Role of socioeconomic context on motherhood during educational enrollment: a comparison between Romania and some other European countries.

Work-family balance is an important issue when studying the link between low fertility and family policies. However, in times when educational investments last longer and longer, it becomes increasingly important to study also how motherhood can be combined with continuous investments in human-capital and how the socioeconomic context plays a role in the education-family balance.
Adopting a life course perspective, I study the impact of the transition to motherhood on educational enrollment in Romania and other European countries (with available GGS data) based on the presupposition that motherhood has a negative effect, by reducing educational aspirations. However, since institutional and cultural factors do play a crucial role in shaping life-course interrelationship, I intend to disentangle between three calendar periods: the 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s. For Romania and other former-communist countries these periods mark: i) the last years of the communist authoritarian regime, ii) the first years of transition to democracy and market economy, and iii) the consolidated capitalist regime. For the countries with stable sociopolitical regimes, the comparative analyses by period reveal the dynamic of the relationship between motherhood and completion of studies, and highlight the differences with the CEE countries.