A Gendered Aftermath? Medium-Term Implications of COVID-19 for Affective Well-Being Among Mothers and Fathers in Finland, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands

This article investigates the short- and medium-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on parents’ affective well-being using a comparative research design based on harmonized longitudinal data from four different work-family regimes. Using up to four waves collected between 2019 and 2022, we estimate average treatment effects of the first phase of the pandemic (spring to late summer 2020), its second phase (fall and winter 2020), and a third, post-vaccination, phase (summer 2021 - winter 2022) as compared to pre-pandemic, comparing mothers and fathers’ affective well-being (happy, calm, and sad) observed shortly before the pandemic (fall 2019-early March 2020) using a Propen- sity Score Matching Approach. We find moderate decrease of fathers’ well-being in the second stage of the pandemic in Finland, the Netherlands and Italy. Reduced well-being was observed for mothers only in Germany and Finland. Overall, these results point to a convergence of mothers’ and fathers’ well-being in the middle of the pandemic, as mothers exhibited lower well-being levels before its outbreaks. We discuss the results in light of discordance between intra-family allocation of time and gendered behavioral expectations present in different normatively framed work-family regimes. We conclude that couples’ responses to pandemic policies in the domains of education and work may not only have re-traditionalized the gendered division of labour with their economic longer-term risks, but may also have reduced family well-being overall.