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What Did You Do Today? Children's Use of Time, Family
Composition, and the Acquisition ofSocial CapitalAuthor(s): Suzanne
M. Bianchi and John RobinsonSource: Journal of Marriage and Family,
Vol. 59, No. 2 (May, 1997), pp. 332-344Published by: National
Council on Family RelationsStable URL:
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SUZANNE M. BIANCHI AND JOHN ROBINSON University of Maryland
What Did You Do Today? Children's Use of Time, Family
Composition, and the Acquisition
of Social Capital
Using time-diary data collected from a statewide probability
sample of California children aged 3-11, we examine the amount of
time children spend on four activities presumed to affect their
cognitive and social development-reading or being read to, watching
TV, studying, and doing household chores-and how that time varies
by four family characteristics: parental education, maternal
employment, number of parents in the household, and family size. As
expected, children of highly educated parents study and read more
and watch TV less. Contrary to expectations, chil- dren of mothers
who are employed part-time watch significantly less TV than
children of moth- ers at home full-time. Otherwise, there are few
significant differences by mother's extent of paid employment, the
presence of a father, and the number of siblings. Thus, the results
reinforce the thesis that parental education is the predominant
predictor of the human and social capital invest- ments that
children receive.
Department of Sociology, 2112 Art-Sociology Building, Col- lege
Park, MD 20742-1315 ([email protected]).
Key Words: children, family composition, social capital, time
use.
Changes in the American family have resulted in a growing
uneasiness about the well-being of children in the United States.
Some researchers note how the increased educational attainment of
parents and declining family size bode well for children's economic
security (Bianchi, 1990; Haveman & Wolfe, 1993; Hernandez,
1993). At the same time, others have emphasized trends like the
increase in single parenting that result in more poverty and
undermine children's economic well- being (McLanahan &
Sandefur, 1994). Although the research on maternal employment has
been mixed and inconclusive (Bronfenbrenner & Crouter, 1982;
Presser, 1995), there continues to be concern about the potentially
negative effects of working mothers. Debate continues over whether
the dramatic increase in mothers' labor force participation and
more single parenting have diminished parental attention to
children and eroded children's chances of success in school and in
other arenas of life.
Sociologists have emphasized the importance of parental
transmission of cognitive ability and academic expectations for the
educational and oc- cupational achievement of children (Duncan,
Featherman, & Duncan, 1972; Sewell & Hauser, 1980). The
notion of "human capital," a term so- ciologists borrowed from
neoclassical economists, infuses our understanding of the
Journal of Marriage and the Family 59 (May 1997): 332-344
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Children's Use of Time
goals of many childhood activities, particularly schooling. In
this view, accumulating skills in childhood is of paramount
importance, and under- standing what impedes and what enhances
devel- opment of competencies that will translate into success
later in life becomes an important focus of the study of children
and childhood activities.
Sociologists, particularly James Coleman (1988), have broadened
the economist's notion of human capital to encompass what has been
called "social capital." Social capital, like human capi- tal,
increases children's future productivity, but investments depend on
the relationships in which children are embedded. So, for example,
a child may have a talented and highly educated parent and thus be
genetically endowed with great po- tential for cognitive
development, but interactions with that parent are needed to convey
encourage- ment and expectations. Social interaction with parents
thus can create resources that will en- hance the child's
realization of his or her potential for achievement and later
success. Parental re- sources also place children in certain types
of communities and educational environments where social
interactions can provide further social capi- tal to facilitate
"good" child outcomes.
McLanahan and Sandefur (1994) argue persua- sively that the
dysfunctional outcomes of children raised with one parent-such as
the higher likeli- hood of dropping out of high school, having an
early teen birth, and having difficulty getting es- tablished in
the labor market-result not only from the poorer economic
circumstances of these children but also from the diminished
interaction these children have with parents (especially fa-
thers). Children in one-parent families also derive less social
capital both from the schools they at- tend and from the
neighborhoods in which they live. Indeed, one of Coleman's (1988,
1992) con- cerns about the increase in single parenting and in
maternal employment was that both trends in the family undermine
the social capital available to children in far-reaching ways.
Parents were spend- ing less time with their own children and fewer
adults were at home during the day to supervise the activity of
groups of children when they came home to their neighborhoods after
school each day. Also, less time was available for volun- teerism
in schools and other organizations and for building social networks
around these institutions that provide extensive resources for
children.
The interrelated notions of human capital de- velopment and
social capital suggest that how children spend their time is
important and that
parental (and community) resources may be criti- cal in
determining which children engage in ac- tivities that enhance
intellectual growth, encour- age responsibility, and generally
steer children to- ward a productive adulthood. The human and
social capital of childhood are built over time and through the
activities in which children engage and the quality of the
resources and social interac- tions that surround them.
However, we know relatively little about how children spend
their time. To date, there have been only a handful of time-diary
studies of chil- dren's time use, most of limited scope. Nor do we
know how children's time in activities varies in different types of
families, although families are presumed to provide varying degrees
of access to the social capital needed for the successful devel-
opment of human potential.
In this article, we conduct an exploratory anal- ysis of the
amount of daily time children spend in an array of activities that
might be deemed rele- vant to their accumulation of skills during
child- hood. We review the literature on the interrela- tionship
among family characteristics and par- ents' and children's time
use. With 1989-1990 time diary data for children in California, we
ex- amine the time children spend in four important activities:
reading or being read to, studying, doing housework, and watching
TV. We address four questions about the interrelationship between
family characteristics and time spent in these ac- tivities.
