Mother's Home Time and the Production of Child Quality (original) (raw)
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Parents’ Education as a Determinant of Educational Childcare Time
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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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This article uses the 1986 Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data set to investigate the impact of maternal employment on children's intellectual ability, as measured at the age of 4 by using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). Results from multivariate regression analysis show a statistically significant adverse effect of mother's employment on children's intellectual ability, but only for boys in higher income families. Furthermore, the negative impact was related to the timing of maternal employment: employment during the boys' infancy had a statistically significant negative effect on PPVT scores at the age of 4. This pattern was not found for girls, for children in low-income families, or for families in which mothers resumed their employment after the child's first year of life. The impact of other demographic trends in recent years—declining fertility and rising marital instability—are also investigated. The results show an adve...
Educational Gradients in Parents' Child-Care Time Across Countries, 1965-2012
Journal of Marriage and Family, 2016
Parental time with children leads to positive child outcomes. Some studies have reported a positive educational gradient: Highly educated parents devote more time to children than other parents. Furthermore, some research finds that parental child care increased over time. Less certain is whether highly educated parents increased their time more than less educated ones did, whether parenting trends for mothers and fathers are the same, and whether observed patterns characterize all Western countries or only some. Hypotheses inspired by theories of social diffusion, class differentiation, and ideologies of child rearing are tested with time-use data for 11 Western countries between 1965 and 2012. For both mothers and fathers, results indicated a widespread educational gradient and an increase in childcare time. In a number of countries, the positive educational gradient increased; nowhere was it diminished. Thus, the advantages of intensive parenting continued to accrue to the well-educated elite.
2002
The first objective of this article is to clarify which model best captures the structure and trend of the influence of social origin on children's education. The second objective is to analyse how general conclusions on historical trends in educational reproduction change if we add the mother's status background to the model. Six contrasting hypotheses are derived from the body of literature dealing with models on families' socioeconomic status. All hypotheses are translated into empirical models and their explained variance is compared. A pooled data set is used that contains data from the Netherlands, West Germany, and the USA. The Modified Dominance Model, that distinguishes the influence of the highest from the lowest status parent, has the best model fit. Regarding the second objective we see that adding the mother's influence to that of the father's does not change general conclusions on trends in educational reproduction. Over time the influence of both parents decreases continuously. However, the influence of the mother's education and occupational status on children's educational attainment is substantive.
Parental family income and the socioeconomic attainment of children
Social Science Research, 1987
Like others before us using different data, we find significant effects of parental family income on the completed schooling and wage rates of adult children using intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We explore various hypotheses regarding these effects, finding substantial support for the economic hypothesis that income, regardless of its source, is invested by parents in their children; mixed support for the hypothesis that fathers serve as role models for their sons; and no support for the welfare dependency hypothesis. Rather than serving as positive role models, working mothers appear to have SigIIifiCRntly less successful sons. 0 1!%7 Academic press, Inc.
Household Choices and Child Development
The Review of Economic Studies, 2014
The growth in labor market participation among women with young children has raised concerns about the potential negative impact of the mother's absence from home on child outcomes. Recent data show that mother's time spent with children has declined in the last decade, while the indicators of children's cognitive and noncognitive outcomes have worsened. The objective of our research is to estimate a model of the cognitive development process of children nested within an otherwise standard model of household life cycle behavior. The model generates endogenous dynamic interrelationships between the child quality and employment processes in the household, which are found to be consistent with patterns observed in the data. The estimated model is used to explore the effects of schooling subsidies and employment restrictions on household welfare and child development.
Parental Time and Child Outcomes: Does Gender Matter?
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
Using different econometric specifications this paper analyzes the relationship between the time parents spend with their children, child-related expenditure and the results obtained by them, with particular attention to gender differences. The authors use PSID-CDS data from 1997 to 2007 and consider separately boys' and girls' test scores in reading and writing and math and logical reasoning. The amount of time mothers spend with children is always greater than fathers but changes over the life cycle of the children. In fact, the time mothers spend with children decreases as the child grows up and is greater with daughters, while the reverse is true of fathers. The estimates show that the impact of mothers' and fathers' time with children varies considerably with respect to the two cognitive tests, and is considerably greater in the case of highly-educated parents.
Home with Mom: The Effects of Stay-at-Home Parents on Children’s Long-Run Educational Outcomes
Journal of Labor Economics, 2014
In 1998 the Norwegian government introduced a program that increased parents' incentives to stay home with children under the age of three. Many eligible children had older siblings, and we investigate how this program affected long-run educational outcomes of the older siblings. Using comprehensive administrative data, we estimate a difference-in-differences model which exploits differences in older siblings' exposures to the program. We find a significant positive treatment effect on older siblings' 10th grade GPA, and this effect seems to be largely driven by mother's reduced labor force participation and not by changes in family income or father's labor force participation.