Center-Based Care and Parenting Activities

Abstract

We estimate effects of center-based care on parenting activities using time use data for Germany. Our estimates imply that center-based care reduces the overall time that parents spend with the enrolled child, but has only small negative effects on time spent doing activities together. Correspondingly, center-based care increases activities as a share of the time spent together with the child. The overall effect is driven by households with lower maternal education. Our findings imply that child development effects of center-based care may be explained, not just by the institutional environment, but also by changes that occur within the home environment.

Culture, Children and Couple Gender Inequality

“…playing with or reading to the child. Besides the activities, the time-use survey also contains indicators on whether the child was present at any time (Jessen et al, 2020b, use the terms 'parenting activities' and 'time with child' to differentiate between those). As parents of young children will still be interacting with the children and be somewhat constrained by their presence, it is not an unreasonable to assume that a general question for 'time spent on child care' will be interpreted this way.…”

Potential Impact of Daycare Closures on Parental Child Caregiving in Turkey

“…While time use data during the pandemic have yet to become available, the magnitude of the increase in the time burden of caring for young children during the pandemic can be roughly estimated by using data from recent time use surveys and estimating the variation in parental caregiving time by whether or not parents use nonparental childcare arrangements. For instance, using data from the 2012-13 German time use surveys, Jessen, Spiess, and Waights (2020) compare the time parents with and without daycare usage spend providing primary and secondary childcare in Germany. They find that, in the absence of daycare services, mothers spend an additional 134 minutes in parental caregiving activities, while fathers spend only 19 minutes more on these activities.…”