The higher the level of education, the greater the demands that parents place on themselves when raising children these days. “Their ideals and behavioral norms show that raising children is much more intensive and resource-intensive than it used to be,” said sociologist Caroline Berghammer from the University of Vienna and the Institute for Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in a broadcast today. In a project funded by the Fund for the Promotion of Scientific Research (FWF), she is investigating how the level of education affects family life.
For the study “Families and Inequality: Trends in educational differences in family behavior”, Berghammer and an international team compared data from the Labor Force Surveys of several European countries since the 1970s, specifically Austria, Italy, Ireland, Great Britain, Poland, France, Germany and Norway.
According to the FWF, in addition to the higher demands in terms of child-rearing among the higher educated, this also shows that they say more often that they spend too little time with their children – even if in fact it is just as much as with lower-educated comparison persons.
Starting advantage for children
In fact, Berghammer found in her study that more educated women, who tend to work more hours, spend more time with their children than less educated women (and tend to work fewer hours).
You can outsource a substantial part of the housework to external service providers. For their children, this time brings a head start.
