Abstract
We ask how the paid work of Canadian married mothers and fathers is affected when a child has a physical/mental condition or health problem that leads to restrictions in daily activities. Using the Statistics Canada National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, we find that married mothers of children with disabilities are less likely to engage in paid work and/or work fewer paid hours per week. No statistically significant changes in paid work participation or hours are apparent for fathers of the same children. We find, moreover, evidence that the degree of specialization within families increases when there is a child with a disability. These responses are consistent with traditional gender roles within families, and may make sense as a ‘household’ coping strategy. However, such a division of labor may generate economic vulnerability for mothers compared to fathers.
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Notes
Throughout the paper, ‘married’ refers to both legal and common-law marriages.
Starting from 2000, there has been a change in the definition of ‘disability’ in Canadian national surveys (Human Resources Development Canada 2003). In this paper, we focus on children reported to experience functional limitations at home, at childcare, at school or in any other activities such as transportation, play, sports or games, for a child of his/her age, in order to construct consistent measure across survey years.
Powers (2003) presents US data. Trends across time in child disability rates are harder to identify with Canadian data, given changes in definitions used by nationally representative surveys (Human Resources Development Canada 2003), but are likely to follow a similar trend. This may, paradoxically, be partially due to advances in medical science which mean that children survive but live with health problems; it is also the case that fewer children with serious disabilities are institutionalized than was previously the case (Salkever 1982a).
Lone parents obviously do not have this option and so are faced with extraordinarily difficult circumstances. However, we do not study lone mothers in this paper given our focus on ‘household’ responses with potentially different roles for mothers and fathers connected to gendered norms.
Pollak (1985) notes that complete specialization in non-market production might be regarded as an extreme investment in ‘marriage-specific’ human capital, which would both increase the ‘payoff’ to remaining married, but also reduce the ‘payoff’ to leaving the marriage if no market human capital is acquired (Pollak 1985). .
As well, some medical expenses can be deducted from taxes owing and tax credits are also available. See Burton and Phipps (2009).
Six weeks of ‘Compassionate Care’ benefits as part of the Canadian Employment Insurance program were also available during our study period; however, parents in our sample would not generally be eligible since these benefits were only available if the child is ‘was at significant risk of death’. Compassionate Care take-up rates were thus very low. .
In contrast, a slightly larger literature focussed on lone mothers generates more ‘mixed’ results, sometimes finding no impact on paid work (e.g., Salkever 1982a; Kimmel 1997, 1998), sometimes finding a negative impact (e.g., Baydar et al. 2007; Breslau et al. 1982; Lukemeyer et al. 2000; Salkever 1990; Wolfe and Hill 1995).
Hobbs and Perrin (1985) provide discussions of the nature and implications of individual childhood chronic conditions.
Some surveys may not provide details on father's labor market behaviour, if, for example he is not present in the household (i.e., does not reside with the child).
Since maternity and parental leaves are not counted as time outside the labor market, we should not expect any impact of the 2001 extension of parental benefits on the reported paid work of new parents.
The survey questions that we used to construct child disability variable are as follows: “Does child have any long term conditions or health problems which prevent or limit % his/her % participation in school, at play, or in any other activity for a child of % his/her % age?” (cycles 1–3), or “Does a physical condition or mental condition or health problem reduce the amount or the kind of activity this child can do: (1) at home? (2) at childcare? (3) at school? (4) in other activities, for example, transportation, play, sports or games? (cycles 4–8)”.
We have also estimated all models retaining the ‘recovering’ children. Results are not affected.
A limitation of the NLSCY is that it is not possible to provide separate estimates for children more or less severe activity limitations or with specific conditions, though as emphasized by Salkever (1982a, b), Powers (2003) and Gould (2004), results may be sensitive to the definition of child disability employed, since both time and financial demands will vary with the nature and severity of the disability. Observed patterns of specialization could differ depending upon whether the child’s health problem is more demanding of time or money (Gould 2004).
Recall that we only study children with two parents. If the pmk is female, we code her as the mother and her spouse as the father. If the pmk is male, we code him as the father and his spouse as the mother. We did not identify any same-sex couples in the data. .
Given the non-negative and right skewed nature of the parental paid hour variable, the GLM models with a gamma distribution appear most appropriate. We also estimated Tobit models. Despite yielding qualitatively similar results, the Tobit assumption of normality is strongly rejected by the Lagrange multiplier test (at 1 % significance level) in all cases. Since there is no clear theoretically best choice for the link function, we follow Hardin and Hilbe (2012) and used a power analysis to determine the optimal link. The result suggests that the preferred one is the canonical inverse (power = −1). We thus present results only from inverse-gamma models in the paper, although they are generally similar among different links such as the log (power = 0).
The coefficient on child disability in the labor force participation model for mothers is, however, no longer statistically significant when we control for mother's health status.
It is possible that the incidence of child disability is not a ‘random event’ that is equally likely to happen to any child in the population. For example, if reductions in health status are more likely in rural areas and labor force participation is also lower in rural areas, then we might observe an association between incidence of child disability and low rates of participation without necessarily any causal connection. To help address this concern, we use a ‘propensity score reweighting’ technique (Rosenbaum 1987; Hirano and Imbens 2001) that involves constructing a scalar weight based on estimated propensity scores to create a ‘balanced’ sample in order to compare the labor market behavior of parents of children with disabilities to parents whose children remain healthy but are otherwise as similar as possible in terms of other observable characteristics. Results obtained using propensity score reweighting are qualitatively very similar to the onset results reported here. They are available in an earlier version of the paper, available on request.
Although some authors have found larger negative impacts for lower-income mothers (Breslau et al. 1982; Salkever 1982b), we find no difference in effect for mothers with high school or less education, controlling for prior labor market behavior (i.e., the interaction between low education and onset of child disability is statistically insignificant). Also, we find no statistically significant difference for older versus younger children (whereas Salkever 1982b found smaller associations for younger children using cross-sectional US data). This may reflect higher rates of labor force participation for women with young children in the late 1990’s and 2000’s.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank both the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research through the “Healthy Balance Research Program: A Community Alliance for Health Research on Women’s Unpaid Caregiving” for funding this work.
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Burton, P., Chen, K., Lethbridge, L. et al. Child health and parental paid work. Rev Econ Household 15, 597–620 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-014-9251-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-014-9251-z