Raising children without the village: How religion may help mothers access childcare and household help in post-industrialized nations

– By Laure Spake & John Shaver

In post-industrialized settings, religious parents tend to have more children than non-religious parents. But in these same contexts, having large families is costly – the more children a person has, the fewer resources there are for each child. How are religious families able to support their large families, despite the potential costs to their children?

One possible explanation is that religious families get more support from their networks, which then allows them to convert this support into resources for their children. Considering that partaking in religion is associated with increased cooperation between individuals, we have proposed that this cooperation extends to childcare, and this enables religious individuals to successfully support larger families.

To disentangle how religion might be associated with support to mothers, we started by exploring these associations in post-industrialized countries using analyses of existing datasets from New Zealand and England. In both settings, religiosity was clearly associated with fertility: religious individuals had more children. In New Zealand, religious affiliation and frequency of attendance at a house of worship predicted that a childless individual had provided childcare help to others. In England, a mother’s frequency of attendance at church was associated with receiving help from her social network and co-religionists. However, because these datasets were designed to study other research questions, the measurement of support to mothers was quite coarse. We therefore designed a new data collection to collect higher quality information on how others provide support to mothers.

We disseminated an online survey to women in the US and the UK who had at least one child under of 5 years of age in 2020. The survey was better able to address our research questions by asking about religious affiliation and behavior, social relationships, all children born to the woman. Most importantly, we obtained data on what we call the woman’s help network: a list of all of the people whom the woman said helped her take care of her youngest child or helped her with a set of household tasks. A total of 1528 women successfully completed the survey: 919 of them lived in the UK, and 609 of them resided in the US.

Overall, 44% of UK mothers reported a religious affiliation, compared to 65% of US mothers. Amongst the mothers declaring a religious affiliation, US mothers generally had higher religiosity scores – this is in agreement with a broad literature which shows that the US has unusually high levels of religiosity for a high income country.

We explored how mothers’ religiosity related to: 1) how close they lived to and how often they contacted family members; 2) their fertility, adjusted for age at the time of the survey; and 3) the childcare and household help they received from family members. For this analysis, we focused on help received from family members because existing evidence overwhelmingly shows that family members provide the most help to mothers and exert the most influence on childbearing decisions.

We found that women with higher religiosity scores tended to have more geographically dispersed kin networks, but that despite this, they maintained similar levels of contact with them as women who were less religious (virtually or in person). It seems like religion helps to support familial cooperation, even over great distances. Religiosity was also clearly associated with the number of children a woman had, which was in agreement with our previous findings in the UK, New Zealand, and the findings of others.

There was no association between maternal religiosity and the number of people who provided her help with either childcare or household tasks. However, there were some associations between religiosity and the amount of help a mother received. In both the US and the UK, religiosity was clearly associated with receiving more help with household tasks.

In both countries, religiosity was clearly associated with receiving more help from non-partner kin. Most commonly, these helpers were either the mother’s mother or her partner’s mother. However, the third most commonly named non-partner helper was a mother’s older female child. When this helper was named to the help network, they provided the highest average amount of help with both childcare and household tasks.

The mother’s partner’s behaviour, however, was not uniformly affected by maternal religiosity. In the US, the partners of more religious mothers tended to provide less help, while in the UK mother’s religiosity was associated with receiving more help from partners, at least with household tasks. This was a bit surprising, as sociological research on religious fathers suggests that they tend to be more involved with their children than non-religious fathers.

The finding that family members increase their cooperative contributions to a household in response to maternal religiosity is a new and interesting one. Indeed, one explanation for why religion evolved and persists is that it can help to connect people. In post-industrialized settings, researchers have typically expected religion to connect unrelated individuals, compensating for the loss of extensive family networks that would have been available in non-urbanized, non-industrialized settings. However, our research has shown that religiosity does increase the amount of support that a mother receives from her family, though not necessarily from her partner. We have also shown that religiosity promotes cooperation differently across the US and the UK, which are fairly culturally similar contexts.

Since we conducted this study, we have collected more data on these themes across five different cultural settings in Bangladesh, The Gambia, India, Malawi, and the USA. We are busy analyzing these data to see if the relationships we found in this study persist in non-Western contexts, or whether they are influenced by market integration and/or religious tradition.

Read the original article: Spake, L., Schaffnit, S.B., Page, A.E., Hassan, A., Lynch, R., Watts, J., Sosis, R., Sear, R., Shenk, M.K., & Shaver, J.H. (2024). Religious women receive more allomaternal support from non-partner kin in two low-fertility countries. Evolution & Human Behavior, 45(3), 268-280.