Asymmetries and Interdependencies in Time use Between Italian Parents

In recent decades, changes in parents’ attitudes towards the importance of spending time with children to optimise their development have greatly affected patterns of time allocation among both working and non-working parents in all developed countries. So far, the research on the time allocation of couples has been focused on how spouses divide their time between work, domestic tasks and childcare, without distinguishing between time spent on basic care and quality time and without considering links between spouses. Moreover, the main concern has been the reduction of maternal caring time due to the increase in mothers´ working time. The link between father time with the child and mother´s working time is still to be understood. Finally the literature provides evidence that children’s achievements depend less on the total time parents devote to them than on the type of activities parents engage in with them. It seems, then, plausible to hypothesize that parents are willing to find substitutes for basic care time (in the form of help from grandparents, babysitters or childcare centres), while preferring to allocate as much of their own time as possible to engaging in “quality” activities with their children. In this paper we investigate how parents’ employment status affects the total time they spend with their children and if it is basic care time or quality time that is affected more. We compare the two waves of the Italian Time Use dataset (1988 and 2002) to analyse how family time allocation changed over time in a country that was undergoing a marked increase in female employment rate and a continuous decline in total fertility rate. Using a simultaneous sequential approach, we consider links among the different time uses of individuals and correlations between spouses’ decisions. Our results show that women’s time allocation is generally more responsive to family and individual characteristics than men’s time allocation. Family composition becomes important only in 2002, when fathers are more involved in children caring and education as a response to women’s increased participation in the labour market. Substitution by fathers for working mother’s time thus seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon. Another interesting result is that mother’s education increases the time both parents spend with their children, while father’s higher education has an effect on mother’s quality care and only in the most recent years. Finally, the number of hours mothers spend at work inevitably decreases both the basic and quality care time they spend with their children, but this is compensated by an increase in the amount of time fathers are devoting to their children.

Mancini, Anna Laura and Silvia Pasqua (2011), Asymmetries and Interdependencies in Time use Between Italian Parents, ZEW Discussion Paper No. 11-005, Mannheim.