Mothers' Employment, Parental Involvement, and the Implications for Intermediate Child Outcomes

Gender in intergenerational educational persistence across time and place

“…The first is the household production model which first appeared in Becker and Tomes (1979;1986) and was further developed by Chiswick (1988) and Gang and Zimmermann (2000) to account for the role of mothers' labor force participation in the intergenerational transmission of human capital. Here mothers alone are responsible for the home production of children's education -a highly stylized aspect of the model which nevertheless parallels the empirical reality of mothers spending more time in education with their children than fathers (Leibowitz, 1974;Zick et al, 2001;Sayer et al, 2004). The model further says that fathers' education is important to their descendants' educational attainment only in that the fathers' higher education increases their earnings capacity, and some of the higher earnings are used to invest in the descendants' education.…”

Cultural participation and time restrictions

“…The (quality of) time and activities parents spend in the light of media socialization thus decrease with a greater number of siblings. Recent research, however, has shown that family size does not negatively affect the frequency with which mothers read to their children; a possible explanation is that reading aloud can be done simultaneously with multiple siblings (Zick et al, 2001). Nevertheless, from the child's point of view we expect a large number of siblings to negatively affect the parental media socialization experienced by each individual child.…”

“…Working mothers are better equipped (e.g. have more cognitive and social skills) to guide their children's development, but they face considerable time restrictions (Zick et al, 2001). Since we include a parent's socioeconomic resources in the modelling, this study assumes that the mother's working status manifests itself mainly in time restrictions.…”

Human capital investments in children – A comparative analysis of the role of parent- child shared time in selected countries

“…The few studies that link parental time to children's human capital development focus on parent-child time spent in specific activities such as shared leisure (e.g., cultural events, sporting activities), educational activities (e.g., helping with homework), and/or eating time. These studies document the positive relationship between the time parents share with children in non-care activities and developmental benefits within a single country (Buchel & Duncan 1998, Zick et al 2001, Dubas & Gerris 2002, Crosnoe & Trinitapoli 2008.…”

“…We meet the CIA assumption by doing two things. First, we include in X , both parental and child characteristics that have been found to be associated with time spent with children (Buchel & Duncan 1998, Zick et al 2001, Dubas & Gerris 2002, Sayer et al 2004, Craig 2005, Crosnoe & Trinitapoli 2008. We follow the specification of past research as closely as possible across all three analyses given the limits on the information available in each of the three time diary data sets we utilize.…”