A new study by the University of Oldenburg and Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) published in Population and Environment shows that the birth of a child has little impact on parents’ environmental and climate concerns—however, there are differences in the way mothers’ and fathers’ planetary concerns develop after childbirth.

For the research, Gundula Zoch, assistant professor of sociology for social inequalities at the University of Oldenburg, and Nicole Kapelle, assistant professor of quantitative sociology at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) analyzed longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study for the period between 1984 and 2020.

“Our study shows that the common assumption that people become more concerned about the environment and climate change as a result of having a child cannot be confirmed across the board,” says Zoch.

This premise, known as the “legacy hypothesis,” is based on the assumption that parents want their children to have a secure future—and fear that environmental problems or climate change will jeopardize that future.

“However, our results show that parents report being slightly less concerned about environmental and climate issues around the time of birth, because in many cases, daily life with a newborn shifts priorities so that environmental and climate protection are somewhat pushed into the background,” Zoch explains. Only once their children reach school age do parents go back to expressing the same degree of concern as before childbirth, she adds.

Zoch and Kapelle analyzed changes in parents’ concerns due to the birth of a child also in connection with parents’ gender and educational attainment. They found that fathers report a slight decrease in environmental concerns shortly before and after the birth of their child, whereas for mothers these concerns increase slightly during the same period.

Regarding climate protection specifically, however, the situation is reversed: Here it is fathers who express a significant increase in concern, especially after the birth of their child. In contrast, mothers worry considerably less about the consequences of climate change than they did before giving birth—even as their children get older.

Surprisingly, the education factor appears to play a subordinate role in this context—hardly any differences could be observed between those with and without a university degree. However, a notable finding of the study was that respondents with a university education and with children of primary school age displayed higher levels of concern about environmental and climate protection than before they became parents.

As far as differences between the attitudes of mothers and fathers are concerned, Zoch suspects that well-known gender gaps in other studies on social and political inequalities are also reflected here. “The fact that, on average, fathers report being more concerned about climate change than mothers may be due to the fact that climate change is also associated with economic problems, distribution conflicts and political crises—topics that men still tend to focus more on than women.”

Environmental problems such as littered landscapes or polluted (bathing) water, on the other hand, have a more direct impact on the family living environment, which is why mothers, who still do most of the care work, are presumably more concerned about these immediate threats to their children.

Zoch also points out that mothers’ daily lives and career prospects change more drastically than those of fathers as a result of childbirth—which can cause abstract worries about the future to temporarily fade into the background.

“Unfortunately, it was not possible to derive a causal explanation for the differences between concerns of fathers and mothers on the basis of the data analyzed, but our findings underscore how differentiated parental perceptions of environmental and climate issues can be, and why we will need better data on these research questions,” Zoch added.

The study is based on longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), the most comprehensive long-term social science survey carried out in Germany. A defining feature of the SOEP is that the same people are surveyed every year. This allows researchers to analyze long-term social trends as well as changes in individual attitudes and concerns.

The authors of the study analyzed a total of 108,340 interviews with 12,198 people to assess concerns about environmental protection and 39,028 interviews with 7,028 people to investigate attitudes towards the consequences of climate protection.

The data on environmental protection was gathered by the SOEP between 1984 and 2020, while the data on climate protection was gathered between 2009 and 2020. Zoch and Kapelle restricted their analysis to data covering the period from two years before childbirth to 10 years after.