Abstract
It has been argued that child care should be treated separately from leisure or housework when analyzing time use data. This is because child care has a positive income gradient, whereas leisure and housework do not. Using U.S. data from PSID-CDS, this paper computes parental child care during and outside of typical work hours (TWH) by income quintile for two-parent families. The TWH distinction is important because the opportunity cost of spending time with children is first and foremost in terms of forgone earnings during TWH; outside of TWH, leisure or housework mainly constitute this opportunity cost. Indeed, I find that child care decreases with income during TWH and, hence, behaves similarly to leisure and other household chores. While maternal child care also slightly decreases with income outside of TWH, paternal care increases with income outside of TWH. Also, the discrepancy between paternal and maternal child care is smaller outside of TWH than it is during TWH. This is particularly pronounced in high income families. Theoretical implications are derived in a static framework of time allocation and child quality production encompassing the recent literature on the topic. Variation in child care during TWH can be rationalized by assuming a high elasticity of substitution between leisure, consumption and child quality. This is the standard explanation for the patterns observed in leisure and housework. Within this widely used framework, however, the facts outside of TWH point to systematic differences by income in preferences or productivity. Further exploration of child care patterns during and outside of TWH is needed to inform us about the dimensions in which this widely used framework should be extended.
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Notes
I discuss this choice of definition for “typical work hours” in Online Appendix O.1.2.1. Results for alternative definitions are provided in Online Appendix O.2.
The facts described above also hold when conditioning on the age of the child and the number of children in the household (see Online Appendix O.3 for details).
I should note here that the facts described above could reflect a spurious correlation where people who value leisure and child quality more tend to work less and, hence, have lower income for any given wage. If wages and preference parameters are truly independent, the facts described above should not emerge when quintiles are based on wages instead of household income. Similar facts do emergewhen using a restricted sample of households where the father earns a positive wage. Hence, the relationship is not just a spurious one. See Online Appendix O.4 for details.
Similar facts as those described below emerge basing quintiles on father’s wage instead of household income, using a restricted sample including only families where the father earns a positive wage. See Online Appendix O.4 for details.
Similar child care patterns as those presented below emerge when looking at college versus non-college educated mothers and fathers. See Online Appendix O.5 for details.
A more detailed description of the measurements can be found in Online Appendix O.1. I present only a brief summary here.
Their analysis used child-level weights from the CDS demographic file to adjust for family selection and non- response factors. Further, I multiply time spent during weekdays by 5 and during weekends by 2.
See Online Appendix O.1.2.1 for a discussion of this definition and Online Appendix O.2 for results for alternative definitions.
Similarly, Folbre (2008) finds that middle income two-parent-two-children families spend an average of 13.5 h of passive care and 27.8 h of active care per child per week (see her Tables 6.2 and 6.3). In contrast, this paper argues that estimates using the TWH distinction, though imperfect, provide more accurate estimates of the actual opportunity cost of spending time with children than does Folbre (2008)’s overall number (designed to compute replacement costs). For comparison, Hill and Stafford (1980) find that women spend 7.33 h (i.e. 440 min) per child per week if they have two preschoolers based on time use data in 1976. This is lower than the estimate in this paper, especially during typical work hours. There are many studies on parental child care over time and within and across countries. For a comparison of the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K., see Folbre and Yoon (2007); for Sweden, see Gustafsson and Kjulin (1994); for Australia, see Apps and Rees (2002), Bittman and Craig (2008) and Bradbury (2008); for Spain, see Gutiérrez-Domènech (2010); for France, see Ekert-Jaffé and Grossbard (2015); for changes over time in the U.S., see Sayer et al. (2004); for trends across selected industrialized countries, see Gauthier et al. (2004), to name only a few. None of these show how different groups of the population compare at different times of the day and week.
Household income depends on the education and labor force participation of the parents. Similar observations become apparent when disaggregating by education and labor force participation; details by education can be found in Online Appendix O.5. Trends in child care by parental education can be found in Ramey and Ramey (2010); cross-sectional evidence can be found in Gobbi (2013). These studies find that parental time with children increases with education. As the education of parents increases, the gap between child care supplied by mothers relative to that supplied by fathers decreases. Trends in child care by labor supply of parents can be found in Hallberg and Klevmarken (2003). They find that a change in the mother’s working hours has less influence on the parents’ time with their children than a change in the father’s working hours does. None of these papers disaggregate by “time of day and week” as this paper does.
The expenditure categories reported are: housing, food, transportation, clothing, health care, (paid) child care and education, and miscellaneous (including personal care items, entertainment, and reading materials).
Lino also mentions that there are some economies of scale in the number of children. “To estimate expenses for an only child, multiply the total expense for the appropriate age category by 1.24. To estimate expenses for each child in a family with three or more children, multiply the total expense for each appropriate age category by 0.77. For expenses on all children in a family, these totals should be summed.” That is, if it takes \(\$x\) per child to raise 2 children, the total expenditure for a one-child family is \(\$1.24x\), for a two-child family is \(\$2x\) and for a three-child family is \(\$3*0.77x\). Lazear and Michael (1980) find large economies of scale, while Espenshade (1984) finds that they are of the order of 5 % for an additional child.
Table O.2 in Online Appendix O.1.2.1 reports that parents spend more than 80 per cent of their total work hours during TWH.
The main fact under consideration in this paper—namely that high income fathers catch up to mothers to a greater extent than low income fathers do—is most pronounced for active child care. It therefore seems reasonable to disregard passive child care altogether. Online Appendix O.8 shows how the facts about passive child care can easily be accommodated in this framework.
Biddle and Hamermesh (1990) show that sleeping time decreases with the wage rate, especially for women. Assuming that time endowments are independent of quintile and gender greatly simplifies the analysis.
See Online Appendix O.3 for details. There are economies of scale in child care and the burden decreases when children enter school (i.e., level effects), but the cross-sectional patterns hold for each type of family. Folbre (2008) also constructs an approximation of the economies of scale in parental child care by examining families of differing compositions. She finds that children in two-parent, single-child families receive about 50 % more active care time from at least one parent than those in two-child families, while children in families of three or more children receive only 15 % less than those in two-child families. Hill and Stafford (1980) find that women in 1976 spent 550 min per child per week in child care if they had one preschooler and 440 min per child per week if they had two (p.237), i.e. a factor of 1.25.
A brief discussion of how heterogeneity in \(n, \lambda\) and \(\phi _{2}\) would affect model predictions can be found in Online Appendix O.6.1.
See Online Appendix O.6 for details.
I discuss relaxing this assumption below.
See Online Appendix O.4 for details.
See Online Appendices O.6.1 and O.6.2 for details.
For a detailed derivation of first-order conditions, see Online Appendix O.7.
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Acknowledgments
The author thanks David Frisvold, Martin Gervais, Paula Gobbi, Lev Lvovskiy and Michèle Tertilt as well as four anonymous referees for helpful comments.
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Appendix: Detailed tables
Appendix: Detailed tables
Table 6 reports hours per child per week of active and passive child care disaggregated by household income, during and outside of typical work hours. As in Table 3, the Parents rows are the sum of Mother and Father rows. Further, there is one row for each type of child care per child (active, passive and total (active plus passive)). For comparison, the first column of Table 6 repeats the overall numbers from Table 3, while the last five columns are conditioned on household income quintile. Table 7 provides detailed numbers derived from dividing Father’s time by Mother’s time for each child care category in Table 6.
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Schoonbroodt, A. Parental child care during and outside of typical work hours. Rev Econ Household 16, 453–476 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-016-9336-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-016-9336-y