Are the Real Time Costs of Children Equally Shared by Mothers and Fathers?

This article attempts to estimate the time cost of children in France for couples who do not forgo any income, on the basis of the INSEE 1998–1999 time use survey. Having a child involves an increase in domestic work and/or the dedication of occupational income to pay for childcare. The reduction in “time for oneself”—leisure and personal care, i.e. 24 h less working hours paid or unpaid—is modelled for a dual-earner couple in full-time employment who do not use childcare services to increase his/her leisure time. Taking a couple in full-time employment avoids income endogeneity bias, since income is reduced by career interruption and part-time employment. These estimates account for this selection by full-time paid work. The article shows that time cost is roughly 1 h 30 min a day for a child aged 3–14, and is 4 h a day for each younger child. As this cost rises, the more fathers sacrifice some of their free time. The father and mother of two young children with a childminder thus each have only 11 hours of free time (including sleep) per day. The time cost of a large family (3 children) is equivalent to a full-time job on the labour market. In France, work-life balance policies and family pension entitlements only cover a small part of this cost.     

Time use in child care and housework and the total cost of children

The use of time for child care and housework among Swedish families is investigated. We allow the effect of children on child care and housework to vary by age of the child and also by whether the child is cared for outside the home or not. Our estimates allow us to compute the total cost of children in the form of the cost of time, and the cost of goods, services and housing.The result shows that time used for child care decreases sharply with the age of the child but this is not the case for time used for other housework. Considerable economies of scale is found to prevail for time used for child care. Child care outside the home reduces time use for other housework but the effect on time used for child care is quite small. For the average family time use cost make up more than half of total child cost. Our estimates indicate that decreased time use cost for children caused by care outside the home are not very different from a typical parental fee for public day care.This research was supported by a grant from the Swedish Council of Social Research (SFR). We thank Lennart Flood for useful comments on an earlier version.     

Intra-household work time synchronization

If partners derive utility from joint leisure time, it is expected that they will coordinate their work schedules in order to increase the amount of joint leisure. In order to control for differences in constraints and selection effects, this paper uses a new matching procedure, providing answers to the following questions: (1) Do partners coordinate their work schedules and does this result in work time synchronization?; (2) which partners synchronize more work hours?; and (3) is there a preference for togetherness? We find that coordination results in more synchronized work hours. The presence of children in the household is the main cause why some partners synchronize their work times less than other partners. Finally, partners coordinate their work schedules in order to have more joint leisure time, which is evidence for togetherness preferences.     

Mother’s home time and the production of child quality

This paper deals with the effect of mother’s time spent out of the labor force, and presumably in the home, on the “production” of child quality, where child quality is measured by intelligence (IQ), level of schooling attained, and market earning power. The results indicate that mother’s home time is most effective in producing (male) child quality for mothers who have attained relatively high levels of schooling. The results suggest that education programs which devote equal school resources to all (male) children do not necessarily provide equal educational opportunity and that the influence of family background on economic success is indirect, operating through home investments in children.     

Another Child? Fertility Ideals,Resources and Opportunities

Low fertility in most developed countries has prompted policy concern in relation to labour market supply, pensions, and expenditure on health and welfare services as well as policy debate about both the cost of children and the opportunity costs of parenthood. The extent to which family policy interventions can be effective in slowing or reversing fertility decline is much debated. This paper, based on a fertility module of the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey 2005, examines the current fertility, and ideal and expected fertility of a nationally representative sample of 455 parents of reproductive age and focuses on whether they plan to have another child. It compares the characteristics of those who intend to have another child with those who do not, and how parents with one child differ from those with more children. It addresses three questions about family size: (1) fertility ideals, (2) resources and the economic implications of childbearing, and (3) opportunities for childbearing and the effects of a late start on fertility expectations. It concludes that, despite a sustained period of low fertility in Scotland, childbearing ideals are robust and explanations of low fertility must derive from difficulties in realising those ideals. Difficulties in realising fertility aspirations are associated less with resources than with opportunities for childbearing, especially the timing of first birth. Those who delay their first birth are less likely to realise their ideal family size, and their lower fertility is associated with the opportunity costs of childbearing in terms of foregone qualifications, careers and earnings.     

Men's attitudes toward parenthood

In recent family literature, men are often characterized as deadbeat dads, with a focus on their lack of involvement, mainly financial but physical and emotional as well. At the same time, there has been little attention paid to how men feel about being parents. This paper examines men's attitudes toward parenthood using data from the National Survey of Families and Households. The results indicate (1) married men are significantly less likely than unmarried men to think that the stress of raising children, the ability to purchase goods, career time, leisure time, and old age security are important considerations in deciding whether or not to have a child; (2) men with higher education are more likely than less educated men to consider time for career and time for leisure and social activities important in making fertility decisions but are less likely to consider having someone to love important; and (3) black and Hispanic men are more likely to place importance on old age security than non-Hispanic white men.     

Parental Leave Take-Up of Fathers in Luxembourg

The study uses administrative data from Luxembourg to investigate fathers’ decisions to use parental leave. We focus on two measures of opportunity cost: the difference between the parental leave benefit and the salary of the father and the mean salary growth for a period of 6 months for each father. The first measure captures the direct opportunity cost, while the second is a proxy for foregone promotion opportunities. We use Cox proportional hazards model for the analysis. The results suggest a negative relationship between foregone income and taking parental leave. Surprisingly, salary growth appears to be positively related to the hazard of taking parental leave. Coefficients of control variables are in line with previous findings: fathers are more likely to use parental leave if they work in larger organization and for the first child.     

Trends in differentials in the workforce participation of mothers with young children in Australia 2002–2008

This paper analyses changes in the employment rates and hours worked of mothers with pre-school age children in Australia between 2002 and 2008, using data from Waves 2 to 8 of the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, a large-scale longitudinal survey of the household population. The employment rate of mothers with young children rose considerably over the period considered. However, the hours per employed mother changed relatively little on average. There are significant differentials in the mother??s employment rate by the number and ages of children, and by mother??s education, marital status and birthplace. Hours worked per employed mother vary with the mother??s age, education, marital status and birthplace, by the youngest child??s age, and the number of children under five. The paper pays particular attention to the change in these differentials over time. It finds the change over time for the mother??s employment rate varies significantly by the number of children, while for the hours worked it varies by mother??s education and marital dissolution, and the age of the youngest child. The implications of these patterns are discussed.     

Maternal employment and time with children: Dramatic change or surprising continuity?

Despite the rapid rise in mothers' labor force participation, mothers' time with children has tended to be quite stable over time. In the past, nonemployed mothers' time with children was reduced by the demands of unpaid family work and domestic chores and by the use of mother substitutes for childcare, especially in large families. Today employed mothers seek ways to maximize time with children: They remain quite likely to work part-time or to exit from the labor force for some years when their children are young; they also differ from nonemployed mothers in other uses of time (housework, volunteer work, leisure). In addition, changes in children's lives (e.g., smaller families, the increase in preschool enrollment, the extended years of financial dependence on parents as more attend college) are altering the time and money investments that children require from parents. Within marriage, fathers are spending more time with their children than in the past, perhaps increasing the total time children spend with parents even as mothers work more hours away from home.     

