The Impact of Paternity Leave on Fathers’ Future Earnings

Using Norwegian registry data, we investigate the effect of paternity leave on fathers’ long-term earnings. If the paternity leave increased long-term father involvement, then we should expect a reduction in fathers’ long-term earnings as they shift time and effort from market to home production. For identification, we use the Norwegian introduction of a paternity-leave quota in 1993, reserving four weeks of the total of 42 weeks of paid parental leave exclusively for the father. The introduction of the paternity-leave quota led to a sharp increase in rates of leave-taking for fathers. We estimate a difference-in-differences model that exploits differences in fathers’ exposure to the paternity-leave quota by the child’s age and year of observation. Our analysis suggests that four weeks of paternity leave during the child’s first year decreases fathers’ future earnings, an effect that persists through our last point of observation, when the child is 5 years old. A battery of robustness tests supports our results.     

Changing the Gender Balance in Caring: Fatherhood and the Division of Parental Leave in Norway

In this article, we study fathers’ use of parental leave in Norway, using register data from 1993 to 1997. In 1993, a special father’s quota (1 month) was introduced in the parental leave program. The father’s quota is a success in the sense that 85% of fathers entitled to the leave use it, but few take more than their quota (1 month). One policy intention was to make a real change in the gender balance in care. The analyses show that gender balance in breadwinning has a strong effect on fathers’ use of parental leave: controlling for parents’ educational level, labor market attachment and father’s income, we find that the more mothers contribute to the family economy and the more equalized their earnings are, the more parental leave fathers take.     

Child gender and father involvement in fragile families

In this article, we use data from the first two waves of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the effects of child gender on father involvement and to determine if gender effects differ by parents' marital status. We examine several indicators of father involvement, including whether the father acknowledges "ownership" of the child, whether the parents live together when the child is one year old, and whether the father provides financial support when the child is one year old. We find some evidence that child gender is associated with unmarried father involvement around the time of the child's birth: sons born to unmarried parents are more likely than daughters to receive the father's surname, especially if the mother has no other children. However, one year after birth, we find very little evidence that child gender is related to parents' living arrangements or the amount of time or money fathers invest in their children. In contrast, and consistent with previous research, fathers who are married when their child is born are more likely to live with a son than with a daughter one year after birth. This pattern supports an interpretation of child gender effects based on parental beliefs about the importance of fathers for the long-term development of sons.     

The Effect of a First Born Child on Work and Childcare Time Allocation: Pre-post Analysis of Australian Couples

This paper uses Australian data from a national representative sample of Australian couples having their first child. Using data from before and after the birth of the child on a range of variables, including economic resources, gender attitudes, workplace flexibility, and availability of non-parental childcare, we first model the factors are associated with the decision to remain in work or not after the birth of the first child. The main finding here is that childbirth has a major impact on mothers’ paid work-time, whereas for fathers it has very little impact. Factors that are related to a mother’s decision to remain in work or not include the absolute (but not relative) pay of each parent, the father’s workplace flexibility, and paid parental leave available to the mother. We then model the factors that govern, for those mothers remaining in paid work, how much paid work they undertake. We find that changing employers is related to mothers’ work hours, as are absolute post-birth salaries, as is the relative pay of each partner. As with the decision to work or not, the availability of paid parental leave to the mother is significantly related to the amount of work-time for those mothers that do continue to work. Similarly, the use of external childcare is positively associated with maternal work hours. Finally, we model the factors that determine childcare time allocation and find that for neither parent do pre-birth economic resources significantly affect childcare time, once a decision about basic work patterns has been made. Gender role attitudes affect childcare time decisions, unlike work time decisions.     

Fathers’ Use of Childbirth Leave in Spain. The Effects of the 13-Day Paternity Leave

This article investigates, for the case of Spain, to what extent the introduction in March 2007 of a non-transferable 13-day paternity leave has encouraged men to make greater use of childbirth leave. Data were drawn from the Spanish Economically Active Population Survey, covering the period 2005–2009. We use a natural experiment approach, comparing the behavior of wage earners fathers with children of less than 1 year of age before and after the reform and using mothers as control group. After estimating a difference-in-differences logistic regression model we obtain statistical evidence that there is a higher percentage of males on leave in the reference week in the post-reform period (after 2007). The article also analyzes some of the personal and socio-economic determinants of the fathers’ use of childbirth leave. Fathers are more likely to be on leave if they have stability in employment, if there are facilities for reconciling work and family life (working in the public sector) and if the partner is employed. The father’s age has an interesting U-shaped influence.     

