Hsu, ifb Bamberg & Universität Bamberg

Zusammenfassung

Parenting and childrearing, a central component of family lives for parents with young children, has become more demanding across industrialized countries including Germany. Over the past few decades, parents not only spend more time with their children, but also become more cautious in promoting children's cognitive and socio-emotional development via selective activities. The emergence of such “intensive parenting” behaviors could increase the difficulties for modern parents to combine work with family demands. Meanwhile, couples’ gender division of parenting may have also changed in Germany, which partly reflects the shifting employment patterns for mothers and fathers over the past three decades. Drawing on the background, this colloquium will present two papers to discuss the complex relationship between people’s (paid)working and parenting behaviors in Germany.

In the first study, we examine whether German parents’ gender division of parenting has become more equalized over time and how structural changes in mothers’ and fathers’ employment patterns contribute to such gender conversion. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we apply growth curve analysis to estimate mothers’ and fathers’ parenting time and their within-couple gender division of parenting during the first six years of parenthood in Germany from 1991 to 2020. Results show that while the gross parenting time has significantly increased for both genders over the past 30 years, fathers’ share of parenting time has only increased by 3.7 percentage point, indicating a rather slow gender convergence. From a life course perspective, fathers do share more time as their children grow older. Moreover, our decomposition analysis shows that the structural changes in German mothers’ and fathers’ employment patterns over the past 30 years has been a crucial component behind the gender convergence in parenting time. A key finding is that while the structural increase in mothers’ higher employment rates after childbirth has significantly increase fathers’ share in parenting time (by +2.4%), such a positive effect has been largely offset by the negative effect resulted from the significant increase in mothers’ part-time employment (by -2.0%).

In the second study, we further dig into the micro-level linkage between parenting behaviors and post-childbirth career patterns for German mothers. Different from previous studies, we introduce an innovative method to measure mothers’ parenting involvement in both quantity and quality dimensions. These parenting indicators are used to predict the holistic employment/leaves patterns for German mothers during their early motherhood. Drawing on the German National Educational Panel Study – Newborn Cohort (NEPS-SC1), this study firstly used sequence analysis to identify four postnatal employment/leaves sequence clusters for 2,684 German women (across children’s ages of 0–36 months): full-time employment after leaves (16.5%), part-time employment after leaves (27.8%), inactive after leaves (27.1%), and extended leaves for more than two years (28.7%). Next, we performed multinomial logistic regressions to investigate how mothers’ postnatal employment/leaves sequences were associated with the latent variables measuring the quantity and quality of parenting. Results showed that higher parenting quantity could increase the probability of being inactive or taking extended parental leaves, while decrease the probability of part-time employment for German mothers. On the other hand, mothers’ higher parenting quality may decrease the probability of being inactive, but increase the probability of part-time employment. These results indicate that part-time employment could be a strategic arrangement for some German women to balance the trade-off between parenting quantity and quality while remaining active in the labor market during their early motherhood.

Vortragssprache

Englisch