Who takes the child to the doctor? Mom, pretty much all of the time

ABSTRACT

We document the degree to which Danish mothers are responsible for handling their children’s medical services. Using unique administration data on detailed medical services that were performed on all Danish children from 1992 to 1995, we find that, on average, more than 90% of all children’s medical services were handled by their mothers rather than their fathers. To our knowledge, this is the first study to use medical register data to quantify domestic time use. As these services are mainly performed during work hours, this finding provides one mechanism by which absenteeism increases as a consequence of motherhood. Furthermore, the economic variables that should affect a household’s assignment of a task like taking the child to the doctor are shown to explain very little, suggesting that other factors, such as societal norms, are at play.

KEYWORDS:

• Child medical care
• child care
• household time allocation
• family gap

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J1
• J2
• I1
• D1

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Danish Social Science Research Council under Grant 300279. We would like to thank Mette Ejrnes and Herdis Steingrimsdottir for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Notes

¹ Using a subset of the sample for which we have accurate wage information, we verify that the results are similar when using the wage ratio rather than per cent of earnings earned by mothers. See online appendix.

² See appendix for a discussion of measurement error.

³ The results do not change if we consider families with 1 child in the current calendar year, but interpretation becomes more ambiguous as families leave the sample if they have a second child.

⁴ We consider children whose parents are either married or cohabiting in given year in order to avoid issues of child custody. Mothers handle even more child services when we also include parents who are not married or cohabiting. See supplemental appendix for figures in this case.

⁵ Publically subsidized child-rearing leaving was also introduced in 1994, see Simonsen and Skipper (2006) for detail.

⁶ fm also varies with the number of annual services, but again, never drops below 0.80, see appendix figure A3.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Samfund og Erhverv, Det Frie Forskningsråd [300279].