Confidence, Not Chores: What Really Drives Millennial and Gen Z Parents’ Engagement in Infant Care

A new study from South Korea offers a striking insight into how the youngest generation of parents translates family life into hands-on childcare: what matters most is not how evenly household tasks are divided, but how capable each parent feels. Among Millennial and Generation Z parents raising infants and toddlers, parental efficacy—the confidence in one’s own caregiving abilities—emerged as the single strongest predictor of parenting engagement, outweighing both marital intimacy and the fairness of household labor division.

The research, published in the open-access journal Heliyon, was conducted by JiSu Jang and Jihea Choi, who set out to understand how environmental, behavioral, and cognitive factors interact to shape parenting behavior in a generation redefining family roles. Drawing on Bandura’s social cognitive theory, the team modeled marital intimacy and household labor division as environmental and behavioral factors, parental efficacy as the cognitive factor, and parenting engagement as the behavioral outcome. The framework allowed them to test whether confidence acts as the psychological bridge between a supportive family environment and active participation in childcare.

The context is a society in rapid transition. Historically, Korean parenting was organized around rigid gender divisions, with fathers serving as economic providers and mothers as primary caregivers. That structure is eroding quickly. According to Statistics Korea, 72.8 percent of 20,000 surveyed adults rejected the idea that men should work while women stay home. The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family reported that agreement with the belief that mothers should primarily handle child-rearing fell from 53.8 percent in 2016 to 17.4 percent in 2021, while paternity leave utilization climbed from 1.9 percent in 2005 to 24.5 percent in 2020. Similar shifts toward egalitarian caregiving are visible across many OECD countries, making the Korean case part of a broader global reorganization of family life.

To capture these dynamics empirically, the researchers surveyed 210 parents in Wonju City—105 fathers and 105 mothers—aged 20 to 40, each raising a single child between 1 and 36 months old. Data were collected between March and May 2024 following approval from the Yonsei University Wonju Severance Christian Hospital Institutional Review Board. Participants completed validated questionnaires measuring marital intimacy, household labor division, parental efficacy, and parenting engagement, with all instruments showing strong internal consistency. The sample was highly educated—81 percent held bachelor’s degrees—and predominantly employed in office work, reflecting the profile of contemporary urban Korean parents.

Analysis relied on partial least squares structural equation modeling, a statistical technique well suited to estimating complex mediation and moderation pathways with minimal distributional assumptions. The measurement model passed rigorous validity checks, including indicator reliability, convergent validity via average variance extracted, and discriminant validity through heterotrait–monotrait ratios. The final structural model performed well, explaining 22.6 percent of the variance in parental efficacy and 41.4 percent of the variance in parenting engagement, with fit indices such as a standardized root mean square residual of 0.089 falling within acceptable bounds.

The path coefficients told a clear story. Marital intimacy strongly predicted parental efficacy (β = 0.407, p < 0.001), and household labor division also contributed positively (β = 0.194, p = 0.038). Yet the direct effect of marital intimacy on parenting engagement was not statistically significant, while household labor division showed only a modest direct effect. Parental efficacy, by contrast, was a powerful predictor of engagement (β = 0.545, p < 0.001) with a large effect size. Mediation analysis revealed that parental efficacy fully mediated the link between marital intimacy and engagement, accounting for 78.9 percent of the total effect, and partially mediated the link between household labor division and engagement, accounting for 36.1 percent.

The most provocative finding concerned gender. Parental role significantly moderated the relationship between household labor division and parental efficacy (β = −0.457, p = 0.001), and the direction of the association flipped between fathers and mothers. As the perceived fairness of household task division increased, parental efficacy rose among fathers—from a predicted 110.9 to 112.2 on the efficacy scale—but fell among mothers, from 105.4 to 103.7. In other words, the same behavioral condition carried opposite psychological meanings depending on which parent experienced it.

The authors interpret this divergence through the lens of persistent gendered expectations. For fathers, participating in household labor may represent an expansion of their caregiving role, reinforcing paternal identity, role satisfaction, and confidence. For mothers, an equitable division of labor may not confer the same psychological benefit; instead, it may be entangled with greater parenting-related burden and role stress, mechanisms the study did not directly measure but which previous research has linked to lower efficacy. The result suggests that behavioral equality can coexist with unequal cognitive and emotional experiences, echoing the concept of invisible labor—the unacknowledged mental and emotional workload that often continues to fall on mothers even in egalitarian households.

These dynamics may be especially pronounced among Millennial and Generation Z parents, whom the study treats as a single cohort shaped by a shared contemporary context rather than comparing them as separate generations. This group tends to construct parenting roles through negotiation and individual readiness rather than obligation, and their constant exposure to digital parenting information and social comparison environments amplifies the role of perceived competence. For some parents, abundant online resources build confidence; for others, they breed uncertainty and self-doubt. Either way, psychological readiness appears to outweigh structural equality in determining whether favorable conditions translate into engaged parenting.

The practical implications are significant. The findings suggest that interventions should prioritize building parental efficacy through mastery experiences, skill-based training, and supportive feedback, while couple-based programs that strengthen marital intimacy may indirectly boost engagement by reinforcing each partner’s confidence. Policy measures such as paternal leave and flexible work arrangements could support fathers’ involvement, but the authors caution that such policies must also address the visible and invisible burdens mothers carry, including emotional and cognitive labor. The study’s limitations—a cross-sectional design that precludes causal inference, self-reported measures vulnerable to social desirability bias, a single-city Korean sample, and a household labor measure based on only four items—warrant careful interpretation. Still, the core message resonates well beyond Korea: in the transition to egalitarian parenting, fairness in chores is only the beginning, and how parents feel about their own competence may ultimately decide how fully they show up for their children.

Subject of Research: Mediation and moderation effects of parental efficacy, marital intimacy, and household labor division on parenting engagement among Millennial and Generation Z parents

Article Title: Parenting engagement of Millennial and Generation Z parents in infant and toddler care: mediation and moderation effects

Article References: Jang, J., & Choi, J. (2026). Parenting engagement of Millennial and Generation Z parents in infant and toddler care: mediation and moderation effects. Heliyon, 12(15), Article e45443. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45443

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45443

Keywords: parenting engagement, parental efficacy, Millennial parents, Generation Z, household labor division, marital intimacy, South Korea, social cognitive theory, gender roles, infant care, PLS-SEM, invisible labor