Does Intensive Parenting Come at the Expense of Parents’ Health? Evidence from Sweden

Given concerns that the intensification of parenting could have negative consequences for well-being, this paper explores whether intensive parenting is associated with parents’ self-rated health in the case of Sweden, where extensive parental supports may provide protection. We apply binary logistic regression models to responses from 3,400 parents in the nationally representative Swedish Generations and Gender Survey from 2021. Results differ depending on whether we use a variable-centered or person-centered approach to measuring intensive parenting. The variable-centered analysis showed that only certain intensive parenting attitudes, mainly within the challenging dimension, predict negative self-rated health, and this only applies to mothers. Using latent class analysis to group respondents by their overall attitude profiles around intensive parenting, the person-centered approach revealed that associations between intensive parenting attitude profiles and self-rated health differed substantially by gender. Although very few differences were observed according to the strength of intensive parenting attitudes or by agreeing with only certain dimensions, the respondents’ predicted probabilities of rating their own health as good or very good differed for those who reject intensive parenting versus adhering to it at least in part. Mothers who reject intensive parenting have significantly higher probabilities of good health, whereas fathers who reject intensive parenting have significantly lower probabilities of good health.