How does paid work affect who does the childcare? An analysis of the time use of Australian couples

George Argyrous () and Sara Rahman
Additional contact information
George Argyrous: Australia and New Zealand School of Government
Sara Rahman: University of Sydney

Review of Economics of the Household, 2017, vol. 15, issue 2, No 2, 383-398

Abstract: Abstract This paper analyzes the effect of paid work by coupled parents of young children on the joint decisions to spend time engaged in childcare. We explore this using Australian Time-Use Survey data from 2006. We examine the effect of paid work in terms of the effect that total work time on a given day has on the amount of time spent on childcare; the allocation of time on activities across work and non-work days; and the effect of non-traditional work hours. The results show that mothers perform a large share of childcare, irrespective of their earning power or their partner’s availability to take on some of these tasks. The use of formal and informal childcare by others allows the mother to balance the competing demands of work and her own childcare; an effect that does not hold for fathers. These effects on childcare are also almost solely concentrated in the routine component of childcare (e.g. preparing meals, changing nappies), with each parent ‘protecting’ interactive childcare from the effect of both paid work and the relative availability of their partner to take on some of this childcare.

Keywords: Time-use; Childcare time; Employment; Gender; Time allocation; Australian Time-Use Survey; Hours of work; Labor force participation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11150-014-9274-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:reveho:v:15:y:2017:i:2:d:10.1007_s11150-014-9274-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11150/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11150-014-9274-5

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economics of the Household is currently edited by Shoshana Grossbard

More articles in Review of Economics of the Household from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().