Parental Education and Parental Time with Children

摘要

Parents invest both material resources and their time into raising their children. Time investment in children is important to the development of human capital. It is also one possible mechanism through which economic status is transmitted from generation to generation.rnThis paper examines parental time allocated to the care of one's children. First, using data from the recent American Time Use Surveys, we highlight what we think are the most interesting cross-sectional patterns in time spent by American parents as they care for their children. (We will refer to the concepts of parental "child care" and parental "time spent with their children" interchangeably, though we discuss in the next section that the two measures might capture different things.) We find that higher-educated parents spend more time with their children; for example, mothers with a college education or greater spend roughly 4.5 hours more per week in child care than mothers with a high school degree or less. This relationship is striking, given that higher-educated parents also spend more time working outside the home. This robust relationship holds across all subgroups examined, including both nonworking and working mothers and working fathers.