Title: Parental time investments in children across countries and over time: What are the implications for inequality?
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: This project will use high quality diary data on individual's activities matched to country-level institutional data for several industrialized countries to explore the relationship between parental education and parental time investments in children, how this relationship has changed over the last five decades, and the factors underlying these trends. Recent evidence shows that parental time investments in children have increased in all developed countries, especially for highly educated parents (Aguiar and Hurst 2007; Jimenez-Nadal and Sevilla-Sanz 2011). The increase in parental time is surprising, given the declines in fertility, the increase in female labour force participation, and declines in home production activities in most developed countries, particularly for highly educated mothers (Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006; Sevilla-Sanz, 2010). This project will contribute to the socio-economic literature by exploring the causes behind trends in parental time investments. The policy relevance of this research is clear. Given the Government's interest in reducing inequality, this study will add to the body of work on the transmission of opportunities from parents to children by being the first study to assess the impact of the different institutional variables on the time parents with different educational attainment spend with their children. To the extent that less educated parents spend less time with their children than higher educated parents, and that less educated parents engage in child care activities that are less likely to contribute to the human capital of their children, there is scope for early interventions to equalize time with children across families from different social class backgrounds. The project will be dividing in two major parts. The first part will document changes in parental time investment for parents with different educational background, what has been called in the literature the "education gradient" of parental time. The second part of the project will aim to explain trends in child care by parents of different educational background across countries. First this study will look at whether the type of economy (according to the level of social equity, welfare provision and gender ideologies) has any relationship with the education gradient in parental time. Second, the study will investigate whether decreases in fertility may have had a differential impact on the time parents spend with children, as educated parents tend to have fewer children and thus may have more time to spend time with them. The third explanation will look at the role of income, as (wage) income has increased more for better educated parents over the last few decades. The fourth explanation has to do with safety concerns, and the fact that heightened concerns about safety may induce parents (especially highly educated parents) to accompany their children in their activities. The fifth explanation will look at the differing parenting practices that have been documented for parents with different educational backgrounds and the impact on the time spent with children by parents from diverging social class. College aspirations will constitute the sixth explanation. The rationale behind it is that college-educated parents will be drawn into the competition for college admissions more so than less educated parents. The seventh explanation will look at flexible working practices, which will be important in understanding the trends in the education gradient in parental time as long as the ability to reconcile work and family is greater for parents with a higher socio-economic status. The last explanation that the project will study is family composition. Large numbers of children in the UK live in lone parent families at some point in their lives and may suffer some disadvantages from doing so. Given the focus on children's welfare, there is a special need to include them in the analysis.


Research activity codes: 1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE