Children's Time Use: Labor Divisions and Schooling in Indonesia

Data from the Worker and Iron Status Evaluation are used to examine gendered patterns in children's time in market and nonmarket work, schooling, and leisure in Indonesia (N = 2,929). Boys spend more time in market work; girls spend more time in nonmarket work. Work responsibilities increase with age as well as gender differentials in children's time use. By age 18, girls spend nearly 1 more hour per day working and enjoy significantly less leisure time, but the gender gap in schooling is not significant, suggesting that parents and children are committed to both work and schooling. Additionally, Tobit regression results suggest that parents' education, household income, and rural residency are important predictors of children's labor and schooling time. Key Words: family diversity, family roles, gender, non-U.S. families, time diary methods. Time is an important resource, and how cluldren use their time may have significant consequences for educational achievement and the development of gendered roles within families. Whereas time diary data in the United States have provided insight into the multiple contexts of children's daily lives that create avenues for socialization and learning (Bianchi & Robinson, 1997; Hofferth & Sandberg, 2001), less is known about how children and adolescents in developing countries spend their time. In many low-income countries, children are expected to become economically productive at an early age. Many studies have examined the consequences of child labor on educational achievement. These studies suggest that the relationship between work and schooling differs across country contexts as well as across families and individuals; in some cases, child labor competes with schooling, whereas in others, work is combined with schooling (Arends-Kuenning & Amin, 2004; Ravallion & Wodon, 2004). Less attention, however, has been paid to understanding children's time use in other dimensions of life such as nonmarket work, time spent in schoolrelated activities such as study time, and discretionary leisure. This article uses both children's and adolescent's time diaries collected from Indonesia to describe how Indonesian youths spend time in multiple activity contexts. It contributes to a small number of time diary studies of adolescent time use set in developing countries (i.e., Arends-Kuenning & Amin, 2004; Ritchie, Lloyd, & Grant, 2004). Like previous studies, the current study examines gender differentials in children's schooling and market work. Following Levison and Moe (1998), the current study expands traditional definitions of child labor to include both market-oriented labor and domestic housework. This article also combines children's and adolescents' time diaries with detailed demographic information to describe how the characteristics of children and households correlate with time use. Indonesia provides a complex example of a society that, on one hand, achieved near-universal and gender-neutral primary schooling by the 1980s and, on the other hand, still may present significant barriers to girls' educational attainment (Kevane & Levine, 2000). In 1973, the Indonesian government began a massive educational expansion program resulting in an increase of primary school enrollment from 60% in 1971 to 83% in 1978 (Duflo, 2001). By 2002, at the time of the survey, enrollment in primary school was 93% with no significant gender gap (United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund [UNICEF], n.d.). Currently, Indonesia follows a 6 - 3 - 3 system, meaning 6 years of primary schooling, followed by 3 years of lower secondary and 3 years of high school. Children enter first grade at age 7 and are expected to attend school for 3 hours per day during the first 2 years of primary school, 5 hours per day until Grade 5, and about 6.5 hours for Grade 6 and above. Aggregated statistics, however, conceal variation in educational achievement. …