Children's Economic Roles in the Maya Family Life Cycle: Cain,Caldwell, and Chayanov Revisited

This article examines the relationship between household demographic pressure and interage transfers for a group of Maya subsistence agriculturists in Yucatán, Mexico. The authors use data from a field study conducted in 1992–93 on individual time allocation, relative productivity by age and sex, and caloric costs of activities to estimate age schedules of average consumption and production. Using these, they investigate the net costs of children to their parents and find that children have a negative net asset value up to the time they leave home. The direction of net wealth flows in this group is downward, from older to younger, and in economic terms the internal rate of return to children is highly negative up to the time they leave home. Nonetheless, children play a critically important role in the family's economic life cycle. On average, girls offset 76 percent of their consumption costs before leaving home at age 19, and boys offset 82 percent before leaving home at 22. Without the contributions from children as a group, parents would have to double or triple their work effort during part of the family life cycle if they were to raise the same number of children. By the thirteenth year of the family life cycle, children as a group produce more than half of what they consume in every year, and after the twentieth year children produce more than 80 percent of what they as a group consume. The authors also find that the elderly in the sample, ages 50 to 65, produce more than they consume. Thus while children have a negative net asset value to parents, the timing of their children's economic contribution across the family life cycle plays a key role in underwriting the cost of large families.     

The effects of time allocation on parental stress

The time allocated to various activities by both husbands and wives influences the stress experienced in life roles. Looking at the division of labor before as well as after the birth of a baby gives an indication of the parents' ability to cope with the stress of parenthood. Here, time allocation variables as well as child characteristics that might explain parental stress are examined based on responses of 117 couples to the Abidin parental stress index 4–7 months after the birth of their first child, measuring stress in 2 domains-parental and child each modeled for both mother and father as a function of personal characteristics of the baby and time allocated to child care, household production, paid work, and leisure. Standardized regression analysis reveals the most important predictor variables to be age and sex of the infant, with older infants and girls predicting lower stress scores, especially in the child domain of the mother. The allocation of time by both parents failed to predict stress scores.     

Flexible Work Hours and Other Job Factors in Parental Time with Children

Flexible working hours are typically seen to be advantageous to working parents, as the flexible hours more easily allow responsibilities of care and employment be balanced. But do flexible work hours actually mean that parents can spend more time with their children? This article explores this for parents of young children in Australia. The analyses use the time use diaries of children in the two cohorts of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC), from the first wave of the study in 2004. The study children in each cohort were aged about one year old and 4–5 years old. For each child, a weekday and weekend diary were completed, giving 5,579 weekday diaries and 4,478 weekend diaries. The diaries captured details of the children’s activities and of who they were with in each 15 min period of a day, and so allowed calculation of the total amount of time the child was with their mother and with their father. Multivariate analyses were used to determine whether amounts of mother-child and father-child time varied according to flexibility of work hours, taking account also of other job characteristics, family and child characteristics. The analyses showed that flexible work hours had only weak independent relationships with mothers’ and fathers’ time with children. Inasmuch as flexible hours are beneficial for parents, it appears that this is related to their ability to distribute their time between work and family time, rather than giving them more time with children.     

Fathers�� time investments in children: do sons get more?

This paper uses the 2003 American Time Use Survey to examine the effects of child gender on paternal time with children in married two-parent families. The results show that fathers of boys invest more time in children than those with only daughters and reduce their leisure time without children to do so. Boys get more of this time than girls in all-girl families and compared to their own sisters. Girls with brothers receive more of fathers’ time than girls with only sisters, but this is primarily in television watching, so whether this advantages them is open to question.     

Parental divorce in childhood and demographic outcomes in young adulthood

We investigated the long-term effects of parental divorce in childhood on demographic outcomes in young adulthood, using a British longitudinal national survey of children. Our analyses control for predisruption characteristics of the child and the family, including emotional problems, cognitive’ achievement, and socioeconomic status. The results show that by age 23, those whose parents divorced were more likely to leave home because of friction, to cohabit, and to have a child outside marriage than were those whose parents did not divorce. Young adults whose parents divorced, however, were no more or less likely to marry or to have a child in a marriage. Moreover, even in the divorced group, the great majority did not leave home because of friction or have a child outside marriage.     

