How Family Policy Context Shapes Mental Wellbeing of Mothers and Fathers

Most studies show that parents have a lower level of wellbeing than non-parents. An interesting question is if this is true in different contexts, such for instance different family policy contexts. Although there are common family policy goals for all member states of the European Union there are still major differences between states regarding the implementation and contents of various family policy measures. The aim of the article is to study the importance of family policy context and gender for the negative influence of having children on mental wellbeing. Data is derived from an extensive cross-country data set named European Social Survey Program (ESS). Family policy context is measured through the different family policies contexts that each state represents, resulting in a Nordic cluster (representing an extensive family policy context) and two clusters, the conservative and liberal, representing less extensive family policy contexts. Results in general show that the level of mental wellbeing is lower among people with children living at home than among people with no children at home. However, separate analyses of the family policy contexts indicate that this difference between those with and without children only exists in the conservative and liberal family policy contexts. Further, separate analyses of women and men in different family policy contexts show that the negative association between the occurrence of children and mental wellbeing exist only among women in conservative and liberal contexts. This indicates that the family policy context is of importance for mother’s mental wellbeing but not for father’s.