(a) Do children of mothers who are at home full-time spend more
time in cogni- tive enhancing activities, such as reading, than
children of mothers who are in the paid labor force? Are there
differences in the amount of time children spend doing housework,
watching TV, or studying by the labor force status of their
mother?
(b) Do children in two-parent house- holds spend more time
reading, doing household chores, and studying, and less time
watching TV than children in one- parent households?
(c) Do children in smaller families spend more time in these
four activities than children in larger families?
(d) Finally, how does parental education relate to these
activities? Do children of better educated parents spend more time
studying and reading and less time watch- ing TV than children of
less well educated parents?
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Journal of Marriage and the Family
STUDIES OF CHILDREN'S TIME USE
Most previous time-use research on children's ac- tivities has
focused on the time parents spend in- teracting with children
(primarily preschool-age), rather than on how these children
themselves spend their time. Although some studies of chil- dren's
activity patterns have been undertaken (Beschen, 1972; Medrich,
Roisen, Rubin, & Buckley, 1982; Wallace, 1987), very few of
them have been conducted with large, representative samples that
also provide full coverage of all daily activities. The one
exception to this was a 1981 study of 229 children conducted as a
follow- up of parents interviewed in the 1975 University of
Michigan National Time Use Study (Juster & Stafford, 1985).
However, these data are now over 15 years old, were obtained from a
sample with less than a 30% response rate, and did not cover all
activities.
Parental Education
In Timmer, Eccles, and O'Brien's (1985) analysis of the 1981
Michigan data, higher parental educa- tion was correlated with more
studying, less TV watching, and more reading on the part of chil-
dren. They highlighted the longstanding interest in children's
cognitive development and acquisi- tion of aggressive behaviors
that characterized the developmental psychology literature on
television viewing. Underlying the concerns about chil- dren's time
in front of the TV is the assumption that, if children viewed less
TV, they would en- gage in other, "more productive" activities like
reading. The 1981 survey showed a large amount of television
viewing on the part of children that peaked at ages 11 to 12, but
it was not clear that less TV viewing resulted in children spending
more time in activities like reading. Yet the more television that
9- to 17-year-old children watched, the lower their scores on a
standardized reading comprehension test (Timmer et al., 1985, p.
370). Whether less able readers selected to watch more TV or
whether large amounts of TV viewing lim- ited reading comprehension
was not clear, given the cross-sectional nature of the 1981
time-diary data for children.
The most extensive previous research related to how children
spend time comes indirectly from educational differences in
parental time with chil- dren. Early studies of parents of
preschoolers sug- gested that college-educated mothers did devote
more time to child care than less well-educated mothers. In
addition, the quality of interaction was
also seen to be superior because more educated mothers spent
more time teaching children, taking them on educational outings,
and playing and in- teracting with children (Hill & Stafford,
1974; Leibowitz, 1974, 1977). Others (e.g., Lindert, 1977)
questioned the strength of the relationship between education and
parental time with children and suggested that the relationship was
quite sen- sitive to model specification and data used.
Subsequent analysis of 1975-1976 nationally representative U.S.
time diary data by Hill and Stafford (1985) confirmed earlier
conclusions that college-educated mothers devoted significantly
more time to children than mothers with only a high school
education or less. In particular, Hill and Stafford (1985, p. 427)
argued that not only did college-educated mothers commit more time
to children, but they engaged children in a greater variety of
activities at a higher level of (maternal) involvement and with
more predictability. They concluded that:
while preschool differences in quantity of care time are
substantial, the differences in pre- dictability and variety of
care are also large and that more educated parents interact more
with their children throughout their youth than do less educated
parents. Hence, it may also be consis- tency and variety of
interaction over a long time period that create differences in
child develop- ment. (p. 435)
Maternal Employment
The study of the effect of maternal employment on child outcomes
has been fraught with method- ological problems. Some research
suggests that, net of socioeconomic status, maternal employ- ment
negatively affects student achievement (Milne, Myers, Rosenthal,
& Ginsburg, 1986), student discipline (Myers, Milne, Baker,
& Gins- burg, 1987), and teachers' rating of the cognitive
abilities of elementary school age children (Stafford, 1987). Other
research has found mater- nal employment to be unrelated to child
outcomes (Dawson, 1991; Leibowitz, 1977) or related only to
outcomes for select subgroups. For example, the relation is
negative for high income boys (Desai, Chase-Landsdale, &
Michael, 1989), neg- ative for boys (but not girls) in
single-parent fam- ilies (Krein & Beller, 1988), negative if
employ- ment is full-time and occurs in the first year or two of
life (Belsky & Eggebeen, 1991), but posi- tive if it occurs in
subsequent preschool years (Blau & Grossberg, 1992). In sum,
the research on maternal employment remains inconclusive,
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Children's Use of Time
often showing effects that are neither strong nor consistent
(Heyns & Catsambis, 1986; Parcel & Menaghan, 1994).
Nock and Kingston (1988) suggested four pos- sible reasons for
the failure to find strong nega- tive effects of maternal
employment on children. Employed mothers might substitute quality
for quantity of time with children; fathers with em- ployed wives
might spend more time with chil- dren and thereby narrow
differences in parental time between dual-earner families and
mother- homemaker families; relatively small amounts of time may be
spent with children in any type of household, hence minimizing the
possibility of differences by labor force status of mother; and,
finally, children may not require much parental time for good
outcomes.
