Abstract
The presence of children may oblige parents to desynchronize their schedules in order both to minimize childcare expenses and to become more efficient in their domestic tasks. This disconnection between the father’s and the mother’s schedules may be undesired as such, and may represent an additional component in the overall cost of children as traditionally considered. This article analyzes the impact of children on their parents’ schedules, using the French time use survey data (INSEE 1998–1999). The comparison of female and male schedules makes it possible to measure the leisure synchronization of dual-earner couples. We show that the presence of children within a household significantly reduces joint leisure time, and the more so if they are young. Parental schedule adjustments are severely limited by work constraints. The parents’ difficulties in coordinating their schedules in order to spend time together is expressed as a deprivation of leisure which is larger for joint than for individual time. Finally, for couples with children, greater housework synchronization does not free up enough time to maintain joint leisure time.
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Notes
From the different waves of the American Current Population Survey results, he shows that the proportion of couples working at a given time is significantly higher than the average proportion of men multiplied by the average proportion of women working at this given time.
The effect of female income was higher than male income in the 1970s survey. This difference disappeared with the 1990s survey. Men's preferences for joint leisure may have grown closer to women's preferences during those decades.
These data stem from the Household Market and Non Market Activities Surveys (HUS) conducted in 1984 and 1993.
She attempted to show that desynchronization was connected to the presence of children but the samples she used were small, making results questionable.
It is measured by the distance between the central points of their respective working days.
His data enabled him to distinguish, for each activity, those that were carried out at the same time (synchronized activities), and those actually performed together.
A total of 97% of children aged three are enrolled at pre-school, even though schooling is not compulsory at that age. School hours are from 8.30 to 16.30 for children aged 3–12 and care facilities are provided before and after school hours from 7.00 to 8.30 and from 16.30 to 18.00–19.00. Care facilities and school meals are provided during the lunch break. Wednesday is a school-free day, but “leisure centres” take over.
Another drawback of the dataset is that it is cross-sectional. We only have information on current time and so we cannot examine the possibility that children and time synchronization are both linked to some unobservable differences between couples. This drawback is common to the majority of time-use surveys.
Furthermore, individual data recording with whom activities takes place are not always reliable. For instance, it has been shown that answers are very subjective and often differ between husband and wife (Hallberg 2003).
Couple’s total leisure is defined as solitary male leisure plus solitary female leisure plus joint leisure.
We do not estimate a Tobit model because the proportion of zeros is very low: there is no couple without joint leisure time according to definitions 1 and 2, only 1% according to definition 3.
Other covariates were introduced, such as geographical variables (town size and region), firm size, level of job responsibility, but were excluded from the final specifications as they were not significant. Results can be obtained from the authors.
The choice of this identifying variable is based on the argument that spouse leisure synchronization is not affected by participation in vocational training while vocational training has positive returns on wages (Adda et al. 2006).
Under the null hypothesis (which states that an ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator of the same equation would yield consistent estimates) the DHW test distributed Chi-squared (4) and the Hausman test distribute a Ficher (4, 1288). Both tests reject at respectively, 36 and 37% the null hypothesis.
Some other non-standard schedules have been tested such as Saturday and Sunday work but with no significant effect.
Results are not shown here. The same regressions are performed on joint leisure and ratios with the dummy presence of children instead of the number of children by age range.
The sample of couples where both partners have a certain degree of choice is too small to perform separate regressions.
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Barnet-Verzat, C., Pailhé, A. & Solaz, A. Spending time together: the impact of children on couples’ leisure synchronization. Rev Econ Household 9, 465–486 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-010-9112-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-010-9112-3