Using German panel data and quasi-experimental designs (event studies, twin births, and sibling sex composition), we show that the first child triggers a large and persistent decline in parents’ participation in arts, cultural events, and sports, with strong gender differences and only modest additional effects of later children.
Becoming a parent is often described as fundamentally life-changing, but we rarely measure what exactly changes in everyday cultural life—going to the theatre, the cinema, making art, or even keeping up with sports.
In our study, we examine how having children affects parents’ participation in (i) artistic and musical activities, (ii) “highbrow” culture (opera, classical concerts, theatre, exhibitions), (iii) “lowbrow” culture (cinema, pop concerts, clubs), and (iv) sports.
We use longitudinal survey data from Germany (the German Socio-Economic Panel, SOEP), which repeatedly interviews the same individuals over many years and includes detailed questions on leisure activities and fertility histories.
A simple comparison of parents and non-parents can be misleading, because people who choose to have (more) children may already differ in time use, preferences, and lifestyle. To get closer to a causal answer, we combine three well-established strategies economists often use to learn from real-life “natural experiments”: an event-study around first births, twin births as an unexpected shock to family size, and parents’ tendency to try for a third child when their first two children have the same sex (“mixed-sex preferences”).
What happens after the first child?
The clearest result is that the first child leads to a large drop in cultural participation (measured on a five-point scale coded 0 to 4) for both mothers and fathers. In the years right after birth, participation falls sharply and then recovers only slowly, without fully returning to pre-birth levels even ten years later. This pattern applies to all the different activity types we study and is especially pronounced for activities couples often do together, such as going to cultural events (see Figure 1). Measured against pre-birth participation levels of the not-yet-treated, the biggest drops show up in lowbrow activities such as cinema, pop concerts, clubs (about −54% for mothers and −43% for fathers) and in highbrow culture like theatre, opera, or exhibitions (about −45% for mothers and −38% for fathers). Sports participation also falls markedly, especially for mothers (around −36%, versus −22% for fathers). Even artistic and musical activities which might be easier to do at home decline after the first child (roughly −26% for mothers and −13% for fathers).
Importantly, we do not find evidence that prospective parents systematically reduce participation before birth, which supports the idea that the post-birth drop is not simply part of a pre-existing trend.
We also find meaningful gender differences. Mothers experience larger immediate declines in the intensity of participation, while fathers are more affected on the extensive margin, i.e. the probability of doing an activity at all. In practical terms, the transition to parenthood seems to push a non-trivial share of parents into “not participating anymore,” and this is particularly strong for fathers in several categories.
Figure 1: First childbirth and cultural participation (taken from Sonnabend & Westphal, 2026)
Is it money or mainly time?
One might expect higher-income households to maintain cultural participation more easily, for example by paying for childcare. However, when we split parents by whether their household income is above or below the median, we do not see clear evidence that higher-income parents are less affected; if anything, some high-income groups show equally strong or stronger declines (likely because they start from higher pre-birth participation).
Additional analyses suggest that time constraints fit the overall picture well. After birth, childcare time (especially on weekends) rises steeply, and much more so for mothers, while mothers also increase housework time noticeably. Moreover, mothers’ paid working hours drop substantially after birth, whereas fathers’ working hours change little, consistent with a strongly gendered reallocation of time.
Do second and third children matter in the same way?
Surprisingly, once parents have already made the transition into parenthood, additional children do not consistently reduce cultural participation further.
Using twin births as an unexpected increase in family size, we find that moving from one child to two has, at most, modest and often statistically imprecise effects in most cultural domains (with one clearer exception: fathers’ sports participation when children are young).
For a third child, results depend on the identification strategy and the subgroup of parents affected; in some specifications, we even see mild positive effects, particularly in sports for mothers under the mixed-sex-preference design. A reasonable interpretation is heterogeneity: parents who choose (or end up with) larger families may differ in resources, preferences, and coping strategies, so the “marginal child” after the first may not be equally disruptive.
What this could mean for cultural policy and cultural institutions
If cultural participation supports well-being and social integration, the transition to parenthood looks like a major “risk point” for cultural withdrawal, especially in the early years.
Rather than treating parents as a niche audience, our results suggest that first-time parenthood is a predictable life event when many people disengage from cultural life for years. Family-friendly formats (timing, accessibility, and low-threshold offers) may therefore be most valuable when targeted specifically at first-time parents and parents of very young children.
About the article
Sonnabend, Hendrik, and Matthias Westphal (2026). “Family first: the causal effect of family size on cultural participation.” Journal of Cultural Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-026-09597-x
About the authors
Hendrik Sonnabend is a Researcher and Lecturer at the University of Hagen, Germany.
Matthias Westphal is a Professor of Economics at the University of Hagen, Germany.
About the image
Caitlin Childs, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons , https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parents_SanFranciscoPrideParadeJun292008Flickr_files.jpg