Using the 1975 time-diary data collected by Juster and Stafford
and the follow-up data collect- ed in 1981, Nock and Kingston
(1988) found that much more time was spent with children in
households with a mother at home full-time- even though relatively
little of that time was spent directly interacting with children.
That is, during much of the time mothers spend with children, they
are primarily doing other tasks, like house- work. The care of
children is an auxiliary or sec- ondary activity. Nonetheless,
employed mothers did not fully compensate for quantity with quali-
ty. Mothers who were not in the labor force also spent more time in
quality activities, such as play- ing with and reading to children,
although differ- ences were concentrated among mothers of preschool
rather than school-age children. In dual-earner families, fathers
compensated some- what for less maternal time but not sufficiently
to erase differences between two-earner and one- earner families.
With the data available to them, Nock and Kingston were not able to
address the most interesting, and perhaps most important, question
about maternal employment: How much parental time do children need?
In general, ques- tions about need are difficult to research and
re- main largely unanswered (Presser, 1995). Howev- er, determining
how children spend their time and how this varies across families
is a reasonable, if only a first, step in assessing the question of
how children should be spending their time.
A major theoretical concern in the social capi- tal literature
is whether the increase in maternal employment deprives children of
the supervision they need and limits connections between the family
and the larger community. Using time- diary data collected on
various samples of rural and urban women in the 1920s through the
late
1970s, Bryant and Zick (1992) reached the con- clusion that the
reduced time for children con- comitant with the rise in married
mothers' partici- pation in the labor force may be overstated.
Larg- er families and the relatively heavy burden of domestic and
unpaid agricultural work that was required of mothers in earlier
decades limited the time mothers had to spend with children. Al-
though the direct time spent with a given child probably has
decreased somewhat for very young children, Bryant and Zick
estimated that maternal time actually has increased for school-age
chil- dren over the course of this century.
Robinson (1993) found that mothers in his 1985 national
time-diary survey spent just as much time with children, on
average, as mothers in a 1965 national survey. Moreover, if the
higher maternal employment levels of 1985 are taken into account,
it could be argued that mothers gave children slightly more of
their available time at the later point.
Recent evidence by Bryant and Zick (1996) suggests that the
activities parents do with chil- dren changes with a mother's
employment. Ma- ternal employment may actually increase leisure
time and housework time that is shared with chil- dren. On the
other hand, it also decreases time spent in direct family care and
supervision of children.
Single Parenting
The research on single parenting, as with mater- nal employment,
often has been beset with methodological problems, particularly the
failure to control for socioeconomic differences. Howev- er, recent
research, which does adequately mea- sure differences in family
income between one- and two-parent families, suggests that only
half of the poorer outcomes of children who grow up with one parent
can be attributed to economic fac- tors (McLanahan & Sandefur,
1994).
McLanahan and Sandefur argue that much of the rest of the
difference can be explained by dif- ferences in parental
involvement. Maintaining a single-parent family curtails the time
that mothers (and fathers) are able or willing to invest in moni-
toring children's activities, supervising home- work, and
developing relationships with teachers and parents of children's
friends. This argument suggests there are important differences in
chil- dren's activity patterns in one- and two-parent families.
However, although Timmer et al. (1985) found that children of
single parents in the 1981 time-diary study watched more TV on
weekends
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Journal of Marriage and the Family
and routinely got less sleep, other differences were
minimal.
Robinson (1993) found that, other factors equal, single mothers
spent about 30% less time with their children, on average, than
married mothers in 1985. Not only did children in single- parent
families miss out on time spent with their father, but time with
their mother was also lower.
Family Size and Birth Order
Number of siblings has consistently been found to have a small,
negative correlation with education- al and occupational attainment
in adulthood in the status attainment literature (Mare, 1995).
Using a number of data sets, Blake (1989a, 1989b) showed that
children from small families do bet- ter on tests of verbal and
math ability than chil- dren from larger families.
Social psychologists, most notably Zajonc and Markus (1975;
Zajonc, 1976), found birth posi- tion to be inversely related to
achievement. The argument is that additional children lower the in-
tellectual stimulation in the family. Only children and first-born
children interact primarily with adults and, hence, the cognitive
stimulation is higher than when interactions include more chil-
dren. A consistent effect of birth order is not well established in
studies that adequately control for socioeconomic status, however.
For example, Steelman and Mercy (1980) showed that, net of
socioeconomic status, the effect of the number of siblings on
intelligence held in the presence of a control for birth order but
not vice versa. In a study of tests of vocabulary and block design
ability of children 6-11 years old, the number of younger siblings
had a consistent negative effect on test scores, and the number of
older siblings tended to reduce verbal but not nonverbal
achievement (Mercy & Steelman, 1982).
In sum, past research on family composition, children's and
parents' use of time, and children's cognitive achievement suggests
that children of college-educated parents can be expected to spend
more time reading and studying and less time watching TV than
children of less well- educated parents. Maternal employment and
sin- gle parenting also may detract from time spent reading and
studying and may encourage more TV watching, although here the
support for such an expectation is far more limited.
Additionally, because of time constraints, we might expect
children in families with either an employed mother or a single
parent to spend more time on housework. Larger families might
also
encourage and provide the opportunity for more time spent doing
housework. And it remains at least a plausible hypothesis that the
greater the number of children in the household, the more difficult
it will be for parents to devote time to reading to children or
effectively monitoring homework. Using the statewide California
time- diary data described in the next section, we inves- tigate
each of these expectations.
