Barbara S. Okun Comment on - Does Parental Quality Matter

Comment on Gould et al: Does parental quality matter? Evidence on the transmission of human capital using variation in parental influence from death, divorce and family size Prepared for Conference on Social Mobility and Inequality in Israel June 2017 Barbara S. Okun Dept. of Sociology Demographic Studies The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

What we know from other research: • Parents’ structured time with kids yields benefits for children 1 • Children’s time spent on unstructured activities can bring risks for their present and future wellbeing. 2 • Most studies have focused on mothers' time…..but see a recent paper that explicitly considers fathers’ time 3

Amato, 1998; Amato and Rivera, 1999; Waldfogel, 2006; 2 Mellecker & McManus, 2008 3 Cano, Perales and Baxter 2017 1

Parents’ time with kids differs by parents’ social backgrounds

• Parents from more advantaged social backgrounds spend more quality time with their children than parents from less advantaged social backgrounds.1 • Differences by social strata in • Amount of time parents spend • Type of activities in which they engage 2

McLanahan 2004 2 Esping-Andersen and Bonke, 2012 1

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And the gaps are continuing to grow…

• The gap in developmental educational time between high and low educated parents is constantly increasing in the last decades •1 • All parents are spending more developmental time with their kids, but the increase is greater among more educated parents1

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Atlintas 2016

Another mechanism for perpetuating social inequality

• Given its potential positive effect on child development, parent-child quality time may be a mechanism contributing to the reproduction of social inequalities1

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Esping-Andersen, 2009; Heckman and Conti, 2014.

Tie in with changes in family and the gender • Mothers and fathers are revolution spending more time on childcare than in past decades

• The increase in time spent in developmental child care is consistent with the idealization of intensive mothering/involved fathering (Coltrane, 1996; Hays, 1996) • That is the cultural notion that good parents (mothers) should invest vast amounts of time, money, energy, and emotional labor in their kids • But the increase in childcare time among fathers is larger than among mothers (Bianchi 2011).

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Do men’s changing roles affect inequality in time spent with children?

• Can shortfalls in the time spent by less educated women be partially counterbalanced by men’s changing roles in childcare?

• It doesn't seem like it - Altinatis (2016) suggests that the social inequality in father's developmental child care is similar to that among mothers….

• Only adding to the problem, given educational homogamy among partners and greater union stability among more educated…

Gould et al. paper argues that the relationship between parents’ education and the time they spend with kids is causal…….

• …arguing that more educated parents spend more time with their kids because they are more effective at producing human capital.

• Idea is backed up by theories of education regarding parenting practices

But is this necessarily the case?

• An alternative explanation: more educated parents spend more time on childcare because they are better able to live up to culturally shared expectations of what a "good" parent is (Coltrane, 1996; Hays, 1996) • Question: Can parents with different social backgrounds who spend the same amount of quality time with their children have the same impact on their kids?

• Perhaps different interventions possible if the issue is quality time spent per se, rather than schooling levels of parents.