Parenting, employment, and fertility: Couple dynamics and life course approach

Parenting and childrearing, a central component of family lives for parents with young children, has become more demanding in industrialized countries including Germany. Over the past few decades, parents not only spend more time with their children, but also becom more cautious in promoting children's cognitive and socio-emotional development via selective activities. The emergence of such “intensive parenting” behaviors, by which parents “spend a tremendous amount of time, energy and money in raising their children” (Hays, 1996), may increase modern parents' challenges to comibine work with family demands, which in turn, could adversely influence longer-term employment and fertility outcomes.

In this project, we aim to compliment previous work on the impacts of parenting behaviors or attitudes on employment and fertility for mothers and fathers by integrating life course approaches and couple-dyadic perspectives. Theoretical perspectives from economics, sociology, and psychology will be synthesized to understand how people's employment and fertility outcomes correspond to their parenting behaviors or attitudes, and how such relationship is moderated by the gender division of labor within couples. Empirically, the project aims to provide (1) a holistic investigation of the dynamic relationship between parenting, employment, or well-being trajectories and (2) the quantitative evidence on the causal effects of parenting behaviors on employment and well-being. To achieve these goals, our analyses will be based on advanced methods for longitudinal data analyses, including sequence analysis, growth curve analysis, fixed effects regression models, and dynamic panel models.

• Hsu, C.-H., M?hring, K., & Engelhardt, H. “The long haul to gender-equal parenting? Employment status and the developmental course of couples' parenting time in Germany between 1990 and 2020.” Conference paper presented at the 2025 PppDays Conference, Cagliari, Italy.
• Hsu, C.-H. Huang, W., M?hring, K., & Engelhardt, H. “Intensive parenting and mothers' postnatal work and parental leave patterns.” Conference paper presented at the 2025 SLLS Annual Conference, Fribourg, Switzerland.
• Hsu, C.-H., & Y.-h. A. Cheng, “Intensive parenting attitudes in Taiwan: Patterns and heterogeneity”

• Hsu, C.-H., Perelli-Harris, B., & Zilanawala, A. “Educational gradients in mothers' developmental parenting over children's early childhood.”