Beyond Absenteeism: Father Incarceration and Child Development

High rates of incarceration among American men, coupled with high rates of fatherhood among men in prison, have motivated recent research on the effects of parental imprisonment on children’s development. We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the relationship between paternal incarceration and developmental outcomes for approximately 3,000 urban children. We estimate cross-sectional and longitudinal regression models that control not only for fathers’ basic demographic characteristics and a rich set of potential confounders, but also for several measures of pre-incarceration child development and family fixed effects. We find significant increases in aggressive behaviors and some evidence of increased attention problems among children whose fathers are incarcerated. The estimated effects of paternal incarceration are stronger than those of other forms of father absence, suggesting that children with incarcerated fathers may require specialized support from caretakers, teachers, and social service providers. The estimated effects are stronger for children who lived with their fathers prior to incarceration but are also significant for children of nonresident fathers, suggesting that incarceration places children at risk through family hardships including and beyond parent-child separation.     

Father Absence and Accelerated Reproductive Development in Non-Hispanic White Women in the United States

Girls who experience father absence in childhood also experience accelerated reproductive development in comparison with peers with present fathers. One hypothesis advanced to explain this empirical pattern is genetic confounding, wherein gene-environment correlation (rGE) causes a spurious relationship between father absence and reproductive timing. We test this hypothesis by constructing polygenic scores for age at menarche and first birth using recently available genome-wide association study results and molecular genetic data on a sample of non-Hispanic white females from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. We find that young women’s accelerated menarche polygenic scores are unrelated to their exposure to father absence. In contrast, polygenic scores for earlier age at first birth tend to be higher in young women raised in homes with absent fathers. Nevertheless, father absence and the polygenic scores independently and additively predict reproductive timing. We find no evidence in support of the rGE hypothesis for accelerated menarche and only limited evidence in support of the rGE hypothesis for earlier age at first birth.     

Patterns of nonresident father contact

We used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort (NLSY79) from 1979 to 2002 and the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (CNLSY) from 1986 to 2002 to describe the number, shape, and population frequencies of U.S. nonresident father contact trajectories over a 14-year period using growth mixture models. The resulting four-category classification indicated that nonresident father involvement is not adequately characterized by a single population with a monotonic pattern of declining contact over time. Contrary to expectations, about two-thirds of fathers were consistently either highly involved or rarely involved in their children’s lives. Only one group, constituting approximately 23% of fathers, exhibited a clear pattern of declining contact. In addition, a small group of fathers (8%) displayed a pattern of increasing contact. A variety ofvariables differentiated between these groups, including the child’s age at father-child separation, whether the child was born within marriage, the mother’s education, the mother’s age at birth, whether the father pays child support regularly, and the geographical distance between fathers and children.     

Fathers’ Imprisonment and Mothers’ Multiple-Partner Fertility

We consider the intersection between two striking U.S. trends: dramatic increases in the imprisonment of fathers and increases in the proportion of mothers who have children with more than one partner (multiple-partner fertility, or MPF). Using matched longitudinal administrative data that provide unusually comprehensive and accurate information about the occurrence and timing of imprisonment, fertility, and MPF for the population of the state of Wisconsin, we consider the relationship between paternal imprisonment and MPF among unwed mothers. Employing discrete-time event history analysis with multinomial logistic regression, we model the occurrence and timing of the mother’s second birth, distinguishing between a birth with the same father and a birth with a different father, and distinguishing between current imprisonment and a history of imprisonment. We find that current imprisonment is associated with an increased likelihood of MPF and a decreased likelihood of fertility with the same father (compared with no additional birth) and that a history of imprisonment is associated with increased MPF in some models but not in our preferred model. To control for unobserved heterogeneity among mothers and assess the evidence of a causal effect of fathers’ imprisonment, we also employ the case-time-control method, a fixed-effects method for the analysis of nonrepeated events. Results suggest that fathers’ current imprisonment may increase mothers’ MPF. Policy implications are discussed.     

