Parental Education and Parental Time with Children

By Jonathan Guryan, Erik Hurst, Melissa S. Kearney. 2008

1,085 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Parents invest both their material resources and their time into raising their children. Time investment in children is thought to be critical to the development of "quality" children who will become productive adults. This paper has three goals related to the examination of parental time allocated to the care of their children. First, using data from the recent American Time Use Surveys (ATUS), we highlight what we think are the most interesting, and perhaps surprising, cross sectional patterns in time spent with children by parents within the United States. Second, we interpret our results in a Beckerian framework of time allocation with a view toward establishing whether parental childcare appears to be more akin to leisure or home production. Third, we examine data from a sample of 14 countries to establish whether the patterns we observe in the United States hold across countries and within other countries. We show that both within countries and across countries there is a strong positive relationship between parental education, or earnings, and time spent with children. We then show that time spent with children does not follow patterns typical of leisure or home production, suggesting an important difference. We speculate that one reason for this positive education gradient relates to the investment aspect of time spent with children.

Subfields: Demography, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5fc6a5a68f0ae46bdc4e5ebc4f7297c8343d5f4c

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Citations in the corpus

A Matter of Time: Father Involvement and Child Cognitive Outcomes (2018, positive): “The amount of time parents spend with their children and the content of such time have been shown to differ markedly by social strata (Bonke & Esping-Andersen, 2011; Cha & Song, 2017; Craig & Mullan, 2011; Guryan et al., 2008; Kalil et al., 2012).”
The widening academic achievement gap between the rich and the poor (2011, neutral): “Studies of parental time use show that highly educated and higher-income parents spend more time in child-care activities with their children than do lesseducated and lower-income children (Guryan, Hurst, and Kearney 2008; Ramey and Ramey 2010).”
The Trouble with Boys: Social Influences and the Gender Gap in Disruptive Behavior. NBER Working Paper No. 17541. (2011, positive): “22 We adopt Guryan, Hurst and Kearney (2008)’s definition of “total child care.””
Educational Gradients in Parents' Child‐Care Time Across Countries, 1965–2012 (2016, positive): “Paradoxically, women’s wages related positively to their caregiving (Guryan et al., 2008; Kimmel & Connelly, 2007) but negatively to their housework (Bryan & Sevilla-Sanz, 2011; Gupta, 2006).”
Do Summer Time-Use Gaps Vary by Socioeconomic Status? (2013, positive): “, Guryan et al., 2008; Ramey & Ramey, 2010). Second, aggregating time spent in each activity into one measure of involvement eliminates the multiple-comparisons problem, as advocated by Schochet (2008).(4) Third, while some categories of parent-child interactions listed in Panel B of Table 1 may sti”
Public Provision of Private Goods and Nondistortionary Marginal Tax Rates (2009, positive): “See Kimmel and Connelly (2007) and Guryan et al. (2008) for evidence about a positive wage elasticity for time spent with children and a negative wage elasticity for time spent on leisure.”
Early Maternal Time Investment and Early Child Outcomes (2016, positive): “17 This is in line with the evidence shown by Guryan et al. (2008) for the United States. For Germany, instead, Lauber (2014) finds no relationship between maternal education and time spent by mothers in child care activities.”
Inequality begins at home: The role of parenting in the diverging destinies of rich and poor children. (2015, positive): “Using data from the American Time Use Survey, Guryan et al. (2008) reported that maternal time with children increases steeply with education for working and nonworking mothers.”
Who Benefits from Universal Child Care? Estimating Marginal Returns to Early Child Care Attendance (2018, positive): “For example, Guryan, Hurst, and Kearney (2008) provide evidence for a positive relation between maternal education and time spent with children for both nonworking and working mothers.”