Matthias Pollmann-Schult

Highlights: Parental separation raises children’s peer rejection but not friendship integration. Peer rejection increases after separation and remains high for up to four years. No moderating effects were found for the child’s age, the child’s gender, or parental education. Separation impairs peer relations primarily by heightening children’s socioemotional difficulties.

Objective: This study examines three key pathways in the association between the transition to parenthood and declining relationship satisfaction. Background: The decline in relationship satisfaction among new parents is well documented, yet research on the underlying mechanisms remains limited. This study investigated three commonly proposed pathways: gendered shifts in household labor and resulting perceptions of unfairness, increases in negative couple behaviors (relationship conflict), and decreases in positive couple interactions (emotional intimacy and appreciation). Method: The study used data on 4108 respondents of the German Family Panel (pairfam), a nationally representative survey conducted annually between 2008 and 2022. Fixed effects multiple mediation regression models were used to explore the mediating factors linking the transition to parenthood to declining relationship satisfaction. Results: Following the transition to parenthood, relationship satisfaction declined persistently among both men and women. These declines were largely attributed to increases in negative couple behaviors as well as decreases in positive couple interactions. Among women, but not men, these declines were also linked to increases in household labor. Conclusion: These findings highlight the pivotal role of both positive and negative couple interactions and behaviors in shaping relationship satisfaction following the transition to parenthood.

Objective: This study examines whether nonstandard work schedules (NSWS) improve or hinder work-life balance (WLB) for parents and non-parents in dual-earner households. Background: Previous research shows that NSWS can negatively affect workers' well-being. However, less is known about whether and to what extent these effects differ between parents and childless individuals. Method: Using data from the first wave of the German Family Demography Panel Study (FReDA), linear regression models are applied to assess whether the effect of NSWS on WLB is influenced by family circumstances. Results: Parenthood is generally associated with lower WLB. However, the negative association between NSWS and WLB is more pronounced among childless workers. Notably, mothers of young children (ages 0-5), as well as fathers of school-aged children (ages 6-12) working NSWS report higher WLB than their childless counterparts. Conclusion: Parents with NSWS in dual-earner households do not necessarily experience lower WLB than childless workers. In some cases, NSWS may even help parents better reconcile work and family responsibilities.

Despite growing evidence that parental work–family conflict (WFC) affects children’s emotional well-being, little is known about the multiple pathways underlying such effects. This study examines the association between parental WFC and children’s emotional well-being and the potential mediating role of parenting behaviors in this process. Using the German Family Panel data from wave 6 (2013/2014), wave 8 (2015/2016), wave 10 (2017/2018), and wave 12 (2019/20), we use random-effects and multiple mediation models to analyze how parental WFC influences parenting behaviors and children’s emotional well-being, and whether parenting behaviors mediate their association. Parental WFC is linked to more negative communication and conflict and less parental warmth, especially among mothers. Parental WFC is linked to children’s emotional well-being, with a more pronounced association for mothers’ WFC. Mediation analyses showed that parenting behaviors partially mediate this association. Our results underscore the importance of reducing WFC among working parents to promote children’s emotional well-being.

This study used panel data to examine the longitudinal effect of maternal and paternal depressiveness on children’s emotional difficulties in two-parent families in Germany. The main purpose was to examine whether the strength of this association differs depending on whether parents or children themselves assessed children’s emotional difficulties. Based on data from 1,586 children from the German Family Panel (pairfam), our findings show much stronger associations between parental depressiveness and children’s emotional difficulties when using parent-reported measures than when using child-reported measures, which indicates a negative mood bias in parent reports. The findings emphasise the importance of taking children’s self-reports into account when studying child wellbeing.

This study examines whether, and to what extent, widowed individuals experience increases in emotional and social loneliness. It specifically investigates whether strengthened parent-child relationships mitigate increases in loneliness following widowhood. Using survey data from the German Ageing Survey (DEAS) from 1996 to 2021, we examined changes in loneliness and the quality of the parent-child relationship during the transition to widowhood with fixed effects regression models. Mediation models tested whether improvements in the quality of the parent-child relationship mitigate the increase in loneliness following widowhood. The analysis revealed a persistent increase in emotional loneliness following widowhood for both men and women. Increases in social loneliness were less pronounced and only significant for men at later stages. Mothers, but not fathers, reported increased contact frequency and greater emotional closeness with their children after spousal loss. Mediation analyses, however, did not indicate that such an improved parent-child relationship mitigates increases in loneliness following widowhood. The enduring elevation in emotional loneliness after widowhood, combined with the delayed rise in social loneliness, underscores the lasting challenges faced by surviving spouses. The findings highlight the limited capacity of parent-child relationships to fill the emotional void left by a deceased partner.

Research on the relationship between parenthood and life satisfaction has revealed mixed results, with older parents reporting higher life satisfaction than older nonparents in some countries but not in others. This study investigates whether the link between parenthood and life satisfaction among individuals aged 60 years and older systematically varies across countries. Drawing on the theoretical premise that country-specific factors influence both the benefits of parenthood and the psychological costs of childlessness, the study examines the roles of pronatalist norms, filial elder-care norms, and the economic conditions of older individuals in shaping the life satisfaction gap between parents and nonparents. The study analyzes European Social Survey data on 114,513 individuals aged 60 years and older in 32 European countries using multilevel regression models. The results show that the life satisfaction gap between parents and nonparents is positively related to the strength of pronatalist norms and the level of economic vulnerability among older people. In contrast, elder-care norms are not uniformly linked to the magnitude of the life satisfaction gap. However, a particularly large life satisfaction gap was observed in countries with both high levels of economic vulnerability and strong elder-care norms. These findings suggest that the extent to which parenthood affects the life satisfaction of older individuals strongly depends on societal context.

The growing number of older childless individuals in Western societies has raised concerns about their subjective well-being. In this study, we scrutinize the subjective well-being of parents and childless individuals aged 60 years and older. We examine subjective well-being as a multi-dimensional construct encompassing life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect. Based on the value-of-children approach, we hypothesize that childless individuals experience lower subjective well-being than parents and that the disparity in well-being differs with age, gender, and the quality of the parent-child relationship. For our analysis, we use data from a nationally representative sample of adults aged 60 years and older (n = 10,682) drawn from the German Ageing Survey. Our findings from random effects regression models show that childless individuals report lower life satisfaction, less positive affect, and more negative affect than parents. These associations are larger for men than for women but do not vary significantly across age groups. Furthermore, our results suggest that the benefits of parenthood strongly depend on the quality of the parent-child relationship. Childless people report lower subjective well-being than parents with a close emotional bond with their children, but similar or even higher subjective well-being than parents with an emotionally distant parent-child relationship. In sum, our study indicates that childless people experience, on average, lower well-being across all three dimensions of subjective well-being in older age. However, under specific circumstances, childless individuals may fare better than parents.