Mom's Time

Dan Hamermesh always takes on the fun projects. 

A decade ago, he did a pile of work looking at returns to beauty. 

Now, he's looking at time-diary data. Here's the abstract from his latest at NBER. 

Using time-diary data from the U.S. and six wealthy European countries, I demonstrate that non-partnered mothers spend slightly less time performing childcare, but much less time in other household activities than partnered mothers. Unpartnered mothers’ total work time—paid work and household production—is slightly less than partnered women’s. In the U.S. but not elsewhere they watch more television and engage in fewer other leisure activities. These differences are independent of any differences in age, race/ethnicity, ages and numbers of children, and household incomes. Non-partnered mothers feel slightly more pressured for time and much less satisfied with their lives. Analyses using the NLSY79 show that mothers whose partners left the home in the past two years became more depressed than those whose marriages remained intact. Coupled with evidence that husbands spend substantial time in childcare and with their children, the results suggest that children of non-partnered mothers receive much less parental care—perhaps 40 percent less—than other children; and most of what they receive is from mothers who are less satisfied with their lives.

After adjustments for education, age, children's age and so on, married mothers spend about 40 minutes more per day in household production than do similar other mothers. But most of that time difference is in non-childcare activities; married mothers spend about 6% more time providing childcare. But their husbands spend a lot of time in childcare as well. Consequently:

Together with the slight amount of additional time in childcare by married women, this suggests that children of married mothers receive over 3 hours per day of care from their parents, compared to about 1-1/2 hours per day that children receive from their single mothers.

The biggest gaps are for children aged 3 to 12; 

Widows differ substantially from other groups of mothers without a spouse in the home:

One sub-group of non-married mothers uses time differently from the others—widows. They account for only four percent of non-married mothers ages 25-54 in the sample, but they show statistically significant differences in the time they spend on various activities compared to other non-married mothers. They exhibit much more home production time than others; indeed, they differ only minutely (five minutes less per day) in this dimension from married mothers. They make up for this extra time by working and sleeping less than the other non-married mothers. Overall, except in their leisure time widows behave more like women with a husband present than do divorcees, separated mothers or those whose spouse is absent.

And marital status has substantial effects on self-reported life satisfaction:

The estimates of the impact of marital status in regressions describing this indicator of life satisfaction are shown in the bottom panel of Table 7. For all four countries the same vectors of covariates that have been used throughout are included. If there is no spouse/partner in the household, the mother is significantly less satisfied with her life—by 16, 43, 23 and 16 percentage points in the U.S., France, U.K. and Italy respectively. There is a very large difference in this measure by partnership status in all four countries. (The effects of being non-partnered are even more significant statistically in ordered probits describing the entire range of responses to the questions about life satisfaction.22) While feeling only slightly more rushed for time than partnered mothers, non-partnered mothers are much less likely to be satisfied with their lives. This difference is essentially unrelated to how they allocate their time across different activities—the results hardly change if the mother’s time allocation is included in the estimating equations.

Note that while the Table 7 estimates adjust for the effects of education (among other covariates), income doesn't seem to be included.  

Hamermesh concludes:

The results suggest that children of non-partnered mothers not only receive less parental time than others. The attention that they do obtain is from mothers who feel more stressed for time and who are less satisfied with their lives, a concatenation of time and possible interest that may on average disadvantage their children even more. Overall, our findings imply the need for even more attention and concern to the difficulties facing children in single-parent households. With non-married mothers in the U.S. being disproportionately less-educated and more likely to be from minority groups than married mothers, this conclusion takes on special importance.

Hamermesh doesn't draw policy conclusions; I expect folks will form them based on their prior preferences. 

Some conservatives may take it as an argument for strengthening families, discouraging out-of-wedlock births, and encouraging marriage counselling over rapid divorce. 

Others might take it as argument for very substantial investments either at school or before school to try to make up for the hour-and-a-half difference in parental time per day. There will be a substantial cumulative difference by the time a child enters school. 

It may not be particularly controversial to suggest that the government's proposed Equity Index, which would replace school decile funding formulas, include marital status as one of the variables. I don't think it's currently in there.

The tender years

I go into a bit more depth, over at Newsroom ($), on our tendering system for the household chores. I wonder whether it will catch on among econ-minded parents. A snippet:

Back in 1968, economist Friedrich Hayek wrote that competition is a discovery procedure. Some information about the world simply would not exist without the process of market competition that discovers it.

Parenting is a discovery procedure too – some information about it is difficult to acquire without going through the process. Applying a few economic insights can make some bits of parenting just a little less painful – like sorting out the household chores.

Every household has some chores that the kids are just expected to do as part of the general terms and conditions of family membership. But other chores are more onerous, both for the kids and for the parent, and love and empathy within the family can only get you so far. Managing some tasks can too easily be more painful than just doing them yourself.