DATA AND METHODS
In order to provide basic information on the daily activities of
young children in California, the Sur- vey Research Center at the
University of Califor- nia, Berkeley, conducted a survey of the
daily ac- tivities and locations of a representative sample of
children aged 11 years or younger for the Califor- nia Air
Resources Board between April 1989 and March 1990. The principal
objectives of the sur- vey were to determine the proportion of time
spent in specific indoor and outdoor locations (e.g., living room,
workplace) and in specific ac- tivities (e.g., active sports,
hobbies) by Califor- nia's children in general and by their
demograph- ic and socioeconomic subgroups.
The California Children's Activity Pattern Sur- vey implemented
a methodology of collecting time- diary information in the context
of probability- based surveys that had been employed in several
earlier representative surveys. (See Wiley et al., 1991, for
background and further details.) Time- diary estimates from these
studies thus far have produced rather reliable results at the
aggregate level (Robinson, 1977, 1985). However, almost all of the
methodological and substantive data on activity patterns have come
from samples of adults.
Studies of children raise special issues, partic- ularly because
of the unknown abilities of chil- dren to report on their own
behavior. Moreover, because children's activities tend to be
different from those of the larger adult population, new data
collection procedures and coding categories needed to be developed
for them. To help identify potential sources of reporting bias and
to develop efficient probing techniques to improve parent re- call,
a small pilot study was conducted with 38 households containing
children aged 11 or younger. The results of the pilot study
suggested that interviewer attentiveness and probing were the most
effective ways to enhance the quality of the diary information.
Interviewers were instruct- ed to probe any activity that lasted
more than 2 hours to determine whether the child had done
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Children's Use of Time
anything else during the period. The results of the pilot study
also led to the decision to obtain diary information directly from
children aged 9-11 and to encourage parents to consult with
children aged 6-8 about how they had spent their time during the
diary day, i.e., the day preceding the interview. The pilot study
did not indicate that the quality of the information was enhanced
when re- spondents were contacted ahead of time and told that the
researchers would call back the next day to obtain information on
time use.
The target population for the California Chil- dren's Activity
Survey consisted of children younger than 12 years old and living
in English- speaking households with a telephone. The full sample
was drawn using random-digit-dialing methods of Waksberg (1978) and
was stratified to provide representative estimates for major
regions of the state. Interviews were distributed over the four
seasons (from April 1989 to March 1990) to take into account
seasonal variations in activity and location patterns. The survey
questionnaire included a complete inventory of children's activ-
ities and locations on the diary day and a brief se- ries of items
pertaining to the characteristics of the selected child, the
household, and an adult in the household who served as an informant
about the child's activities. The questionnaire, including the
diary component, was implemented using the computer-assisted
telephone interviewing tech- nology developed as part of the
university's Com- puter Assisted Survey Execution System. A total
of 1,200 eligible respondents were interviewed, with an overall
response rate of 78%.
The questionnaire instrument for the survey was divided into
three main parts: an adult sec- tion, a children's section, and a
daily time diary. When the selected child was 9-11 years old, he or
she was the preferred respondent for the chil- dren's and diary
sections of the questionnaire. This occurred in about 85% (269 of a
total of 316) of the cases. When the randomly selected child was 8
years old or younger, the preferred re- spondent for all sections
of the questionnaire was the parent or guardian who spent the most
time with the child on the diary day. Respondents for children aged
6-8 were encouraged to consult with the child when filling out the
diary portion of the questionnaire. Approximately 92% of the adult
respondents were the parent or guardian who spent the most time
with the selected child on the diary day-most had spent at least 8
wak- ing hours with the child on the diary day. (Less than 1% of
the interviews were conducted with adults who had spent less than 1
waking hour
with the child on the diary day.) Nearly 98% of the adult
respondents were either the father, mother, stepfather, or
stepmother of the selected child. In fact, over 80% of the adult
respondents were the children's mothers.
Concern about the validity of the diary re- sponses arises quite
naturally because of the na- ture of the task of reconstructing the
full range of activities and locations of the diary day and be-
cause the diary information was collected from children or from
proxy interviews with adults who may not have had full information.
In order to make a subjective assessment of the validity of diary
responses, the interviewers were asked to record their confidence
in the diary responses after the diary section had been completed.
In ap- proximately 80% of the cases, interviewers said they had
"complete confidence" in the diary re- sponses. Eighteen percent of
the diaries inspired a "somewhat confident" rating. Less than 2%
re- ceived a rating of "not too confident."
One issue of validity that is of particular con- cern in this
study is that it is likely that mothers with paid jobs will, on
average, spend less time directly observing their children's
activities than mothers at home full-time. Unfortunately, the data
do not contain a question asking who was with the child when an
activity occurred. This must be kept in mind when interpreting
results, especially those for maternal employment. At the same
time, because older children reported for themselves or assisted
parents, the mother or fa- ther was the sole respondent for the
diary only for children under the age of 6.
Diary Coding Procedures
In contrast to most surveys that examine people's activities in
isolation from the natural temporal context in which they are
embedded (e.g., by ask- ing people to compress their actual
behavioral ex- periences by saying whether they "often" or "usu-
ally" do something), time-diary accounts report activities as they
naturally and sequentially occur in daily life. Studies of time use
provide the op- portunity, then, to examine human activities in
real time-as individuals are actually involved in the stream of
daily behavior.