我国留守老人状况研究

本研究利用2000年我国第五次人口普查抽样数据对我国留守老人的总量、年龄构成、地区构成和家庭类型等进行了分析。结果表明,目前我国留守老人总量为1790万人,留守老人分布密度在市镇乡之间和地区之间存在明显差异,人口流动使生活在隔代家庭的老年人比重大大增加。     

The links between women’s employment and children at home: Variations in low- and middle-income countries by world region

As fertility declines in low- and middle-income countries, the time women devote to childbearing and rearing may also be reduced. This shift has been described as one of the positive consequences of the demographic transition, as it opens opportunities for women to pursue educational and employment opportunities that were previously constrained by the demands of bearing and raising children. We estimate the numbers of children residing at home (with their mother) for women in 58 countries in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. We then examine the association between women’s employment and having children at home. Finally, we assess trends over recent decades in the relationship between employment and childbearing, and differences in this relationship by mother’s occupation. We find a negative association between women’s employment and having children at home; this association varies substantially by world region, age of child, and mother’s occupation.     

The effects of children on divorce and re-marriage: a multivariate analysis of life table probabilities

Summary Using proportional hazards models and multiple decrement life tables to analyse data from the 1973 National Survey of Family Growth, this study tests the hypotheses that, net of the effects of such factors as age at separation or divorce, the probabilities of divorce after separation and of re-marriage after divorce would be lower for women with larger numbers of children or younger children, and that these transitions would take longer than for women with fewer or older children or women who were childless; and that there would be an interaction between number of children and age of youngest child. Results included: (1) the probability that mothers of two or more children would divorce after separation was significantly lower than for childless women, or those with only one child; (2) among whites, mothers of three or more children were at a significant disadvantage regarding their chances of re-marriage, whereas the probability that a black mother of three or more children would re-marry was no smaller than that of a woman with fewer or no children; (3) among whites, the presence of a youngest child aged between two and five years at separation decreased the probability of divorce after separation; (4) there was no interaction effect between number and age of children; and (5) in each category of family size and age of youngest child, the probability that a black woman would divorce after separation or re-marry after divorce was lower than for white women. The results have important implications for the study of divorce and re-marriage, and for understanding of problems of single-parent families.     

Mixing Bismarck and child pension systems: an optimum taxation approach

Pensions with a strong tax–benefit link (Bismarck pensions) minimise the labour–leisure distortion of the public pension system. By contrast, pensions with a strong link of benefits to the number of children (child pensions) minimise the fertility distortion. When both types of distortion are present, we obtain a Corlett–Hague result regarding the optimal mix of the two pension formulae: the Bismack pension should be given a positive weight if and only if children are more complementary to leisure than consumption. Alternative fertility instruments such as child benefits turn out to be perfect substitutes to a child pension.     

Estimating intrahousehold allocation in a collective model with household production

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the intra-family distribution of income and the individual demand for leisure and household production from Swedish cross-sectional household data. As a basis for the analysis, we use a collective model where each individual is characterized by his or her own utility function and divides total time between leisure, household production and market work. For the purpose of comparison, we also estimate a version that is consistent with a more traditional model of labor supply, the unitary model. Received: 14 April 2000/Accepted: 12 January 2001     

The Cash Opportunity Costs of Childbearing: An Approach To Estimation Using British Data

The opportunity costs of rearing British children in terms of cash earnings foregone by their mother are estimated for a typical family. Data from the Women and Employment Survey (1980) provide estimates for hourly pay as a function of work experience and current hours of work. They also make possible the generation of participation and hours profiles for representative women with different numbers of children, which, together with the earnings function are used to simulate lifetime income. Earnings foregone as a result of bearing and rearing two children are roughly equally composed of three effects, on participation, hours and pay. They exceed direct costs, and do not rise proportionally with family size. They are sensitive to the spacing of births but not, undiscounted, to the timing of the first one. The method and results contrast markedly with those of a similarly motivated study of US women, by Calhoun and Espenshade. It is argued that the non-linearity of the earnings function and state dependence in British labour force transitions would violate the assumptions which permitted the US exercise to be based on a multi-state labour force life-table.