Maternal Employment and Child Cognitive Development

The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) is an ideal dataset for studying the allocation of time. For those of us interested in child and family health outcomes, it offers one of the few windows into time allocation that may help us better understand plausible mechanisms linked to health and educational outcomes. If quality time is a valuable input that with significant health and human capital implications for children, particularly in these early formative years, then the ATUS gives us a chance to explore for those links.

The ever-interesting John Cawley has a new paper using the ATUS that explores for whether maternal employment pushes down child cognitive development via reduced time inputs invested in children. Here's the paper and here's the abstract

Recent research has found that maternal employment is associated with worse child performance on tests of cognitive ability. This paper explores mechanisms for that correlation. We estimate models of instrumental variables using a unique dataset, the American Time Use Survey, that measure the effect of maternal employment on the mother's allocation of time to activities related to child cognitive development. We find that employed women spend significantly less time reading to their children, helping with homework, and in educational activities in general. We find no evidence that these decreases in time are offset by increases in time by husbands and partners. These findings offer plausible mechanisms for the association of maternal employment with child cognitive development.

The actual results are pretty interesting. The authors find conditional on spending some time in the various activities they study, working is associated with mothers spending 5 fewer minutes reading to their kids, 6 fewer minutes helping with homework, 17 fewer minutes on other educational activities, 18 fewer minutes playing with their kids, 8 fewer minutes supervising their kids, and 139 fewer minutes spend with the children overall (p. 11).