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The incremental time costs of children: An analysis of children's impact on adult time use in Australia

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 14; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13545700701880999

1466-4372

Lyn Craig, Michael Bittman,

demographic modeling and climate adaptation

Abstract Raising children takes both time and money. Scholars have sought convincing ways to capture the costs of children, but even when these estimates include indirect costs, such as mothers' foregone earnings, they fall short of the true time costs involved. This paper uses data from the 1997 Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey to study how the allocation of time differs across households with varying numbers and ages of children and how households with children differ from those without children. It also examines the intra household division of time resources, showing how childcare, related unpaid work, and the total market and non-market workloads compare for a couple in the same household. It includes secondary activity in an analysis of total parental time commitments to give a more accurate picture of the time cost of children than is possible on the basis of analyzing "primary" activities alone. Key Words: Childrentime usemotherhoodgender equitysecondary activityJEL Codes: J16, J22, J13 Notes Sleeping is frequently recorded with childcare as a secondary activity. While this does evoke the continuous responsibility of parenthood, sleep cannot be regarded as work. We therefore decided to exclude from our calculations time in which childcare was recorded as a secondary activity to sleep. The US National Academy of Sciences describes the ABS survey as "the Mercedes of time-use surveys" (Committee on National Statistics Citation2000: 30). The TUS data does not identify sexual orientation, so it is not possible to include same-sex couples in the analysis. This paper treats cohabiting couples as de facto married, following the Australian government's convention. Because time-use data almost always contain a high number of zero observations, many econometric analyses of time use have used Tobit regression modeling. However, time-use specialists prefer OLS to Tobit (Jonathan Gershuny and Muriel Egerton Citation2006; Jay Stewart Citation2006) because time-use zero observations do not arise from the data being truncated or censored – the circumstances in which Tobit models are appropriate (Jeffrey M. Wooldridge Citation2003; William H. Green Citation2003). Since in time use zero observations are as likely to result from non-participation as from data limitations, Tobit models that impute values will produce biased results. In recent intensive methodological investigation of this issue, time-use specialists argue that OLS is statistically more appropriate than Tobit (Jude Brown and Peter Dunn Citation2006; Gershuny and Egerton Citation2006; Stewart Citation2006). (a) The ABS codes childcare activities as ABS codes 500 – 99: teaching, helping children learn, reading, telling stories, playing games, listening to children, and talking with and reprimanding children; feeding, bathing, dressing, putting children to sleep, carrying, holding, cuddling, hugging, soothing, journeys, and communications associated with childcare activities; supervising games and recreational activities such as swimming, being an adult presence for children to turn to, maintaining a safe environment, monitoring children playing outside the home, and keeping an eye on sleeping children (ABS Citation1998). (b) The ABS codes domestic labor as ABS codes 400 – 99: housework; food or drink preparation and meal clean-up; laundry, ironing, and clothes care; tidying, dusting, scrubbing, and vacuuming; paying bills and household management; lawn, pool, and pet care; home maintenance and, shopping for goods and services; communication and travel associated with these activities (ABS Citation1998). (c) The ABS codes paid work as ABS codes 200 – 99: employment-related activities (main job; other job); unpaid work in family business or farm; work breaks; job search; communication and travel associated with these activities (ABS Citation1998). The present data identify family configuration by the number of children and the age of the youngest child not by a measure of the age gaps between each child.