The rug rat race
BibTeX
@techreport{ramey2009rug,
title={The rug rat race},
author={Ramey, Garey and Ramey, Valerie A},
year={2009},
institution={National Bureau of Economic Research}
}
Abstract
After three decades of decline, the amount of time spent by parents on childcare in the U.S. began to rise dramatically in the mid-1990s. Moreover, the rise in childcare time was particularly pronounced among college-educated parents. Why would highly educated parents increase the amount of time they allocate to childcare at the same time that their own market returns have skyrocketed? After finding no empirical support for standard explanations, such as selection or income effects, we offer a new explanation. We argue that increased competition for college admissions may be an important source of these trends. The number of college-bound students has surged in recent years, coincident with the rise in time spent on childcare. The resulting “cohort crowding” has led parents to compete more aggressively for college slots by spending increasing amounts of time on college preparation. Our theoretical model shows that, since college-educated parents have a comparative advantage in college preparation, rivalry leads them to increase preparation time by a greater amount than less-educated parents. We provide empirical support for our explanation with a comparison of trends between the U.S. and Canada, and a comparison across racial groups in the U.S.
Notes and Excerpts
Some notes on the reliability of survey comparisons.
Fortunately, the 1965, 1975, 1985, 1995, 1998, and 2000 surveys all involved John Robinson as a principal investigator. As a result, the coding of activities is very similar across surveys. Because these studies span the time period in which childcare began trending upward, we feel confident that the trends we find in time spent in childcare reflect actual trends rather than changes in activity classification
These estimates show that from 1965 to 1995, college-educated mothers spent between 0.06 and 2.1 more hours per week on childcare than did non-college-educated mothers. Beginning in 1998, however, this differential underwent a dramatic increase: college-educated mothers spent over three hours more per week in 1998, roughly five hours more in 2000 and 2003, and over six hours more in 2004 and 2005. Between 1998 and 2007, the college differential in every year was at least double the highest differential observed between 1965 and
Overall, college-educated parents spend more time in each category except for health care. The most important sources of the extra time spent by college-educated parents, however, are in chauffeuring, education- and activity-related categories.7
7 One should not infer from these results that pure travel time accounts for most of the increase in childcare time. Total travel time associated with childcare increased by approximately one hour from 1975 to the 2000s.
The children of less-educated parents spend most of their free time playing with friends and relatives in their neighborhood, unsupervised by adults. Lareau calls this the “natural development” approach. On the other hand, more-educated parents take a “concerted cultivation” approach, which requires significant commitments of parental time:
- They rule out selection effects by saying childcare time went up even if we don’t condition on motherhood.
- for income effects, they do various regressions and they say the coefs on income are always too small to explain the increase in childcare
- for safety concerns, they cite that safety is higher, parents are “less concerned” about kidnapping than they were in the 80s, and educated parents spend more time on kids (despite being in safer areas than less educated)
- I actually think the percieved safety story isn’t ruled out. Parents might be endogenously less concerned because they expend more effort on constantly watching the kids.
By comparing the columns, one can see that omitting playing with children reduces the amount of the increase by about one hour for less-educated mothers, and by about three hours for college-educated mothers. Nevertheless, most of the increase over time and across education levels remains even when playing with children is omitted. The results are similar for fathers, as seen in columns 3 and 4.
- Is it more flexible work schedules?
However, even when we compare to 1985, a year when the labor force participation rate for college-educated mothers was about the same as in 2007, we find that the increase in childcare time among college-educated nonworking mothers was around 15 hours per week as compared to an increase around 8 hours per week for college-educated working mothers. Thus, some other factor must have been at play to lead even nonworking mothers to increase their childcare time so much.
Some of the perceived increase in competition is simply a statistical mirage: the average student now applies to more colleges, both because of the increased ease of filling out applications and the perceived greater uncertainty about getting into a given college. However, there is ample evidence that part of the increase in competition is real. Bound, Hershbein, and Long (2009) document many facets of the increase in competition
Related: post-graduation job market. Do online applications increase or decrease effort of finding a job in equilibrium?
There is a good deal of anecdotal evidence that many parents hope that investing time in developing their children’s sports and music abilities might result in a college scholarship. However, there is also evidence that parents over-estimate the number of scholarships that are available (e.g. The Washington Post, February 13, 2003).
They also do difference in difference, and the results are mostly consistent with their theory. For mothers, the groups with more college admission competition seem to spend more time on childcare, but among fathers that result is mixed.