How do children affect parents’ allocation of time?

Abstract

There is an extensive literature examining the relationship between elder care, child care and labour market activities, although these studies have largely overlooked their simultaneity. This article explores the relationship between these three activities, accounting for the influence that children have on parental allocation of time, using the 2002–2003 Spanish Time Use Survey (STUS). We find that the presence of children has quantitatively significant positive effects on the extent of dependent care-giving activities, with this increase in care-giving being compensated for by a decrease in the time devoted to the labour market.

Acknowledgements

The authors express their thanks to François-Charles Wolff for helpful comments and for the financial support provided by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (Project ECO2008-01297).

Notes

¹A substitution response appears, in such a way that with time being scarce, if informal care responsibilities increase, the carer's shadow wage rate will tend to increase and, thus, labour market activity will be depressed (Carmichael and Charles, 2003).

² See Ejrnaes and Portner (2004) and Lundberg and Rose (2000) as examples of how children affect parents' allocation of time.

³Imputed wage rate comes from the Spanish sample of the ECHP for the year 2001. We also estimate without the imputed wage rate and obtain similar results.

⁴These results are consistent with the results obtained when we use a three-stage least squares model and a sample of families with and without grandparents in the household.

⁵We do not include either child care or adult care in housework activities. We define leisure to include both leisure and personal care activities.

⁶ The null hypothesis is that the means are different.