In the retrospective diary used in the Califor- nia Children's
Activity Survey, respondents re- ported each activity they engaged
in on the diary day, beginning at midnight of the preceding day.
They reported where they were at the time, if they were inside,
outside, or equally inside and out- side, and whether or not a
tobacco smoker was
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Journal of Marriage and the Family
present. The interviewers recorded the time the activity began
and ended, entered a single-digit code (one of eight precoded
categories) indicating the major category of the activity, and
entered a brief description (up to 44 characters in length) of the
activity. When the activity was related to school or to child care,
the interviewer entered an additional code (one of seven precoded
cate- gories) that further specified the type of activity and its
location.
If the randomly selected child was younger than 9 years old and
if the diary contained un- specified "day care," "babysitting," or
"school" activities, interviewers asked the adult respon- dents to
estimate the time the child spent in a va- riety of activities
typical of such settings: eating snacks or meals, napping or
resting, watching TV, doing arts and crafts, actually playing
outdoors, and going on field trips.
Considerable effort was invested in obtaining a very detailed
account of activities during the day, including all the important
changes that occur during the day. Through prompts and prob- ing,
the interviewers attempted to ensure that each respondent's report
was complete and accurate. A detailed scheme for coding activities
was devel- oped as part of an extensive coding operation for the
diary data after the interviews were complet- ed. (See Wiley et
al., 1991, Table 2.3 for the cod- ing scheme and Table 4.15 for a
comparison of the California survey with the 1981 University of
Michigan national survey of children. In general, the California
data are similar to the 1981 data but differ in predictable
directions, e.g., children spend more time in outdoor activities in
Califor- nia than they do in the rest of the nation.)
Comparison of Survey Estimates with Population Data
A comparison between estimates based on the California
Children's Activity Pattern Survey and Current Population Survey
data for 1988 provides a rough basis for evaluating the
representative- ness of the California Children's Survey sample and
suggests the possibility that groups of lower socioeconomic status
may be underrepresented in the California sample (Wiley et al.,
1991, Table 4). Both median household income and mean years of
education for adult respondents are high- er than the corresponding
Current Population Sur- vey figures. Although these differences may
be due, in part, to differences in the sampling frame between the
Children's Survey and the Current Population Survey, they are
consistent with pat-
terns of underrepresentation of groups with lower income and
less education that have been ob- served in many telephone and
personal interview surveys of adult respondents (Goyder, 1987).
This should be kept in mind when attempting to gener- alize from
the Children's Survey estimates.
Compared with statewide public school enroll- ment figures for
children in grades kindergarten through six, the grade distribution
for the Chil- dren's Survey is not significantly different from the
enrollment figures, but the distribution of chil- dren by race and
ethnicity is significantly differ- ent from the enrollment data
(Wiley et al., 1991, Table 5). This suggests some
underrepresentation of non-White and Hispanic children in the Cali-
fornia Children's Survey sample, due, in part, to the exclusion of
households that did not speak English. In addition, because race
and ethnicity are correlated with socioeconomic status, under-
representation of certain racial and ethnic groups also may be due
to selection bias with respect to socioeconomic factors.
Despite its restriction to English-speaking Cal- ifornia
households with children and its possible underrepresentation of
households with lower so- cioeconomic status, the 1989-1990
California Children's Time Use Study stands as the most
comprehensive recent addition to the study of children's activity
patterns. In the next section, we report descriptive findings on
the amount of time children in the study spent reading or being
read to, watching TV, studying, and doing house- work during the
diary day. Given the nature of the activities we examine, we
restrict the sample to the 887 children who were ages 3-11. That
is, al- though we have diaries on infants and toddlers, we exclude
children under the age of 3 from the analysis.
We use tobit regression models to assess whether family
background, particularly parental education, maternal employment,
single parent- ing, and family size are predictive of the number of
minutes a child engages in these activities. A tobit estimator is
used because it corrects for the censored distribution of
children's time in each activity. That is, a sizable number of
children spend no minutes in a given activity on the diary day, and
the tobit estimation takes into account this censoring at zero
minutes.
FINDINGS
Implicit in the literature on family background and child
outcomes is the notion that children ex- perience a more varied,
cognitively stimulating
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Children's Use of Time
childhood in some family environments than in others. The child
outcomes that result are, there- fore, better in some situations
than in others. The challenge is to determine which activities and
in- vestments matter most and what environments foster achievement.
We cannot, with the data here, address the question of what
activities are best for children, but we can add to what is known
about how children spend their time and how this varies by family
composition.
In selecting the activities to focus on, we are drawn to
activities that seem to generate strong sentiments on the part of
parents, teachers, or re- searchers about how children should spend
time. For example, we argue that many teachers (and parents)
believe that the more children are read to in their preschool
years, the more they read them- selves as they get older, the
better they do in school, the better they perform on standardized
tests, and the more likely they are to attain higher levels of
education. The presumption is also that good study habits improve
academic performance. Too much TV viewing is often considered bad
or at least of questionable value for children. House- work is more
neutral, but at least one scholarly work (Goldscheider & Waite,
1991) argues that doing housework may be good for children be-
cause it prepares them for running their own households later in
life and teaches responsibility. However, other research, more
focused on paid employment than on household chores, suggests that
work (of any kind) may detract from time children devote to study
or to developing cogni- tive skills (Zill, Nord, & Loomis,
1995).
