Childcare arrangements and mothers’ satisfaction with work-family balance

A rapidly growing literature has been focusing on the relationship between fertility and life satisfaction. One key and robust finding in this literature is that parents tend to be more satisfied than their childless counterparts, especially in the years around childbearing. It has also been found that men tend to gain more than women in terms of life satisfaction from being parent. In part this finding can be explained by difficulties in conciliation of work and parenthood, which especially weighs on mothers’ shoulders. In this paper we focus on working mothers and argue that within this group there is a considerable degree of heterogeneity in work-family balance satisfaction that can be partly attributed to different childcare arrangements and difficulties that mothers can experience with them. We use random effects models on longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey (2003-2013). Results show that a balanced mix of paid and unpaid childcare is associate to mothers’ higher satisfaction with the work-family balance, while difficulties related to paid childcare - such as the affordability and the flexibility of the care – negatively impact on the satisfaction with work-family reconciliation