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Fathers’ Childcare: The Differences Between Participation and Amount of Time

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Abstract

The main research question of this article was whether and how predictors of fathers’ participation in childcare, defined as zero versus more than zero minutes of childcare, differed from predictors of participating fathers’ amount of time on childcare, measured as minutes on the survey day. The sample was drawn from the Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS) and covered surveys from ten industrialised countries from 1987 to 2005. Results showed that there were some similarities, but also remarkable differences between factors influencing participation in childcare and factors affecting participating fathers’ time spent with children. Thus they call for caution regarding findings from existing studies not distinguishing participation from participating fathers’ childcare minutes.

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Notes

  1. For an overview on social and economic determinants of fathers’ and mothers’ time for their children see also the review of Monna and Gauthier (2008).

  2. The educational level did not appear to be significant in Norway (Haas and Hwang 2008; Sayer et al. 2004b).

  3. Recently, some researchers have pooled data from several countries to investigate the impact of macro-level factors on fathers’ participation in domestic work, e.g., family policy. But as this paper focuses on individual-level data, I refrain from reviewing literature on macro-level predictors in this article. For an overview of some of these factors for fathers’ childcare see Reich et al. (2012).

  4. For matters of simplification, the terms “diary day” and “survey day” are used interchangeably for the day to which the diary refers.

  5. Regression diagnostics have been carried out using the instructions of the Stata Web Book, Chapter 2 (Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE) at UCLA 2012).

  6. International Standard Classification of Education.

  7. If students are working, they are not classified as not working, but belong to the other groups (part-time or full-time employment or employment with unknown work hours). The share of students in the category “not employed” is below 12% in all countries but Finland (23.9%) and Norway (21.4%).

  8. The exploration of confidence intervals shows that the differences in participation rates and average minutes are significant at the 95% level between the countries with lowest values and those with highest values. Tables and figures with confidence intervals for the participation rate and the average number of minutes are available from the author upon request.

  9. See discussion in Mischke (2011).

  10. Sensitivity analyses have shown that the exclusion of this variable does not change the qualitative effect of the other covariates.

  11. Inclusion of all variables - father's work status, partner's work status, and interaction effects of both - was not possible in all countries due to perfect multicollinearity in some countries. In particular, the group of couples in which the partner works full-time or has unknown work hours, but the father not, was very small (Table 5).

  12. These estimates have been carried out for Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway and Sweden, but not for the Netherlands due to the small sample size.

  13. Apart from content-related reasons, this could also be caused by the low share of couples in this category which ranges between 2% and 7% (Table 5 in Appendix).

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  1. Hamburg Institute of International Economics, University of Hamburg, Heimhuder Strasse 71, 20148, Hamburg, Germany

    Nora Reich

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Appendix

Appendix

For Appendix see Tables 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.

Table 5 Summary statistics, range of all countries, all fathers
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Table 6 Summary statistics, range of all countries, participating fathers
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Table 7 Sensitivity analysis of fathers’ participation in childcare in Germany
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Table 8 Sensitivity analysis of participating fathers’ minutes of childcare in Germany
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Table 9 Sensitivity analysis of participating fathers’ minutes of childcare in Germany
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Reich, N. Fathers’ Childcare: The Differences Between Participation and Amount of Time. J Fam Econ Iss 35, 190–213 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-013-9359-y

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