Table 1 shows the percentage of children (aged 3-11) in the
1989-1990 California time-use study who spent some amount of time
during the diary day in each of four activities: reading or being
read to, watching TV, doing housework, and studying. In addition,
for those children who engaged in a particular activity, the
average num- ber of minutes spent doing that activity is shown.
About one quarter of the sampled children spent some time
reading or being read to, whereas almost nine in ten watched TV.
Those who en- gaged in reading spent about 3/4 of an hour per
day in this activity. TV watchers spent an average of 23/4 hours
in front of the TV, 3 hours when we include watching TV and doing
some other activ- ity such as homework (data not shown). Only 22%
spent any time studying, and those who re- ported studying spent an
hour in this activity. It should be noted that studying is not an
activity in which many preschool-aged children engage. Be- cause
the sample combines preschoolers and school-aged children, this
lowers the percentage who report studying. In addition, interviews
are spread over the calendar year, with some children on summer
vacation when the interview occurred, and this also lowers the
percentage studying. The regression models include controls for
summer and weekend interviews in order to improve the modeling of
time spent studying.
About 40% of children reported doing some housework. Children
who did this activity during the diary day averaged close to an
hour in house- hold chores. These estimates seem relatively high
and may reflect the fact that time spent doing household chores is
reported by children them- selves at ages 9-11, rather than by
parents. Among younger children, housework time may include time
helping an adult who is engaged in housework such as dinner
preparation.
In Table 2, we show means (percentages for categorical measures)
and standard deviations for variables used in the multivariate
analysis of chil- dren's time use. Control variables include
whether a child is male, a member of a minority group, the child's
age, whether the diary day was a weekend day, and whether the
interview took place in the summer.
A family's socioeconomic status is measured by two variables:
the educational attainment of the parent and family income.
Parental education is the education of the adult identified as
knowing most about the child's activities, usually the mother of
the child. About one quarter of the chil- dren live with a parent
who has a college educa- tion (or more), and an additional 29% have
a par- ent who attended college but did not graduate. One third of
the children have a parent who is a high school graduate with no
further schooling,
TABLE 1. TIME THAT CHILDREN SPEND READING, WATCHING TV,
STUDYING, AND DOING HOUSEHOLD CHORES
Doing Reading Watching TV Studying Housework
Percentage who did the activity on the previous day 27% 89% 22%
40% Average minutes per day in activity for those who did the
activity 45 168 63 54 Average minutes per day for entire sample 12
150 14 22
Note: n = 887 California children, aged 3-11.
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Journal of Marriage and the Family
TABLE 2. MEANS AND STANDARD DEVIATIONS FOR VARIABLES PREDICTING
CHILDREN'S TIME USE
Mean/ Percentage SD
Control variables Child is male 51% 50% Child is minority 30%
46% Child's age (in years) 7.09 2.70 Weekend diary day 37% 48%
Summer interview 30% 46%
Parental education 100% Less than high school 11% 32% High
school graduate 33% 47% Some college 29% 46% College graduate 12%
33% (Postgraduate) 15% 35%
1988 family income (in $10,000) 3.44 8.54 One-parent family 20%
40% Mother's labor force status 100%
Employed full-time 42% 49% Employed part-time 19% 39% Student 5%
22% Other-looking, laid off, retired 7% 25% (Keeping house) 27%
44%
Number of children 2.16 1.04 Sibling position 100%
Only child 28% 45% Oldest child-1 (or more) siblings 21% 40%
(Younger child-1 (or more) siblings) 51% 50%
Note: Omitted categories in multivariate analysis are in
parentheses; n = 887.
and about 11% have a parent who dropped out before completing
high school.
Family type is indicated by whether a child lives with only one
parent. Almost 20% of the sample lives in one-parent families,
almost al- ways a family headed by the mother. The mater- nal
employment variable indicates whether a child's mother is employed
full- or part-time, is a student, is unemployed, or is a full-time
home- maker. About one quarter of the sample lives with a mother at
home full-time, whereas 42% have a mother who holds a full-time
job. "Maternal em- ployment" actually measures the employment sta-
tus of the father for the 16 (out of 887) children in the sample
who do not live with a mother (or stepmother) but reside only with
their father. The average number of children in the sample house-
holds is just over two children. About 28% of the children for whom
the diary is collected are the only child in their household. The
remaining 72% of the children in the sample live in households with
two or more children. About 21% are the oldest child in the
household, and 51% have at least one older sibling.
Table 3 displays estimates from the tobit equa- tions predicting
time spent reading, watching TV, studying, and doing housework.
Before turning to the family composition indicators, a comment on
the control variables is in order. The control for whether the
diary charts activities for a weekend or a weekday shows that
children watch more TV, study less, and do more housework on the
weekends than during the week. Not surprisingly, the estimate of
time spent studying is greatly re- duced in summer interviews.
Three demographic characteristics of the child are included in
the model, largely as control vari- ables: the child's age,
minority status, and gender. The most important is age. Not
surprisingly, as age increases, the likelihood of studying, doing
household chores, and TV viewing increases. Among 3- to 1
1-year-olds, the likelihood of read- ing (or being read to) does
not differ significantly by age. There are no major differences
between minority and nonminority children, except that White,
non-Hispanic children (the omitted cate- gory in the regression)
spend slightly more time doing household chores. Finally, there are
two gender differences of note. Boys may spend slightly more time
in front of the TV, and boys spend significantly less time doing
household chores than girls. This finding of a significant gender
difference in housework among young children parallels the findings
for teenagers (and young adults living at home) reported by Gold-
scheider and Waite (1991).
