Do Children Enhance Subjective Wellbeing? A Factorial Survey Study of Couple-Level and Contextual Factors in Italy.

Valeria Ferraretto , University of Bologna
Agnese Vitali, University of Trento
Raffaele Guetto, University of Florence
Raffaele Grotti, University of Trento
Daniele Vignoli, University of Florence

Fertility desires are often difficult to reconcile with the pursuit of other life goals that matter for subjective wellbeing (SWB). This is especially true in low fertility contexts, such as Italy, where the direct and indirect costs of children are high due to precarious working conditions and a familistic welfare system. To understand how children are perceived to affect wellbeing, we implement a Factorial Survey Experiment on a sample of 6,000 Italian women and men aged 25-49. Respondents have been asked to judge the life satisfaction of fictitious partners in a different-sex couple without and with one or two children, under different socioeconomic and contextual circumstances that are expected to affect the perceived SWB. Results show that the perceived wellbeing associated with children varies by gender. While children bring a small wellbeing premium to men, they are perceived to bring a wellbeing penalty to women. The observed gap in wellbeing between the scenarios with and without children is reduced for women in the following cases: when she has access to flexible work, when unpaid work is equally divided, and when family policies are generous. Results suggest that the division of paid and unpaid work and its repercussion on wellbeing vary according to the fictitious partners’ gender. Additional analyses including respondents’ characteristics reveal that negative evaluations of mothers’ wellbeing are partly driven by women and by childless respondents.

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 Presented in Session 118. Flash Session Families, Partnerships and Health