Couple Bargaining or Socio-Economic Status?

ABSTRACT

The quality of time dedicated to child care has potentially positive effects on children's life chances. However, the determinants of parental time allocation to child care remain largely unexplored. We assess two main explanations for differences among parents in the amount of time spent with children. The first, based on the relative resources hypothesis, links variation in time spent with children to the relative attributes (occupation, education or income) of one partner with the other. The second, derived from the social status hypothesis, suggests that variation in time spent with children can be attributed to the relative social position of the couple (i.e. higher status couples spend more time with children regardless of within-couple difference). To investigate these questions, we use a sample of parents living in a partnership with children younger than 10 years old from the 2002 to 2003 Spanish Time Use Survey (STUS) (n = 7438). We find little support for the ‘relative resources hypothesis’, although it has some explanatory power on supervisory and routine activities performed with children. Instead, consistent with the ‘social status hypothesis’, we find that time spent on child care is attributable to the social position of the couple, regardless of between-parent differences in income or education. The ‘social status hypothesis’ is especially relevant for explaining the time that parents devote to activities that have a higher potential for the development of the child's cognitive and social capabilities.

Key words:

• parental care
• time use
• Spain

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Spain's Ministry of Science and Innovation [CSO2010-17811/SOCI] for financing this research.

Notes

1. Time use data do not provide direct information on the depth and intensity of the parent–child interactions. In order to capture qualitative dimensions of this interaction, we resort to relying on information concerning the type of activity, its possible simultaneity with other activities, and the persons with whom the activity was performed.

2. We present in detail our classification of parental child care activities in section 3.1.

3. This increase refers to ‘primary’ activities reported in surveys using the ‘time diary’ method. Responses to the question ‘What where you doing’ are commonly known as primary activities because they are thought to be the most salient activity for respondents. Responses to the question ‘What else were you doing’ are referred as secondary activities (Sayer et al. 2004).

4. This transmission of human capital is not solely attributable to the high quality of child care in early life, but also by the fact that certain parents have more skills to transmit (Hsin 2009).

5. For these last authors, as for many others, it is not entirely clear whether they include child care together with household chores in their analysis of ‘domestic labour’.

6. Continuous variables are set at the mean values.

7. It may well be the case that higher earners under-report higher shares of their income; but hopefully the ranking of households/individuals is not modified.

8. Obviously, households where nobody had a job at the time of the survey could not be classified, and a residual category had to be included.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pau Baizán

Pau Baizán is ICREA research professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain). His research interests are in the study of family dynamics, time use, and on international migration, particularly focusing on the effects of institutional factors and on comparative research.

Marta Domínguez

Marta Domínguez is associate professor at the Observatoire sociologique du changement – OSC (Sciences Po, Paris, France). Her work focuses on the sociology of family and gender, and she contributes to TransParent, a European research program which studies the division of domestic duties among couples. She also teaches first and second year courses at Sciences Po, including the Introduction to Sociology and the Sociology of Family.

María José González

M. José González is associate professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain). Her research interests are family formation, time use, child well-being and gender inequalities. She also participates in the TransParent research project (Ref. CSO2010-17811/SOCI) which analyses changes in the division of work around the time of first birth, and its impact on gender inequalities in the household and the labour market.