Are you ready now for another child? Life satisfaction, work-family trajectories and the progression to the second child

Abstract

This thesis aims to study the relationship between fertility and subjective wellbeing in a sample of Australian couples (source: HILDA 2001-2009), followed from the year of the pregnancy with the first child. In particular, I focus on whether the arrival of the first child modifies new parents’ fertility expectations and the subsequent probability of experiencing a second childbirth as a consequence of changes in couples’ subjective wellbeing after the transition to the first parenthood. The study has been developed under a multidisciplinary perspective (demographical, sociological and psychological), using regression models for panel data. I find that the more difficult the adjustment process to parenthood is, the more parents decrease their expectations of having an additional child, and less quickly they proceed to the second child.