Working parents, financial insecurity, and childcare: mental health in the time of COVID-19 in the UK

Zhiming Cheng, Silvia Mendolia, Alfredo Paloyo, David Savage and Max Tani

Review of Economics of the Household, 2021, vol. 19, issue 1, No 7, 123-144

Abstract: Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic and the policy measures to control its spread—lockdowns, physical distancing, and social isolation—have coincided with the deterioration of people’s mental well-being. We use data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) to document how this phenomenon is related to the situation of working parents who now have to manage competing time demands across the two life domains of work and home. We show that the deterioration of mental health is worse for working parents, and that it is strongly related to increased financial insecurity and time spent on childcare and home schooling. This burden is not shared equally between men and women, and between richer and poorer households. These inequalities ought to be taken into account when crafting policy responses.

Keywords: COVID-19; Working parents; United Kingdom; Childcare; Mental health; Financial insecurity; I14; J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11150-020-09538-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:reveho:v:19:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s11150-020-09538-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11150/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11150-020-09538-3

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economics of the Household is currently edited by Shoshana Grossbard

More articles in Review of Economics of the Household from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().