How does parenthood affect life satisfaction in Russia?
Introduction
Little is known about the relationship between parenthood and subjective well-being in the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe. This is unfortunate, because such analyses proved useful in explaining fertility patterns (Myrskylä & Margolis, 2014). Subjective well-being of parents may drive their fertility behavior: satisfactory transition to parenthood may encourage parents to have another child, and a difficult one may discourage it. Similarly, observing experiences of other parents may provide clues about one's preferred number of children and the preferred timing of own fertility.
Up to date, the evidence was restricted to a small group of Western countries, where long panel data were available. Previous studies analyzed the trajectories of parental life satisfaction in Germany (Baetschmann et al., 2012, Clark et al., 2008, Myrskylä and Margolis, 2014, Pollmann-Schult, 2014), United Kingdom (Clark and Georgellis, 2013, Myrskylä and Margolis, 2014), Switzerland (Anusic et al., 2014, Rizzi and Mikucka, 2015), and Australia (Frijters, Johnston, & Shields, 2011). The picture drawn by these studies is less relevant to situation in Eastern European countries, whose fertility patterns generally differ from the western one. This paper extends the evidence by estimating the effect of parenthood on subjective well-being in Russia.
Documenting the Russian pattern broadens and solidifies the understanding of the relationship between parenthood and happiness because Russian Federation differs from the (previously analyzed) Western countries in various aspects: it has a lower average standard of living, but undergoes a more dynamic economic development; it stands out with overall traditional gender roles, although the period of state socialism facilitated women's place in the labor market (Motiejunaite & Kravchenko, 2008). Russia is also described as a case of a partial second demographic transition (Gerber and Berman, 2010, Zakharov, 2008), which suggests that the determinants and consequences of fertility in Russia are different than in Western countries.
The reliance on a limited empirical evidence is a weakness of the literature on parenthood and life satisfaction, because researchers cannot know how general are the observed regularities and the theories explaining them. Do they refer to a universal part of human experience, or do they apply solely to the wealthy and stable countries of the Western world? By expanding the evidence to the Russian case, this analysis discusses how general are the current theoretical approaches, including as the set-point theory of happiness (Clark et al., 2008, Clark and Georgellis, 2013), the demands and rewards approach (Nomaguchi & Milkie, 2003), and the approach emphasizing selection to parenthood (Kravdal, 2014).
Section snippets
Parenthood and subjective well-being
Previous studies addressed the relationship between parenthood and subjective well-being using a range of data and methods, leading to sometimes contradictory conclusions. For example, several cross sectional studies demonstrated that parents had lower subjective well-being than childless people (Hansen, 2012, Margolis and Myrskylä, 2011, Stanca, 2012, Vanassche et al., 2013), while others showed a positive (Aassve, Goisis, & Sironi, 2012) or a null correlation (for children under the age of
Data
This analysis uses the data of the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey of Higher School of Economics (RLMS-HSE, 2015), which is a yearly household-based panel survey designed to measure the effects of Russian reforms on households and individuals. It has been used previously for analyzing some aspects of fertility in Russia (Kohler and Kohler, 2002, Perelli-Harris, 2006), but not to examine the dynamics of life satisfaction before and after a childbirth.
RLMS-HSE uses a multi-stage probability
Results
The trajectories of mothers’ and fathers’ life satisfaction are presented in Fig. 2 (for the full table of results see Table B.5 in the Online Appendix B). The coefficients of control variables (Table B.5, Online Appendix B) are overall consistent with the literature. The relationship between age and life satisfaction is U-shaped; never married, divorced, and widowed people are less satisfied with their lives than married people, the economically inactive are less satisfied than the employed,
Discussion
This analysis extends the empirical evidence on life satisfaction consequences of parenthood by examining trajectories of life satisfaction experienced by parents in Russia. Fertility pattern in Russia did not fully converge to the one typical for the second demographic transition (Lesthaeghe, 2010, Zakharov, 2008). Thus, the evidence I provide is valuable for verifying whether the previously observed regularities and their theoretical explanations should be treated as general, or rather as
Acknowledgements
The author thanks professor Jacques Hagenaars, Francesco Sarracino, Bogdan Voicu, and the colleagues from the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (Higher School of Economics, Sankt Petersburg) for their advice on interpretation of the results. I also thank the participants of Chaire Quetelet conference (Université catholique de Louvain, November 2014) and the participants of the “Personality traits and subjective well-being in the life course” workshop (Collegio Carlo Alberto, Torino,
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