Parental time investments in children across countries and over time: What are the implications for inequality?

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.

- Who will benefit from it?
This work is intended to benefit a range of academic and non-academic users. Because this will be the first project of its kind in the UK and, to the principal investigator's knowledge, elsewhere, and because the project will include cross-national comparisons, users include not only those from the UK, but also from Europe, North America, and other developed countries. Nonacademic users include civil servants and policy advisor bodies. The principal investigator will exploit her close contacts with Government departments such as the partnerships team in the Cabinet Office, which coordinate a range of policies across government. The Treasury will also be contacted because of its interest in well-being and supporting communities. The principal investigator will also maintain close links to the Department of Communities and Local Government and the Department of Education, which are the two Departments with prime responsibility for children's well-being. The principal investigator will also develop a list of key potential contacts in other Government departments, and MPs with an interest in this field. In addition to the All Party Parliamentary Groups in Parliament on the Economics of Wellbeing, there are other cross party groups on education, equalities and children, which constitute audiences the principal investigator will want to inform about the results of the project.

Other interest groups include Child Poverty Action Group, 4 Children, Day care trust, Gingerbread, Working Families, the Women's Budget Group (where the principal investigator is a member), and the Family and Parenting Institute; health professionals interested in the effect of parental time with children and child development, and parent's interest groups interested in how to make it possible for families to work and care for their children. Unions and workers representatives will also benefit from the findings in this research, to the extent that the type of job and the amount of work hours matter for reconciling family and work responsibilities, including childcare.

- How will they benefit from the work?
Policy makers will benefit from this work because the findings will improve our understanding of whether and why children born to parents with different educational attainments receive different parental time investments, which will have implications for policies designed to increase equality of opportunities early in life and to reduce inequality later in life. Employees and families, and organisations that represent them, will benefit from the research by learning new information about how parental time with children differs by parental educational background. This information should allow them to make informed parenting choices.

- What will be done to ensure that they have the opportunity to benefit from this research?
The findings of the project will be publicised to the general public and other interest groups through a dedicated section of the School of Business and Management website, which will be updated as the project develops. Key findings will be communicated in press releases to QM well-established network of media contacts, and non-technical summaries will be published in the School's Newsletter. The principal investigator will seek opportunities to offer briefings and to present our findings in a policy context and to demonstrate their policy relevance to Government Departments, MPs with an interest in this field, and other interest groups. The principal investigator will be holding a 1-day workshop at the end of the project where the main results of the project will be presented to policy makers and interest groups alike. The principal investigator will set up an advisory group This group will meet twice during the life of the project, once at the beginning where the project design will be discussed and the project impact plan put in place, and one at the end to discuss findings and write a report.