Abstract
Recent research has documented the relatively poor performance of boys, especially those from single-mother households, on a number of outcomes. Differences in noncognitive skills are often cited as a main contributing factor. However, we still know little about the underlying mechanisms driving differences in noncognitive skills and other outcomes. This article provides empirical evidence that parental time investments, defined as the amount of time that parents spend participating in activities with their child, change differentially by child gender following a transition from a two-parent to single-mother household. Boys experience larger investment reductions following the change in household structure, which may help facilitate previously documented gender gaps in noncognitive skills for those in single-mother households. Boys lose an estimated additional 3.8 hours per week in fathers’ time investments, nearly 30% of average weekly paternal investments across the sample. The difference is increasing with age, concentrated in leisure and entertainment activities, with little to no evidence that mothers increase investments in boys relative to girls after such transitions.
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Data Availability
The data used in this study are from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (https://simba.isr.umich.edu/data/data.aspx#gsc.tab=0).
Notes
Depending on how returns to parental time investments differ between boys and girls, differential returns could either compound or mitigate the effects of differential inputs on outcomes. However, this question is not directly addressed here. Rather, the focus is on testing whether investment levels differ across household types.
Externalizing behavior was assessed through a series of questions about the child’s behavior, including how frequently the child argues, fights, gets angry, acts impulsively, or disrupts activity. The externalizing behavior measures used by Bertrand and Pan (2013) are based on teacher ratings.
The age limits refer to the child’s age during an initial screening. For a small number of cases, the child’s age was outside these limits when the time diary data were recorded.
Exact wording from the codebook entries of the corresponding indicator variables is, Who else was doing the activity with the child? . . . Mother, and Who else was doing the activity with the child? . . . Father.
Figures A3 and A4 (online appendix) include all individuals who were in a two-parent household in the first wave and complete at least one survey in Wave 2 or 3 while in a two-parent or single-mother household.
About 3% of CDS observations are from individuals in single-father households, and another 3% are from individuals in households with no biological or adoptive parent present.
In an alternate specification, I include a set of age dummy variables interacted with gender. The results are robust to this specification.
Covariates include controls for other features of the household structure, including the number of biological siblings in the household, a marriage indicator for parents in the same household, and dummy variables for having stepparents in/out of the household. CDS wave dummy variables are also included as controls.
Age refers to the child’s age when the child completed the time diary associated with that observation.
See Table A1 in the online appendix for a comprehensive list of broad activity categories, along with examples of each. Figures A1 and A2 in the online appendix show Wave 1 means for different activity types.
This is distinct from the childcare activity type, which refers to an activity in which the child is providing care to another child.
This is also true for childcare, computer-related, and education and training.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Todd Elder, Stacy Dickert-Conlin, Scott Imberman, Michelle Maxfield, Kelly Vosters, Keith Teltser, Alex James, and seminar participants at Michigan State University for helpful comments. Any opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Education.
Funding
This research was supported by a Pre-Doctoral Training Grant from the IES, U.S. Department of Education (Award #R305B090011) to Michigan State University.
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Bibler, A.J. Household Composition and Gender Differences in Parental Time Investments. Demography 57, 1415–1435 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-020-00901-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-020-00901-8