If cleaning the cats’ litter box is a particularly objectionable task, which kid gets the job? If they take it in turn, whose turn is it this time? Is dealing with the cat box really worse than sweeping the floors? How much worse? And what happens if one of the chores doesn’t get done?
...
But back to the tendering system. As parents, we really didn’t know what allocation of chores would result in the least amount of grief. We needed information that the kids could not really credibly deliver to us. They might not even know it themselves without being put to the choice. We needed a procedure to elicit that information. And, at least as importantly, we needed a procedure that reduced the hassle in getting the allocated chores done.

And sealed bid tenders seemed just the thing.

I'll link to the ungated version on our site when it's up. [Update - it's ungated at their site now.]

Parentonomics

My column for next week's Newsroom will go through a bit of econo-parenting. I wanted to check my earlier review of Josh Gans's excellent "Parentonomics", but found it had disappeared down an internet memory hole; it had been in the Christchurch Press in 2008. I've dredged it up from my Google Drive archives and am posting it here.

Review of Parentonomics

As with most things in life, it comes down to a cross-price elasticity. If you're a careful parent who's made sure that sugary and fatty treats are a complement to healthy foods rather than a substitute for them, which is to say that you'll allow them as an occasional reward for good behaviour rather than as a daily staple, you should welcome every bit of advertising on the kids' morning cartoons - it increases the price that kids are willing to pay for those treats and consequently the amount of good behaviour that you can extract from them in exchange. If you can control the supply. At least according to Melbourne Business School economist Josh Gans.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams tells us that having a working knowledge of economics is like having a mild superpower: it provides a pretty useful framework to help in understanding the world. Gans's latest book, Parentonomics (University of New South Wales Press, 2008), applies the economist's mild superpower to parenting - from the delivery room to school concerts. The results? Generally hilarious and often helpful.

Parentonomics is presented as a series of chapter vignettes written primarily to appeal to an audience of non-economists. Gans avoids economic jargon like "cross-price elasticity" - the tone far more Dave Barry than textbook. The informal narrative is bolstered by reference to empirical findings from the social sciences and intuitive explanations of the relevant theories. So we find that reasonable amounts of television viewing doesn't seem to have adverse effects on kids' school performance and that car seats for kids aged 2-6 don't really seem to add much safety over and above just wearing a normal seatbelt.

Parentonomics is at its best in chapters like "Toileting" where Gans applies economic reasoning about incentives in order to provide rewards for achievement of certain ... outcomes, then watches as the subjects of his regulatory regime alter their behaviour to obtain the promised reward in ways that meet the letter of the law rather than its spirit: when the child is rewarded for having a clean nappy when he wakes up in the morning, don't be surprised to find a pile of dirty nappies hiding behind the dresser. Other highlights include negotiating with infants and optimal punishment schedules for older children.

In other sections, Gans's economic applications are more observational than prescriptive: they help us to understand why things are as they are rather than help us in doing anything much about it. So Gans argues that, at a resort complex where his family frequently vacations, the folks who wind up paying for the "kids eat free" deals at the participating resort restaurants are the childless people going to the other restaurants: keeping the cheaper restaurants full of noisy kids helps induce others to pay more to go to the higher-end venues. Gans later wonders why airlines seem unwilling to make simple moves to make flights easier for families. Perhaps, following his earlier logic, it's that frazzled families as co-passengers also help make business class travel that much more enticing to the childless. I'm not entirely convinced by that argument, but I'm not sure that the counterarguments don't also cut against Gans's restaurant story.

In another interesting application of cross-price elasticity, Gans offers a blog, that provides interesting tidbits of economic analysis of parenting. I started following the blog about a year before Parentonomics came out; Gans started offering teaser bits from the book a few months ahead of the book launch. Some of the anecdotes and analyses that made it into the book also can be found in the blog, and of course the blog updates regularly with new material while the book does not. Is the blog then a complement to the book or a substitute for it? I find them rather complementary. Not least because it's a lot harder to take the blog to bed with you at night to read to your wife when the 11 month old is letting neither of you sleep.

Household division of labour and sealed-bid tenders

In this week's Insights newsletter, I have a bit of fun with some econoparenting. 

I know that people who aren’t economists manage to raise kids and that it all seems to work out in the end, but I’m not entirely sure how.

I have learned that standard practice in the Crampton household diverges a bit from practice elsewhere. So gaze in awe, or horror, at our system for managing the more irksome household chores.

Some chores, the kids are happy to do just as part of being happy members of the family – and to get their dollar-a-day allowance instead of an amount discounted by the cost they imposed on their parents that day.

Other chores are less fun. Those go up for competitive sealed-bid tendering.

At the start of every quarter, we list the jobs that need to get done around the house.

We make a point of listing those chores that are more efficiently done by the source of the chore in the first place, and ones that we parents find particularly unappealing. So the kids can bid to do their joint laundry, fold it, and deliver it to their respective rooms. Vacuuming and washing the floors is another outsourced chore. And so is keeping the cat boxes in order.

The children submit sealed bids tendering for each of the chores – the weekly price they would charge for undertaking the chore satisfactorily. It is very important to define the tasks precisely, like the areas covered by a mop-and-vacuum requirement, or the frequency of cat box cleaning.

