Abstract
This paper analyzes the effect of paid work by coupled parents of young children on the joint decisions to spend time engaged in childcare. We explore this using Australian Time-Use Survey data from 2006. We examine the effect of paid work in terms of the effect that total work time on a given day has on the amount of time spent on childcare; the allocation of time on activities across work and non-work days; and the effect of non-traditional work hours. The results show that mothers perform a large share of childcare, irrespective of their earning power or their partner’s availability to take on some of these tasks. The use of formal and informal childcare by others allows the mother to balance the competing demands of work and her own childcare; an effect that does not hold for fathers. These effects on childcare are also almost solely concentrated in the routine component of childcare (e.g. preparing meals, changing nappies), with each parent ‘protecting’ interactive childcare from the effect of both paid work and the relative availability of their partner to take on some of this childcare.
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Notes
Weekend was used as a controlled exogenous variable instead of used as a data separator in order to keep a larger sample size. There were 365 weekdays and 243 weekend days in the sample, which would have significantly affected the reliability of the model.
Even so it might be the case that daily working hours fluctuate around a fixed or usual daily amount according to a person or their partner’s needs, as noted by Hallberg and Klevmarken (2003: 215). We therefore also developed a model where parents determine their work hours jointly. The results of this model were not substantially different to those for the model presented below, where worktime decisions are treated as separate rather than simultaneous decisions.
In the following multivariate analysis we indeed find a close and significant correlation between usual and actual hours worked.
We note that there was a very small sample of days where only the mother was working, which may partially explain the relatively smaller number of significant correlations in this model.
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Argyrous, G., Rahman, S. How does paid work affect who does the childcare? An analysis of the time use of Australian couples. Rev Econ Household 15, 383–398 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-014-9274-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-014-9274-5
Keywords
- Time-use
- Childcare time
- Employment
- Gender
- Time allocation
- Australian Time-Use Survey
- Hours of work
- Labor force participation