Abstract
This paper uses data from the American Time Use Survey to examine the effect of the timing of parents’ daily work schedules on their caregiving time on weekdays. Since the timing of employment is a choice, the decision to work non-standard hours is modeled jointly with caregiving. We find that high-wage non-standard mothers provide more caregiving than lower-wage non-standard mothers, while caregiving time performed by standard-time working mothers is not responsive to their wages. For fathers, caregiving is shown to be strongly related to marital status, the age of his children and the presence of other adults in the household.
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Notes
We use data drawn from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to instrument our childcare price measures.
Presser [2003] explains that structural labor demand shifts as well as the evolution of societal norms have contributed to the increase in non-standard jobs.
See also Han [2005] and Grosswald [2004] for discussions of the implications of parental non-standard work schedules for children and families.
Han [2004] also finds that mothers working non-standard shifts rely heavily on paternal childcare for their children. Henly et al. [2006] extend Han's work by focusing on low-income mothers. They find that low-income mothers who work in the evening use less center care but more total hours of non-parental care per year.
We define caregiving as the time parents devote to caregiving reported as the primary activity in the ATUS.
Gelbach [2002] finds an important role for public school eligibility in determining maternal labor supply.
In fact, some school systems still switch the child from morning to afternoon halfway through the school year.
Owing to the way caregiving is coded, it is possible for the mother to record caregiving minutes even if the child is asleep, if for example, she spent 15 min on the phone looking for a babysitter. However, the vast majority of caregiving time is done with children present.
The criteria for defining mothers or fathers are the same — a respondent with the time diary who lives in a household with at least one child under the age of 13 years where the child is recorded as “own household child.”
These means are unweighted because they reflect estimation sample descriptive statistics.
In the SIPP Wave 4 topical module, employed women with children under the age of 5 years were asked about their expenditure on childcare for their youngest child. In addition, employed women with children between the ages of 6 and 14 years were asked about their expenditure on childcare for their youngest child in that age range. We eliminated those whose youngest child was the age of 13 or 14 years and those who were either currently in the military, in school, or unemployed. We used the resulting sample to estimate the price of childcare for children aged 5 years or under and separately for children between the ages of 6 and 12 years. We retain these two childcare expenditure measures as separate regressors because the availability of 5 or 6 h of school time, which doubles as non-parental childcare time, makes childcare for 6–12 year olds very different from that for children aged 5 years and under. The procedure we used to estimate the hourly price of childcare is a standard bivariate selection correction model, described by Tunali [1986] and used by Connelly and Kimmel [2003a, 2003b]. The results of this bivariate selection correction model are available from the authors.
More specifically, we use the dot product of the predicted coefficients and values of the independent variables from the mothers in the ATUS sample. As is well known, incorporating generated regressors in this way produces biased standard errors. Owing to the complexity of our model, we have not corrected the estimated standard errors for this bias.
The sample omits a small group of parents who work all their non-standard employment hours at home. The rationale for omitting these respondents is that they may be working away from the home during standard work hours and then bringing work home to do in the evenings. This type of work at home may be more easily juggled with caregiving time than non-standard hours worked outside the home. The analysis is largely unchanged when they are included. For a full discussion of working at home simultaneously with care provision, see Callister and Singley [2004], who conclude that the bulk of such work serves more as a double burden than as a reflection of choices made to facilitate work/family balance.
Note that we are speaking here of the work schedule reported on the diary day, not a “usual” work schedule. Rapoport and Le Bourdais [2008] focus on the endogeneity of the usual schedule while treating the schedule reported on the diary day as exogenous.
According to Stewart [2009], “the zeroes in time-use data arise from a mismatch between the reference period of the data (the diary day) and the period of interest, which is typically longer.” However, for our interest, the reference period of the data coincides exactly with the period of interest. We focus on how non-standard work on the single diary relates to caregiving on that same single diary day. We are not interested in examining a longer time period. Thus, we feel that the tobit model is an appropriate choice for our research project.
We did estimate an alternative model in which we use an endogenous switch to estimate caregiving time use simultaneously with total paid work hours (both modeled as tobits) to incorporate the jointness of those two time choices. The coefficient estimates in the caregiving equations were nearly identical to the findings reported in this paper.
It could also be coming from the price of time effects on non-employed mothers. Mothers with no employment hours on a weekday diary day are excluded from our analysis here, but were included in Kimmel and Connelly [2007].
Diary data from the child-based Panel Survey of Income Dynamics might be more appropriate for considering this question.
Results available from the authors.
Bianchi et al. [2005] show that “child in room” minus primary caregiving time is similar to the secondary caregiving in past time diaries. Not all primary caregiving happens when the child is in the room, since primary caregiving may include making phone calls to secure a babysitter or meeting with the child's teacher, but most primary caregiving does coincide with having a child in the room. What is missing is when one is supervising children playing in a different room and what is included that perhaps should not be is “hanging out time,” such as watching TV together.
Full results available for the authors.
Stewart [2010] examines another aspect of the time of day of parental caregiving by considering the time of day of parent–child interactions. He argues that children are most alert around 11 am when most employed parents are not with them.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Suzanne Bianchi, Joyce Jacobsen, Liana Sayer and three anonymous referees from this journal. The paper was part of a larger project funded in part by the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
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Connelly, R., Kimmel, J. The Role of Non-standard Work Status in Parental Caregiving for Young Children. Eastern Econ J 37, 248–269 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/eej.2010.45
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/eej.2010.45