If You're Happy and You Know It: How Do Mothers and Fathers in the US Really Feel about Caring for Their Children?

This paper considers the question posed by popular media: Do women like doing childcare more than men? Using contemporaneous subjective well-being data paired with 24-hour time diaries from the 2010 American Time Use Survey, the paper explores gender differences in how mothers and fathers feel when engaged in a set of common daily activities. We find that both mothers and fathers engaged in child caregiving enjoy their time spent in child caregiving; fathers as much, or even more so, than mothers as evidenced by their average values for happiness, meaningfulness, tiredness, and stress and an aggregated statistic, the unpleasantness index. Simulations provide evidence that the difference between mothers and fathers comes almost completely from differences in their subjective well-being rather than from differences in how they use their time.