Full Citation

Title: As Children Grow: Variation in Parenthood and Childhood by SES Through the Ages

Citation Type: Conference Paper

Publication Year: 2009

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Abstract: What parents do with their children shifts a great deal over the course of childrens lives. Parenting an infant is quite different from parenting a teenager, and differs even more markedly from parenting a child who is grown up and no longer lives at home. While it is common knowledge that parents do different things with their children as those children grow and their needs shift, we know less about how shifts in parenting over childhood has implications for parents. In other words, how do the workloads of parents shift when they have very young children as compared with older children? What happens to parental leisure time over the parenthood trajectory? How much does parent-child time decline as children age and how do the types of activities parents and children do together shift? We are seeking a more comprehensive and detailed understanding of parenting as it looks over the entire course of childhood rather than slices at particular points when workloads are thought to be the heaviest. This paper examines how the day-to-day activities of both parents and children shift as children age from infancy to adulthood and how this has implications for both parents and children. Other studies have examined short windows in the parenthood trajectory (e.g. the transition from non-parent to parent, from parent of preschool-age child to parent of school-age), but few studies have examined this in-depth across the whole of childhood, at least in part because no data source was large enough to provide that level of detail. We make use of the large number of time diaries from the five years of the American Time Use Survey to provide that detail. We disaggregate our analysis by both sex of the parent as well as parental education given that mothers tend to be more involved parents than fathers in the US and given that education level is an important factor affecting both time in paid employment and child care. Perhaps most importantly, our analysis is nuanced in that we examine the parenthood trajectory both from the perspective of the parent as well as the perspective of the child, examining parent time diaries from the (2003-2007) American Time Use Survey (ATUS) and child time diaries from the 1997-2002 Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement (PSID-CDS).

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Authors: Raley, Sara; Thorn, Betsy

Conference Name: Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

Publisher Location: San Francisco, CA

Data Collections: IPUMS Time Use - ATUS

Topics: Aging and Retirement, Family and Marriage

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