Parenting from a distance: The effects of paternal characteristics on contact between nonresidential fathers and their children

Changes in marital and fertility behavior have influenced the role of father for many men. We use data from the first two waves of the National Survey of Families and Households to examine various sociodemographic, situational, and attitudinal characteristics that might influence the degree of contact between nonresidential fathers and their minor children. We tap two different dimensions of distance parenting and find that although several variables influence both visiting and talking on the telephone or writing letters, some factors (the presence of multiple children in a household) predict visiting only, while others (child’s age and gender) predict only verbal/written contact. Similarly, some of the life-course decisions made by fathers appear to crowd out their involvement with nonresidential children, whereas other decisions reinforce their parenting behavior.     

Work, income, the economy, and married fathers as child-care providers

Previous research on fathers as child-care providers indicates a need to study the father’s role in child care in the context of different economic cycles. Using data from the 1988, 1991, and 1993 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we examine whether father’ availability and the couple’s economic resources are differentially related to child care by fathers over time. We focus on the differences between 1991—a recession year—and 1988 and 1993—two nonrecession years. Increased availability of fathers is significantly related to higher levels of fathers’ participation in child care in all three years. Relative economic resources between husbands and wives help explain care by fathers only during the recession year, whereas family income is important only in the nonrecession years. These results suggest that in the future, researchers should acknowledge fluctuations in the economy when studying husbands’ participation in traditional female tasks, as macroeconomic shifts appear to impact the likelihood of married fathers caring for their preschoolers during mothers’ working hours.     

Parenting in On/Off Relationships: The Link Between Relationship Churning and Father Involvement

Family systems theory points to the interconnected nature of dyadic relationships within the family unit, arguing for attention to how the parental relationship shapes their ties to and interactions with their children. Grounded in family systems theory, we consider how relationship churning—defined as being in an on-again/off-again relationship with the same partner—is associated with father involvement. We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine how father involvement among relationship churners compares with father involvement among those in three other relationship types (measured during the first five years of the focal child’s life): stably together relationships, stably broken-up relationships, and repartnered relationships. First, we find that churning fathers remain more involved with their 9-year-old children than do parents who stably break up or repartner, but they are less involved than those who are stably together. Second, lower relationship quality among churners—and, to a lesser extent, repartnering and childbearing with a new partner—explains some of the differences in father involvement between churners and the stably together. Third, these differences are most apparent among parents not living together when father involvement is measured. Taken together, the focus on relationship churning extends prior research on the association between relationship transitions and father involvement by separating relationship instability from partner change.     

Maternity leave and the employment of new mothers in the United States

We use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine the relationships between maternity leave coverage and U.S. womens post-birth leave taking and employment decisions from 1988 to 1996. We find that women who were employed before birth are working much more quickly post-birth than women who were not. We also find that, among mothers who were employed pre-birth, those in jobs that provided leave coverage are more likely to take a leave of up to 12 weeks, but return more quickly after 12 weeks. Our results suggest that maternity leave coverage is related to leave taking, as well as the length of time that a new mother stays home after a birth.All correspondence to: Jane Waldfogel. Funding for this project was provided by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the William T. Grant Foundation. We are grateful to the editor and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. Responsible editor: Daniel S. Hamermesh.     

Time Cost of Children as Parents' Foregone Leisure

From the 1998–99 French Insee time use survey, the time cost of children is estimated in terms of hours of foregone leisure. The focus on couples with two spouses working full time implies no need to be concerned about substitution between home production and labor supply. The model accounts for selection into full-time employment, endogenous wages, and controls for outside help with home production and child care. The foregone leisure cost per child under the age of 3 is 1.6 hours for each parent. It is about half that size for children aged 3 to 14. Children over age 14 involve no leisure cost to parents.     

