The Effect of Birth Order on Children’s Time Use

Nicole Black, Danusha Jayawardana () and Gawain Heckley ()
Additional contact information
Danusha Jayawardana: Centre for Health Economics, Monash Business School, Monash University
Gawain Heckley: Health Economics Unit, Department of Clinical Science, Lund University

No 2025-12, Working Papers from Centre for Health Economics, Monash University

Abstract: Recent research shows that birth order affects human capital outcomes, yet there is limited empirical evidence on the underlying mechanisms. This study examines the effect of birth order on children’s time use across activities that are important for human capital development. Using detailed time-use diaries of Australian children aged 2-15, we find that within families with two or three children, later-born children spend less time on enrichment activities and more on digital media, compared to first-born children. We obtain the same findings when we repeat the analysis using detailed time-use diaries of US children. Further investigation reveals that part of the birth order effect is driven by parents spending less time with later-born children compared to first-borns. However, later-borns also independently devote less of their own time to enrichment activities, suggesting that personal time use may be an important mechanism behind the well-documented impact of birth order on human capital development. We find evidence that later-born children experience more lenient parenting, which may help explain this pattern of own time use.

Keywords: Birth order; Children’s time use; Human capital development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 J13 J22 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://monash-ch-econ-wps.s3-ap-southeast-2.amazon ... e/chemon/2025-12.pdf (application/pdf)

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:mhe:chemon:2025-12

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://www.monash.edu/business/che

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Centre for Health Economics, Monash University Centre for Health Economics, Monash University, 900 Dandenong Road, Caulfield East VIC 3145.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Johannes Kunz ().