Parental child care during and outside of typical work hours

Abstract

It has been argued that when analyzing time use data, child care should be treated separately from leisure or housework because, unlike these two, its income gradient is positive. 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 during TWH the opportunity cost of spending time with children is first and foremost in terms of forgone earnings, while outside of TWH it is mainly in terms of leisure or housework. Indeed, I find that during TWH active child care is actually decreasing in income and, hence, behaves a lot like leisure and other household chores. Outside of TWH, fathers partly catch up to mothers especially in high income families. Indeed, mothers' child care is still slightly decreasing in income, while fathers' active care is increasing. Implications for theory are derived in a static framework of time allocation and child quality production which encompasses the recent literature on the topic. Similar to patterns in leisure and housework, the variation in child care during TWH can be rationalized by assuming a high elasticity of substitution between leisure, consumption and child quality where the substitution effect dominates the income effect. However, the facts outside of TWH point to systematic differences by income in preferences or productivity. For instance, assuming father's productivity in child care is increasing, while mother's is decreasing in income could be a potential rationale for the observed behavior.

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ORCID for Teresa McGowan: orcid.org/0009-0002-9231-3743

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