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Parents’ education as a determinant of educational childcare time

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Abstract

We analyze the relationship between parents’ education and the time devoted to childcare activities, with a focus on activities aimed at increasing the child’s human capital. We use the sample of opposite-sex couples with children under age 18, from Spain (2002) and the UK (2000), included in the Multinational Time Use Study. By estimating a seemingly unrelated regressions tobit model, we find that mothers’ education is associated with an increase in the time devoted to educational childcare by fathers in both Spain and the UK, while it is associated with an increase in the time devoted to educational childcare by mothers in Spain. We also find that fathers’ education has no effect on the time devoted to educational childcare time by either parent. It seems that what really matters in determining the time devoted to educational childcare at the couple level is the educational level of the mother.

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Notes

  1. Previous research has shown a negative relationship between stress and brain development (e.g., Sapolsky 1996; Bremmer and Vermetten 2001; Teicher et al. 2002) and between physical/emotional neglect and children’s neurodevelopment and health (e.g., Anda et al. 2006; Dube et al. 2003; Edwards et al. 2003). Hence, the other two types of childcare (basic and supervisory childcare) may also influence children’s human capital. However, in this paper, we focus on the educational childcare time of parents.

  2. The first approach was developed by Samuelson (1956) and Becker (1974, 1981), and it is known as the “common preference” or “unitary” approach, under which family behavior can be rationalized as the outcome of maximizing a single utility function. A full review of theoretical models of the household can be found in Molina (2012).

  3. In many models of household behavior, children are considered to be “household public goods” that require parents’ financial and time resources. Alternative models explaining parents’ investments are those of Konrad and Lommerud (2000) and Peters and Siow (2002).

  4. Other examples showing the effects of the legal framework on marital investments are those of Brinig and Crafton (1994), Chiappori et al. (2002), and Wickelgren (2009).

  5. Information on the variables and on how to access the data is available on the MTUS website: http://www.timeuse.org/mtus. See Fisher et al. (2011) for a full description of the MTUS documentation. We use version W58, release 1 (accessed in October 2010). The MTUS has been widely used across the social sciences (Gershuny 2000; Gershuny and Sullivan 2003; Gauthier et al. 2004; Guryan et al. 2008; Gershuny 2009; Gimenez-Nadal and Sevilla-Sanz 2011, 2012).

  6. For a review of the different dimensions of childcare, see Budig and Folbre (2004), Folbre and Bittman (2004), Bianchi et al. (2006), Guryan et al. (2008), and Sevilla-Sanz et al. (2010).

  7. Although we follow Guryan et al. (2008) for the classification of the different types of childcare, we are limited by the classification of childcare activities in the MTUS. Thus, we are able to consider only three categories of childcare (we do not analyze “travel childcare”), and “educational” childcare and “supervise” childcare are slightly different than that in Guryan et al. (2008).

  8. As in Guryan et al. (2008), time spent preparing a child’s meal is included in “food preparation/ cooking” (main18) in the MTUS, a component of non-market production.

  9. Connelly and Kimmel (2010) found similar results for the USA using the American Time Use Survey. Hence, it seems that this pattern is replicated in other developed countries, and more research on this issue is needed. For instance, an interesting research question would be the underlying preferences for this empirical fact.

  10. Only 2 % of childcare slots for children up to age three in Spain are publicly funded, with the lowest percentage in Europe (Carrasco and Rodriguez 2000). The Spanish institutional context improved somewhat in recent years with the implementation of certain family-friendly policies and, although the portion of GDP devoted by the government to gender equality policies has increased from 0.5 % in 1998 to 1.1 % in 2005, this is still the lowest in the European Union (EUROSTAT 2012). Such policies, at the time of the survey, included the “baby-check” (2,500 €), and the Spanish law Ley para la igualdad efectiva de hombres y mujeres 2007/3.

  11. Examples of studies estimating SUR systems are those of Kalenkoski et al. (2005), Kimmel and Connelly (2007), Connelly and Kimmel (2009), and Gimenez-Nadal et al. (2010).

  12. In this paper, we consider that labor participation decisions are exogenously given, despite existing evidence showing the endogenous relationship between childcare and labor participation decisions (e.g., Connelly 1992; del Boca 2002; Schøne 2004; del Boca et al. 2005; Kornstad and Thoresen 2007). Since we are simultaneously estimating six equations, we do not have sufficient variables in the dataset that can be used as instruments for labor participation decisions.

  13. Since Becker (1965), it has been assumed that the wage is the opportunity cost of the time devoted to household production. Accordingly, there is a large empirical literature on time use examining the impact of wages and income on time allocation, including Kalenkoski et al. (2005), Kimmel and Connelly (2007), Connelly and Kimmel (2009), and Bloemen et al. (2009).

  14. The minimum value of the original ratio is more than “−1”, so we always have positive values of the transformed ratio, which holds real values of the logarithm for all couples.

  15. See the readme files of each survey included in the web page of the Center for Time Use Research, CTUR (http://www.timeuse.org), to see what values are considered as earnings interval limits.

  16. Despite that we operationalize individuals’ labor force participation using full time/part-time/no time employment status, rather than using hours of employment that day, we have also run robustness checks by including hours of work in the SUR system. We have estimated a six-equation SUR system on the time devoted by both members of the couple to basic childcare, educational childcare, and market work, for both the UK and Spain. Compared to our main results for educational childcare time, alternative estimates, including the time devoted to the labor market, are robust and are available upon request.

  17. An alternative specification including the partner’s childcare time as explanatory variable shows that the time parents devote to each childcare activity is complementary, in both the UK and Spain, since the time devoted to each childcare activity (basic, educational, and supervisory childcare) by the partner has a positive and statistically significant association with the time devoted by the respondent to the same childcare activity.

  18. The larger sample size in Spain may be driving greater statistical significance for regressions coefficients, leading to different results between countries. For this reason, we have estimated for the Spanish sample as if we had the same number of observations as in the British sample. To that end, we have built a random variable (uniform distribution) with values from 0 to 1, and sorted Spanish couples according to this value. Then, we have chosen the 1,527 couples with the lowest values of the random variable. The only difference with our main estimation is the association between mother’s secondary education and the time devoted to basic and educational childcare by fathers, and basic childcare by mothers, that turns out to be non-statistically significant. To the extent that our conclusions are similar for Spain if we restrict the sample to the same number of observations as in the sample of the United Kingdom, we confirm that differences in results are due to differences between the countries, and not to different sample sizes.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for comments from participants at the conference of the International Association for Time Use Research (2011), the conference of the European Economic Association (2011), the Becker Conference on the Economics of the Household (2011), and the European Society for Population Economics (2012), as well as the financial support provided by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Project ECO2012-34828). Remaining errors are our sole responsibility.

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  1. Department of Economic Analysis, Faculty of Economics, University of Zaragoza, C/Gran Via 2, 50005, Zaragoza, Spain

    J. Ignacio Gimenez-Nadal & Jose Alberto Molina

  2. Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn, Germany

    Jose Alberto Molina

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  1. J. Ignacio Gimenez-Nadal
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Gimenez-Nadal, J.I., Molina, J.A. Parents’ education as a determinant of educational childcare time. J Popul Econ 26, 719–749 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-012-0443-7

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