“Their ideals and behavioral norms show that raising children is much more intensive and complex than it used to be,” says sociologist Caroline Berghammer from the Institute for Demography at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In a project funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, she examined how the level of education affects family life.
For this study, Berghammer compared data from the 1970s onwards from the following European countries: Austria, Italy, Ireland, Great Britain, Poland, France, Germany and Norway. It has been shown that, on the one hand, higher educated people have higher demands when it comes to raising children, but on the other hand they say more often that they spend too little time with their offspring – even if it is in fact just as much as with less educated comparison persons. In Austria, about a quarter of mothers believe they spend too little time with their children. However, according to the study, working women with a higher level of education tend to devote more hours to their children than women with a lower level of education. Across Europe, fathers are far more likely than mothers to say they don’t have enough time for their children, according to the study.
single parent
In her study, Berghammer also related the level of education and the quality of relationships as well as the age at which a family was started. The result on average across Europe: those with a higher education tend to have more stable relationships, become parents later and young mothers return to work earlier. On the other hand, in Europe, the majority of those with a lower level of education tend towards illegitimate relationships and there are more frequent separations, which means that there are also more single parents.
According to the study, things were different in the 1970s: At that time, it was mainly the higher educated who divorced because they could assert themselves against social norms and also afford it. The turnaround came in the 1980s, and more and more of the poorly educated became single parents. The only exception among the countries examined is Norway, where the less educated were more likely to be single parents earlier. Today, in countries like Austria and Italy, there are hardly any educational differences among single parents.
Source: Nachrichten
