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Abstract
Using data from the first wave of the Millennium Cohort Study, covering a large birth cohort of children in the UK at age 8 to 12 months, this paper examines the effects of leave-taking and work hours on fathers’ involvement in four specific types of activities: being the main caregiver; changing diapers; feeding the baby; and getting up during the night. We also investigate the effects of policies on fathers’ leave-taking and work hours. We find that taking leave and working shorter hours are related to fathers being more involved with the baby, and that policies affect both these aspects of fathers’ employment behaviour. Thus, we conclude that policies that provide parental leave or shorter work hours could increase fathers’ involvement with their young children.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a grant from NICHD. We would like to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments.
Notes
1. Maternity leave policy has been amended several times. At the time the children in this sample were born, in 2001 and 2002, women who met the qualifying conditions had the right to take up to 29 weeks of leave, including 18 weeks of paid leave (Burgess, Gregg, Propper & Washbrook, Citation2002; DTI, Citation2003). Subsequently (as of April 2003), the length of paid maternity leave was extended from 18 weeks to 26 weeks, and the unpaid leave was extended from 11 weeks to 26 weeks, thereby providing a total of 52 weeks of leave. At the same time, paid paternity leave was introduced for the first time. This leave is for a maximum of two weeks, paid at a flat rate. Future extensions (already announced) will extend the period of paid maternity leave to nine months and ultimately 12 months. Paid paternity leave will likely be extended as well (Moss & O'Brien, Citation2006).
2. Parents of disabled children are entitled to 18 weeks of leave, which can be taken any time until the child's 18th birthday (DTI, Citation2003).
3. As noted above, a statutory entitlement to paid paternity leave was introduced in 2003; a 2005 study found that fathers’ leave-taking had increased (Smeaton & Marsh, Citation2006).
4. See also Woodland, Simmonds, Thornby, Fitzgerald & McGee, Citation2003.
5. See Holt & Grainger, Citation2005; Palmer, Citation2004; Smeaton & Marsh, Citation2006, for evidence on increases in parents requesting and working flexible hours schedules subsequent to the policy change.
6. Volling and Belsky (Citation1991) analyzed a sample of infants at two separate points in time: 3 months and 9 months. Deutsch et al. (Citation1993) analyzed a sample of children whose ages ranged from 3 months and 9 months.
7. The sample includes 246 twins and 10 triplets.
8. The sample population includes children living in non-household situations (women's refugee centers, hostels, hospitals and prisons). It also includes children who were not born in the UK but were a resident by the age of 9 months, while excluding children who died before the age of 9 months, UK-born children who emigrated before 9 months, and children not resident in the UK by the age of 9 months (Plewis, Citation2003).
9. Further details on sampling can be found in the Technical report on sampling (Plewis, Citation2003).
10. We exclude fathers who were not working during the pregnancy because leave-taking is not relevant for them; we exclude those not working at the time of the survey because working hours are not available for them; and we exclude the self-employed because the employer policy variables are not relevant. This results in a sample of 9,771. We then drop those who did not report working hours, or reported working hours exceeding 80 hours per week, and those who did not report data on leave-taking. This yields our final sample of 9,592.
11. The sample population of children for this question (N = 9,047) excluded the 445 families who responded that the baby does not wake up at night.
12. We experimented with other ways of coding father involvement and the pattern of results (not shown, but available on request) did not change. We prefer this coding because it defines involvement in a consistent way across activities, distinguishing the more involved fathers (roughly half) from the less involved.
13. Assisted deliveries include deliveries assisted with forceps, vacuum extraction, breach, planned Caesarian, emergency Caesarian or other types of assisted delivery.
14. Never married and previously married do not include cohabiting couples, who are combined with married.
15. Educational qualifications refer to: (i) higher degree, (ii) first degree, (iii) diplomas in higher education, (iv) A/AS/S levels, (v) O level/ GSCS grades A–C, (vi) GCSE grades D–G, (vii) other academic qualifications (including overseas qualifications), and (viii) none of these qualifications.
16. Many of the mother's characteristics (e.g. age and race) are highly correlated with the father's characteristics. Because fathers are the main focus of this study, we also estimated all our models omitting the mother's characteristics as a robustness check. The results from the alternative models (not shown, but available on request) were very similar to those reported here.
17. In British pounds, (i) 0–10,399, (ii) 10,400–20,799, (iii) 20,800–31,199, (iv) 31,200–51,999, and (v) 52,000 and over.
18. The firm size categories are: (i) less than 25, (ii) 25–49, (iii) 50–499, and (iv) 500 or more employees.
19. Less than 1% of cases were missing data, except for income, where 6% of cases were missing data.