We tell the children that we need not necessarily accept the lowest or any bid. I look over the bids and award the chores for the quarter.

It has been transformational. Before we adopted the system, the kids would whine about doing chores. Now, we can threaten to shift to the other supplier. They each want to win as many chores as possible.

Aligning incentives can work wonders: instead of throwing mostly clean clothes in the laundry so that he doesn’t have to deal with re-folding them for another wearing, our ten-year-old makes sensible decisions and polices his sister as well.

And they haven’t yet started colluding against us, so that’s great too.

When I told folks around the office about our contracting arrangement, Oliver thought it was funny and told me to write it up for Insights. But I think it far more best-practice exemplar than satire.

Consider it for your upcoming third-quarter household planning.

The kids getting a bit taller will help. Right now there's only really one potential contractor on the laundry because the dryer is too high up for the other contractor. It's notionally contestable, but the current contractor will have to figure out that it'd be more expensive for us to use the other contractor on that one. And when they're tall enough to use the ironing board.....

All joy no fun? You're failing.

Parenting is only "all joy and no fun" if you decide to run things that way. It's totally up to you. If you like that kind of thing, well, de gustibus. But know that it doesn't have to be that way, and especially so if all the doomsayers have put you off having kids.

Things we've done that make parenting fun.

• The kids never got to see any TV shows we don't like so they don't ask for them. They get to choose among TV shows we do like. The Wiggles have never entered our house. We don't have Sky with insipid Disney cartoons. Instead, the kids get:
• Classic episodes of Sesame Street
• Animaniacs
• Pinky and the Brain
• Adventure Time
• PowerPuff Girls
• Samurai Jack
• Classic Bugs Bunny
• Freakazoid
• The kids never get cutesy kid music that we don't like. They can choose among the things we do like. And, I spend time finding music that we'll all like. Like Dan Marcotte's brilliant Dungeons & Dragons kid-friendly tunes. My daughter demands "Jello Music" sometimes when we're driving. What's Jello Music? This is Jello Music. Songs sung by Jello Biafra. The kids love Weird Al Yankovic. Why oh Why are you listening to The Wiggles?
• We buy books to read to them that we also like reading. Our son started into illustrated versions of The Hobbit, The Odyssey, and the Ring Cycle before he was 4. There are TONS of books that are great for both parents and kids. Shaun Tan works great. We've almost finished Eddings' Belgariad series. 
• Audiobooks while commuting can be great too. StoryNory.com has, for free (donation recommended), great audio renditions of:
• The Norse mythology
• Greek Myths
• Kipling: From the Just-So stories through Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, The White Seal and more
• Tales from 1001 Arabian Nights
• Classic fairytales from home and abroad
• Brothers Grimm
• We downloaded enough audiobooks to cycle round once every two months or so. And so the kids learned the classics, we all were entertained, and their vocabulary is way the hell better than it would have been if we were listening to The Wiggles on the drive.
• We play games with them that we also enjoy playing. You can totally run Dungeons & Dragons scenarios that work for 3 year olds if you don't expect that they'll be writing things down on their character sheets. Set up simple puzzle quests and see how they work them out. What could be more fun than that? They beg for me to run scenarios while we're commuting to and from daycare/school. Because of bad traffic, I sometimes have to turn down my childrens' pleading requests that we play Dungeons and Dragons in the car. My children have excess demand for Dungeons and Dragons. What could be better?

• For a few months, when he was 5, the boy's favourite thing in the whole world was to play Skyrim with me. I'd play, he'd watch for monsters and point out things I should be doing. All joy, all fun. Then, when we'd go out to the park afterwards, we'd LARP Skyrim. He'd set up an alchemy table on a stump and we'd find things to mix together. Then we'd kill monsters with sticks. So long as you don't care about looking ridiculous, it's awesome. And ceasing caring about what other people think about stuff is a great general purpose technology anyway.
• We've been playing 2-player Lego Batman. The three year old is almost old enough to handle a controller - I give it another couple of months. She's ridiculously good at solving some of the puzzles and giving advice as her brother and I go though. 
• If he's good, I'll play Pocket Minecraft with him as LAN play. And if he saves up enough money from doing chores around the house, he'll be able to buy PC Minecraft for the machine in the living room. 
• If you've forgotten how to have fun playing LEGO, are you sure that kids are right for you in the first place?

Yes, the first year's insomnia is awful. Toilet training is horrible. Feeding can be a disgusting mess. There's much tedious training required if you want to produce kids that others might find acceptable adults later on. But the fun stuff should be fun for both of you. I don't get people who decide to kill the fun stuff. What a horrible horrible pointless and stupid waste. There are little people in your house who would love to play Dungeons and Dragons with you, if only you would give them a chance.

Folks like Ruth Graham need to ignore all the whiny parents. A lot of it is just signalling from people who think that others will hold them in higher esteem because of all of the work they've put into parenting. Don't encourage this labour-theory-of-value-thinking by sympathising or awarding approbation. Read Bryan Caplan's serenity approach to parenting and have fun.