Our main research questions revolve around whether family
environments-particularly the level of parental education, maternal
employ- ment, single parenting, and family size-influ- ence the
likelihood of a child participating in vari- ous activities. Our
multivariate findings suggest the following.
Parental Education and Income
Children's time spent reading or being read to is significantly
higher in households in which the parents are college educated.
Minutes spent read- ing per day do not differ between children who
live with a college graduate and children who live with a parent
who has attended graduate school or completed postgraduate
education (the omitted category). However, children of parents who
have attended (but not completed) college, who are high school
graduates, or who did not complete high school read fewer minutes
per day than chil- dren of college graduates. In addition, the
higher
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Children's Use of Time
TABLE 3. PARAMETER ESTIMATES OF TOBIT EQUATIONS PREDICTING
MINUTES PER DAY SPENT READING, WATCHING TV, STUDYING, AND DOING
HOUSEWORK
Doing Reading Watching TV Studying Housework
Intercept -14.86 8.66 -104.28*** -94.65*** Control variables
Child is male -9.27 18.11* -11.84 -16.37** Child is minority
-7.62 16.66 7.56 -15.43* Child's age -1.05 10.26*** 17.77***
7.38*** Weekend diary day -13.58* 41.46*** -96.28*** 17.01** Summer
interview 4.01 2.00 -86.50*** 5.94
Parental education Less than high school -30.98** 82.29*** -6.47
-21.29 High school graduate -37.27*** 42.76*** -25.78** -8.62 Some
college -34.87*** 28.94** -34.03*** -12.24 College graduate -12.17
0.35 -17.47 -19.98
Family income (in $10,000) 0.98*** -0.85 -0.60 -0.20 One-parent
family 4.64 0.47 0.71 -14.12 Mother's labor force status
Employed full-time -5.65 1.11 -16.02 5.42 Employed part-time
12.75 -30.62** 17.27 -3.84 Student 11.08 -40.62* 0.77 11.68
Other-looking, laid off, retired -1.41 0.27 -29.80 -23.38
Number of children 1.28 5.11 3.35 13.67*** Sibling position
Only child 9.47 5.39 11.94 14.25 Oldest child-i (or more)
siblings 1.45 2.22 11.75 -11.59
Sigma 75.28** 132.27*** 85.63*** 92.1*** Log likelihood -1619
-5042 -1486 -2467
Note: n = 887 California children, aged 3-11. *p
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Journal of Marriage and the Family
mother who is a full-time homemaker. It appears that latch-key
children do not take advantage of parental absence to increase
their TV viewing.
Perhaps more surprisingly, there were no dif- ferences in the
likelihood of children doing household chores by mother's labor
force status. We expected mothers employed full-time might require
more help with household chores, but there was no evidence of this
in the data.
It is possible that reporting on children's activ- ities is less
accurate for employed mothers, who may not spend as much time with
their children as mothers who are not employed. For example, an
alternative interpretation of the finding of no difference in TV
viewing on the part of children with mothers employed full-time and
those whose mothers are homemakers is that children of moth- ers
employed full-time watch more TV than other children, but employed
mothers do not realize this and underestimate the time their
children spend in this activity. Mothers who are at home full-time
may more accurately report how long their chil- dren are engaged in
this activity. Although we cannot rule out such an interpretation
of the find- ings, the use of older children's self-reports of ac-
tivity (regardless of maternal employment status) helps mitigate
against potential bias. Also the finding of significant differences
between moth- ers employed part-time (who, it might be conjec-
tured, know more about their children's activities than mothers who
work full-time do) and home- makers makes it harder to dismiss
findings for maternal employment as merely an artifact of data
quality.
Family Size
Although we expected that family size might de- tract from study
time and the likelihood of read- ing or being read to, we find no
evidence of this. The one activity that seems to occupy more of a
child's time in a large family is housework. As the number of
children in the household increas- es, the average number of
minutes a child spends in housework also increases significantly.
Birth order (i.e., being an only child or a first-born child) is
not predictive of differences in the amount of time spent in any of
the activities we examine.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Most research on the interrelationship of family environments
and child outcomes assumes that
the opportunities and activities of childhood differ across
family settings. Although the most accu- rate way to assess how
children spend time is to collect time-diary data from children or
their par- ents, there has been only limited information about
children's activities gathered in this format. We examine recently
collected time-diary infor- mation from a relatively large
statewide sample of preschool and elementary school-aged children
to explore whether children's activity patterns vary in predictable
ways by family characteris- tics. These diary figures provide
striking docu- mentation of the dominance of TV watching as an
activity among preschool and elementary school- aged children.
Almost 90% of children watch TV in any given day, whereas only
about 25% read a book or have someone read to them. The amount of
time spent viewing TV far exceeds the amount of time spent reading.
Although it is possible that a sizable share of TV watching among
preschool- ers is of educational programs like Sesame Street, the
extensive amount of viewing time reinforces concerns about TV's
influence on children's physical fitness, cognitive functioning,
and ag- gressive behavior.
Of the four family characteristics we examine, the largest
differences are found for parental edu- cational attainment.
College-educated parents ap- pear to limit their children's time in
front of the TV more than less-educated parents do. Highly educated
parents also appear to encourage their children to read and study
more than do less edu- cated parents.
