Men who depended more on their wife’s income tended to have a physical health score of 3.99, and when they made equal amounts as their partner, this dropped to 3.93.
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Researchers from the University of CT analyzed survey results from over 3,000 married men and women between the ages of 18 and 32 from 1997 to 2011. Researchers found men’s well-being declines as they take on more financial responsibility in their marriage.
Study co-author Christin Munsch, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of CT, and colleagues are due to present their results at the 111th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in Seattle, WA.
‘Men are expected to be breadwinners, yet providing for one’s family with little or no help has negative repercussions’.
The surveys provided several more insights. They found that, in general, as men took on more financial responsibility in their marriages, their psychological well-being and health declined. In the years where men were the sole breadwinners of a family, their well-being scores decreased by five per cent and their health scores decreased by 3.5 per cent on average.
For women, making higher financial contribution had a positive effect on their overall well-being.
“People think gender roles are super-entrenched, and in some ways they are, but for most of history men and women have worked together, and there hasn’t been a homemaker and breadwinner model”, she said.
Moreover, studies show that “breadwinning is a stressful and anxiety-ridden experience”, and anxiety can negatively affect health, the researchers wrote in the unpublished study, which was presented on Friday (Aug. 19) here at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting. She wanted to understand what life is like for heterosexual men who juggle work and family. “Women, on the other hand, may approach breadwinning as an opportunity or choice and feel a sense of pride, without worrying what others will say if they can’t or don’t maintain it”, explains lead author Christin Munsch. Munsch attributes these psychological well-being differences to cultural expectations for men and women.
If you’re a young man and the breadwinner for your family, beware: It could harm your health and well-being.
The study uses data from the 1997 through 2011 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine the effects of household income dynamics on psychological well-being and health. Various factors such as age, education and income were kept in mind and the questions were created as such that they tell about their mental and physical health. “Further, we find that decoupling breadwinning from masculinity is associated with concrete benefits for both men and women”.
Additionally, she suggested that perhaps men who were the primary breadwinners were suffering from a phenomenon called lifestyle creep: as their households became accustomed to a certain level of income and standards of living, they feel pressure to perpetually provide more, meaning they aren’t able to to take time away from their desks to actually spend with their families. Study participants reflected a nationally representative sample of married people between the ages of 18 and 32.
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The assistant professor of sociology said she and her team had carefully considered a number of variables, such as how much money the couple made in total, to ensure the validity of their findings.
