Parental happiness and social policy in Asia

ABSTRACT

People in East and South Asia widely believe that having children brings fulfilment to an individual’s life. However, over the past fifty years, modernisation in Asia has been accompanied by a remarkable drop in birth rates to a level even lower than most western countries. Prior research on western nations has shown that the time demands and financial stresses of parenthood, as well as current inflexible employment practices, contribute to the high cost of parenthood and discount the emotional rewards of having children. This study investigates the happiness of parents and childless individuals in East and South Asia, and whether social policies can improve parental happiness. We use individual-level data in 10 Asian countries from the World Values and the Asian Barometer Surveys, and find no country where parents report significantly greater happiness than non-parents after controlling for relevant sociodemographic differences. Multilevel models show that paid annual leave, paid maternity and parental leave, and flexible working schedules as well as a comprehensive policy index help alleviate the disparity in happiness between parents and non-parents across countries, in particular work flexibility, while family-friendly policies have no noticeable negative effects on non-parents’ wellbeing.

KEYWORDS:

• Parenthood
• Asian families
• work-family policy
• happiness

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grant, P2CHD042849, awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 While we endeavoured to get child care cost information on each Asian country, no publicly available data could be found on the cost of care for preschoolers across each country, reflecting the lack of institutional child care policy or formal child care programmes in most of these countries compared to Western European countries.

2 We choose maternity leave instead of parental leave because only three countries have official parental leave with low or zero reimbursement, which could result in low usage and little discrimination across countries.

3 The data is downloaded from World Economic Outlook Database, IMF. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2016/02/weodata/index.aspx

4 The data is downloaded from ILOSTAT, ILO. https://www.ilo.org/ilostat/faces/ilostat-home/home?_adf.ctrl-state=xxshsb955_4&_afrLoop=2559345162528646&_afrWindowMode=0&_afrWindowId=null#!%40%40%3F_afrWindowId%3Dnull%26_afrLoop%3D2559345162528646%26_afrWindowMode%3D0%26_adf.ctrl-state%3D12owqmsq3w_4

5 We also tested models by adding the GINI coefficient, which refers to levels of inequality indicate how much national prosperity is shared across households and could thus lower the parental happiness gap. The results stay substantially the same.

6 The data is downloaded from World Bank. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN

7 We also tested models including women’s labour force participation rate (WLFP), which indicate the degree of breakdown in patriarchal family norms as well as lower availability of women for family care, both of which fuel demand for work-family policies. Models produce no significant change in effects of policies on parental happiness, but negative effects of some policies on population happiness. This may be due to collinearity between measures of TFR and WLFP. After removing TFR, the results with WLFP are the same as those controlling for only GDP, TFR, the proportion of extended family and weekly working hours.

8 As table 1 shows, each country has two observations after combining the WVS and ABS. However, in the WVS South Korea did not provide information on respondent’s occupation so we use only one observation for South Korea from the ABS in our analytical models.

9 To perform sensitivity checks on these rankings, we estimated the fixed-effects model separately by dataset (Columns 2 and 3 of table 4) to detect any instability or unreliability in the measurement of happiness. Results showed moderate instability in rankings across data sets, further justifying our decision to use multiple observations per country (Andersson et al., 2014).