Home alone: supervision after school and child behavior

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Abstract

As female participation in the labor force continues to grow in the US, so too does reliance on non-parental child care. However, the high cost of child care has impeded the ability of many working mothers to find sufficient child care for their children. As a result, as recently as 1998 over eight million children ages five to 14 spent time without adult supervision on a regular basis in the US. I examine the effect of the lack of adult supervision after school on a panel of school-age children using ordinary least squares and fixed effect estimation. I find that children with adult supervision are less likely to skip school, use alcohol or marijuana, steal something or hurt someone. These findings suggest that expanding after school or child care programs typically geared to preschool-age children to accommodate more school-age children may have important consequences for their human capital development and labor market outcomes later in life.

Introduction

The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed a remarkable rise in female labor force participation and with it a large increase in the need for alternative child care. Estimates from the US Census Bureau indicate that 78 percent of women with school-age children were in the labor force in 1999, up from 64 percent in 1980 and 33 percent in 1950. For single women, the trend has recently escalated as a result of state welfare reform efforts that began in the early-mid 1990s and culminated in the federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996. Between 1994 and 1998, welfare caseloads dropped by 48 percent and, coincident with this reduction, the proportion of unmarried female family heads with dependent children who participate in the labor force increased from 66 to 78 percent, further increasing the need for child care among low-income mothers (Schoeni and Blank, 2000).

Due in part to the high cost of child care, working mothers may be unable to afford sufficient child care for their children. The child care policy debate has focused on increasing low-income mothers’ access to child care for their preschool children, with less attention paid to the child care needs of older children. However, in 1998 an estimated eight million children ages five to 14 spent time without adult supervision on a regular basis in the US, half of whom were 13 and 14 year olds, suggesting that the child care needs of school-age children are largely unmet (Miller, 1999). Left unsupervised, school-age children may be more likely to engage in antisocial or risky, potentially dangerous behavior. There is evidence that suggests that children who care for themselves after school (referred to as latchkey children) are at greater risk of truancy from school, stress, receiving poor grades, risk-taking behavior and substance abuse (Dwyer et al., 1990). In addition, the fact that juvenile crime rates triple between the hours of three and six in the evening and that children are most likely to be the victims of a violent crime committed by a non-family member during these same hours also suggest that supervision after school may be critical in promoting the health and well-being of school-age children (Fox and Newman, 1997, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 1996).

The focus of the present research is to estimate the impact of adult supervision after school on child behavior, including school truancy, relatively minor criminal activity such as stealing, alcohol or drug use, and hurting someone. Three factors distinguish this paper from previous research. First, the focus of this work is children age 10 to 14—an age group that has been largely unstudied in the child care literature. Second, the outcomes of interest are behavioral problems rather than cognitive development or educational achievement which have been the subject of most of the previous work linking parental time inputs and child quality. I focus on behavioral outcomes for two reasons: (1) research has shown that, in addition to cognitive and educational achievement, non-cognitive or behavioral outcomes are also important predictors of success in the labor market (Heckman et al., 2000), and (2) the link between adult supervision and youth behavior is more direct and obvious than the link to cognitive outcomes. The third factor that distinguishes this work from others is the employment of family fixed effects to account for the fact that mothers do not randomly select into the work force, nor do they randomly choose to arrange for their children to be supervised when they do.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents existing empirical work on the effect of parental time on child outcomes, Section 3 outlines the estimation strategy and describes the data, Section 4 presents the empirical results, and Section 5 concludes with a brief discussion of the policy implications.

Section snippets

Existing research on the effect of time inputs on child outcomes

Much of the previous empirical research on the effect of parental or adult time inputs on child behavior has focused on the impact of maternal employment during a child’s early life, specifically the first three years of life, and has typically defined child outcomes as some cognitive measure (such as child scores on the Peabody Picture and Vocabulary Test, or PPVT, reading comprehension and math exams). Many of these analyses are based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth Child–Mother

Estimation strategy

The theoretical model underlying the estimation is that developed by Becker and Tomes (1976). In this model, the family maximizes utility that is a function of various commodities and leisure. ‘Child services’ is one type of commodity and its level depends on both the quantity and quality of children. Child quality is a function of market inputs and parental time devoted to child care.

The measures of child quality (the outcomes of interest) in this analysis are antisocial or risky child

Regression results

In OLS regressions, supervision has a negative and significant effect on all outcomes except skipping school (for which the effect is negative but insignificant). For engaging in any of the four behaviors, supervision has a negative and significant effect of −0.075 (representing a 7.5 percentage point decrease). Among the three individual behaviors for which the impact of supervision is significant, the effect ranges from −0.018 for getting high/drunk, to −0.035 for stealing something and

Discussion

Adult supervision of school-age children is associated with a decrease in risky or anti-social behavior such as skipping school, using alcohol or drugs, stealing something or hurting someone. This relationship persists after controlling for unobserved family or maternal characteristics that may be correlated with both the supervision decision and child behavior, such as parental permissiveness. These findings have direct implications for child care policies. Historically, the focus of child

Acknowledgements

I am especially grateful to Janet Currie for invaluable guidance and advice. I also thank Pedro Dal Bó, Jeff Grogger, Joe Hotz, Guido Imbens, an anonymous referee and the editor for helpful suggestions. The Social Science Research Council’s Program in Applied Economics provided financial support. This work is based on chapter two of my UCLA dissertation.

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