Recent empirical and theoretical work has raised new questions
about the negative effect of single parenting and maternal
employment on children, but our findings suggest rather minimal
differences on our four time-use outcomes (time reading, studying,
watching TV, and doing house- work) between children in two-parent
families and those who live only with their mother. Fur- thermore,
our findings on maternal employment do not support the popular
hypothesis that young children fare best when they have a mother at
home full-time. Children of mothers who are em- ployed part-time
(and mothers who are students) watch less TV than children with
mothers who are at home full-time. Our findings suggest that it may
be mothers who achieve a balance between working outside the home
and spending time with their children who are most successful at
steering their children toward productive use of their time.
Finally, we find relatively little difference in children's
activities by family size. In larger fami-
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Children's Use of Time
lies, children do more housework, perhaps be- cause there is
more housework to do. However, oldest (or only) children's time in
activities such as reading or studying or housework do not ap- pear
to be much different than that of younger siblings in
households.
Although the diary data used in this research do not directly
assess the relative value of various activities, they do provide
estimates of how much time children are spending in activities that
may be related to cognitive and behavioral outcomes. With diary
data, we begin to illuminate the con- nections between parental
inputs and child out- comes. Well-educated parents appear to
structure their children's time differently than less educated
parents, and this may provide the children of better-educated
parents with the social capital necessary for cognitive
enhancement. At the same time, our results do not support the
assumption that full-time mothering is critical to good child
outcomes. And until we can show systematic dif- ferences between
how children (and parents) spend time in single-parent families and
how they spend time in two-parent families, caution is war- ranted
in attributing negative outcomes for chil- dren in single-parent
families to a dearth of social capital or inadequate
supervision.
In his seminal work on social capital, Coleman argued that a
child's access to adults in the family (as well as the attention
given by adults to chil- dren) was crucial to their acquisition of
human capital. In this analysis, we have related differences in
children's time use to several factors that Cole- man argued were
key to the development of social capital in the family-the number
of parents pre- sent in the household, materal employment, fami- ly
size, and parental education. Although the diary measures provide a
provocative first look at family variation in children's
activities, to be true to Cole- man's notion of social capital, we
must move be- yond measures of simple access and the availabili- ty
of parents to measures that also capture the de- gree to which
parents are involved with children. For example, how much of a
child's time in vari- ous activities is time that is shared with
other fami- ly members? How much affect and positive rein-
forcement is transmitted? How much and what types of time that
children allocate to reading or television viewing actually affect
their cognitive development? California represents more than 10% of
the country, but the present results need to be replicated and
extended at the national level to as- sess more fully the role that
families play in deter- mining positive child outcomes.
NOTE We would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of
Melissa Milkie, Harriet Presser, and three anonymous reviewers. We
also benefited from the research assis- tance of Lekha Subaiya and
Rongjun Sun, thanks to a training grant from the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation to the Center on Population, Gender, and Social
Inequality, Department of Sociology, University of Maryland.
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Article Contentsp. 332p. 333p. 334p. 335p. 336p. 337p. 338p.
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Issue Table of ContentsJournal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 59,
No. 2 (May, 1997), pp. 243-498Front Matter [pp. 243 - 280]Mothers
and MotherhoodConsequences of Young Mothers' Marital Histories for
Children's Cognitive Development [pp. 245 - 261]Early Motherhood in
an Intergenerational Perspective: The Experiences of a British
Cohort [pp. 263 - 279]Their Mother's Daughters? The
Intergenerational Transmission of Gender Attitudes in a World of
Changing Roles [pp. 281 - 293]Significant Life Experiences and
Depression among Single and Married Mothers [pp. 294 - 308]Risk,
Conflict, Mothers' Parenting, and Children's Adjustment in
Low-Income, Mexican Immigrant, and Mexican American Families [pp.
309 - 323]The Relation of Divorced Mothers' Perceptions of Family
Cohesion and Adaptability to Behavior Problems in Children [pp. 324
- 331]
Children and FamiliesWhat Did You Do Today? Children's Use of
Time, Family Composition, and the Acquisition of Social Capital
[pp. 332 - 344]Child, Parent, and Contextual Influences on
Perceived Parenting Competence among Parents of Adolescents [pp.
345 - 362]Gender of Siblings, Cognitive Achievement, and Academic
Performance: Familial and Nonfamilial Influences on Children [pp.
363 - 374]Divorce-Related Transitions, Adolescent Development, and
the Role of the Parent-Child Relationship: A Review of the
Literature [pp. 375 - 388]Familial Factors Associated with the
Characteristics of Nonmaternal Care for Infants [pp. 389 - 408]
Of General InterestTesting the Theoretical Models Underlying the
Ways of Coping Questionnaire with Couples [pp. 409 - 418]Effects of
Family Structure on the Earnings Attainment Process: Differences by
Gender [pp. 419 - 433]Gender and the Timing of Marriage:
Rural-Urban Differences in Java [pp. 434 - 450]Perceptions of
Family Differentiation, Individuation, and Self-Esteem among Korean
Adolescents [pp. 451 - 462]Healthy and Unhealthy Friendship and
Hostility between Ex-Spouses [pp. 463 - 475]The Contribution of
Intermediary Factors to Marital Status Differences in Self-Reported
Health [pp. 476 - 490]
Book Reviewsuntitled [pp. 491 - 492]untitled [pp. 492 -
493]untitled [pp. 493 - 494]untitled [pp. 494 - 495]untitled [p.
495]untitled [pp. 495 - 496]untitled [pp. 496 - 497]untitled [pp.
497 - 498]