Who cares when care closes? Care-arrangements and parental working conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany

ABSTRACT

This study examines the short-term consequences for care-arrangements among working parents, who were affected by the closure of schools and institutional childcare as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. By applying multinomial logistic regression models to novel data from two panel surveys of the National Educational Panel Study and its supplementary COVID-19 web survey, the study finds that mothers continue to play a key role in the care-arrangements during the first months of the pandemic. Moreover, the results illustrate the importance of working conditions, especially the possibility of remote work for the altered care-arrangements. Overall, the findings point towards systematic gender differences in the relationship between parental working conditions and the care-arrangements.

KEYWORDS:

• Childcare
• gender division of family work
• school closure
• corona lockdown
• NEPS-C

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Zoch et al. 2020 for a more detailed overview of international studies on pandemic-related altered care-arrangements.

2 From 2008 to 2013, NEPS data was collected as part of the Framework Program for the Promotion of Empirical Educational Research, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). As of 2014, NEPS is carried out by the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) at the University of Bamberg, Germany, in cooperation with a nationwide network. Among others, the data set contains detailed longitudinal information on individuals’ educational careers and other individual and household characteristics.

3 The Corona-CAWI was conducted from 15 May to 22 June 2020. Consortium data from the National Educational Panel Study and Corona-CAWI data are not yet available as scientific use files.

4 The initial sample was drawn from pupils attending the first grade of primary school in 2012.

5 Due to a very small number of fathers with exclusive paternal care, categories 2 and 3 were combined for the multivariate analyses.

6 All three subsamples result from long-running panel surveys that are subject to different selection processes. All descriptive findings are therefore presented by using weights. These weights adjust both for the sampling design of the two starting cohorts as well as non-response failure processes between the initial samples of the first wave and the realised participation in the supplementary waves. In addition, the used weights are post-stratified, i.e. the observed distributions are adjusted to the distributions observed in official statistics. This calibration was implemented separately for both starting cohorts based on different characteristics such as year of birth, gender, country of origin (Germany vs other), and federal state (for more details see Würbach et al. 2020). The unweighted distribution of all variables and original care indicators are included in Table A7 in the Online Appendix.

7 Confidence intervals crossing the vertical zero line indicate statistically insignificant effects. For all estimated models, the average marginal effects of all control variables, standard errors, and the number of observations are reported in the full and stepwise model in the Online Appendix.

8 The results of the further controls are in line with theoretical considerations: The number of under-14-year-olds was positively associated with parental care, with a particularly pronounced link with exclusive maternal care. In addition, under-14-year-olds were less likely to remain unsupervised. Moreover, larger families were positively linked to mixed care-arrangements.

9 Given the younger age of the child, the number of unsupervised children was too small to consider a separate category.