Altruism Within the Family: A Comparison of Father and Mother Using Life Happiness and Life Satisfaction

Studies on intra-household allocation of resources show that exogenous increase in mothers’ income has larger effect on children’s outcomes than the same increase in fathers’ income, suggesting gender differences may exist in parents’ altruism towards their children. Using self-reported life happiness and life satisfaction, we investigate the differences by gender in mutual altruism between father and child as well as mother and child dyads in Singapore. We found that mutual altruism exists between mother and child, but not between father and child. These findings are robust to the measure of self-reported well-being. Further, we find that gender difference in altruism of fathers and mothers is not driven by the difference in the extent of future old age support desired by fathers and mothers from their children.     

Parental leave: The impact of recent legislation on parents’ leave taking

We use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to examine the impact of leave entitlements on unpaid leave usage by men and women after the birth of a child from 1991 to 1999. The results indicate that legislation providing the right to unpaid leave has not affected men's leave usage. The results for women are mixed: in some specifications, leave entitlements are associated with increased leave taking or longer leaves, but the results depend on how we define leave coverage. Our results point to the limited impact of unpaid leave policies and the potential importance of paid-leave policies.     

Individual and Institutional Constraints: An Analysis of Parental Leave Use and Duration in Spain

This paper analyzes the extent to which individual characteristics, the workplace situation, and regional policies influence the use and duration of parental leave in Spain. The research is based on a sample of 125,165 individuals, and 6,959 parental leaves covered in the “Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales” (MCVL-2006). The MCVL consists of administrative register data, which include information from three different sources: The social security system, municipal and income tax Registers. We adopt a simultaneous equations approach to analyze the determinants of the use (logistic regression) and duration (event history analysis) of parental leave, which allows us to control for endogeneity and censored observations. Our results suggest that the Spanish parental leave scheme increases gender and social inequalities, insofar as it reinforces gender role specialization, and only encourages the reconciliation of work and family life among workers with a good position in the labor market (educated employees with a high and stable work status).     

Paternal involvement with adolescents in intact families: The influence of fathers over the life course

We measure the quality and quantity of fathers’ involvement with adolescent children in intact families over time using longitudinal data from The National Survey of Children. We examine differentials in fathers’ involvement by children’s and family characteristics and model the long-term effects of fathers’ involvement on children’s outcomes in the transition to adulthood. Fathers are more involved with sons than with daughters and they disengage from adolescents with increasing marital conflict. We find beneficial effects for children of father’s involvement in three domains: educational and economic attainment, delinquent behavior, and psychological well-being. The course of affective relations throughout adolescence also has a beneficial effect on delinquent behavior and psychological well-being.     

Time or Money: The Relationship Between Educational Attainment,Income Contribution,and Time with Children Among Korean Fathers

Korean parents’ enthusiasm for and financial investment in children’s education are well known. However, parental time with children, particularly fathers’ time, and how it differs by parental education and income are not fully explored. Using the 2009 Korean Time Use Survey data, this paper examines how much time Korean fathers spend with children, how it differs by their education and income contribution to household, and which aspect Korean fathers choose to prioritize: time or money. In order to investigate a cross-couple effect, this paper also considers mothers’ time with children and their level of education. The sample is limited to married couples with the youngest child aged between 0 and 12. The stepwise multivariate regression analysis indicates that fathers’ education consistently shows a positive relationship with childcare time. Although fathers’ income contribution to household income has a negative effect on childcare time, positive effects of fathers’ education remain. Both mother’s education and childcare time increase fathers’ time with children. Korean fathers seem to juggle dual demands for money and time contribution and highly educated fathers tend to prioritize time over money. Given that time has become an important resource, different time investment in children by parental socioeconomic status may exacerbate social inequality.     

When is a father really gone? Paternal—Child contact in father-absent homes

This research uses unique longitudinal data to examine the dynamics of the father's presence or absence during a child's first few years of life and consider the extent to which overt father-presence/absence statistics mask a continuing contact with the child's father or other potential father figures. I document the extent to which (1) substantial proportions of children born to younger mothers never have had a biological father residing in the home, (2) "net" levels of fathers' absence at various postbirth points mask significant "gross" flows of fathers in and out of the household, and (3) large proportions of children in homes lacking the biological father have potentially significant contact with absent fathers or new father figures.