Children's Use of Time, Family Composition and the Acquisition of Social Capital - Bianchi y...

What Did You Do Today? Children's Use of Time, Family Composition, and the Acquisition ofSocial CapitalAuthor(s): Suzanne M. Bianchi and John RobinsonSource: Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 59, No. 2 (May, 1997), pp. 332-344Published by: National Council on Family RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/353474 .Accessed: 12/09/2013 15:09

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SUZANNE M. BIANCHI AND JOHN ROBINSON University of Maryland

What Did You Do Today? Children's Use of Time, Family Composition, and the Acquisition

of Social Capital

Using time-diary data collected from a statewide probability sample of California children aged 3-11, we examine the amount of time children spend on four activities presumed to affect their cognitive and social development-reading or being read to, watching TV, studying, and doing household chores-and how that time varies by four family characteristics: parental education, maternal employment, number of parents in the household, and family size. As expected, children of highly educated parents study and read more and watch TV less. Contrary to expectations, children of mothers who are employed part-time watch significantly less TV than children of mothers at home full-time. Otherwise, there are few significant differences by mother's extent of paid employment, the presence of a father, and the number of siblings. Thus, the results reinforce the thesis that parental education is the predominant predictor of the human and social capital investments that children receive.

Department of Sociology, 2112 Art-Sociology Building, Col- lege Park, MD 20742-1315 ([email protected]).

Key Words: children, family composition, social capital, time use.

Changes in the American family have resulted in a growing uneasiness about the well-being of children in the United States. Some researchers note how the increased educational attainment of parents and declining family size bode well for children's economic security (Bianchi, 1990; Haveman & Wolfe, 1993; Hernandez, 1993). At the same time, others have emphasized trends like the increase in single parenting that result in more poverty and undermine children's economic well- being (McLanahan & Sandefur, 1994). Although the research on maternal employment has been mixed and inconclusive (Bronfenbrenner & Crouter, 1982; Presser, 1995), there continues to be concern about the potentially negative effects of working mothers. Debate continues over whether the dramatic increase in mothers' labor force participation and more single parenting have diminished parental attention to children and eroded children's chances of success in school and in other arenas of life.

Sociologists have emphasized the importance of parental transmission of cognitive ability and academic expectations for the educational and occupational achievement of children (Duncan, Featherman, & Duncan, 1972; Sewell & Hauser, 1980). The notion of "human capital," a term sociologists borrowed from neoclassical economists, infuses our understanding of the

Journal of Marriage and the Family 59 (May 1997): 332-344 332


Children's Use of Time

goals of many childhood activities, particularly schooling. In this view, accumulating skills in childhood is of paramount importance, and understanding what impedes and what enhances development of competencies that will translate into success later in life becomes an important focus of the study of children and childhood activities.

Sociologists, particularly James Coleman (1988), have broadened the economist's notion of human capital to encompass what has been called "social capital." Social capital, like human capital, increases children's future productivity, but investments depend on the relationships in which children are embedded. So, for example, a child may have a talented and highly educated parent and thus be genetically endowed with great potential for cognitive development, but interactions with that parent are needed to convey encourage- ment and expectations. Social interaction with parents thus can create resources that will enhance the child's realization of his or her potential for achievement and later success. Parental resources also place children in certain types of communities and educational environments where social interactions can provide further social capital to facilitate "good" child outcomes.

McLanahan and Sandefur (1994) argue persua- sively that the dysfunctional outcomes of children raised with one parent-such as the higher likelihood of dropping out of high school, having an early teen birth, and having difficulty getting established in the labor market-result not only from the poorer economic circumstances of these children but also from the diminished interaction these children have with parents (especially fathers). Children in one-parent families also derive less social capital both from the schools they at- tend and from the neighborhoods in which they live. Indeed, one of Coleman's (1988, 1992) concerns about the increase in single parenting and in maternal employment was that both trends in the family undermine the social capital available to children in far-reaching ways. Parents were spending less time with their own children and fewer adults were at home during the day to supervise the activity of groups of children when they came home to their neighborhoods after school each day. Also, less time was available for volun- teerism in schools and other organizations and for building social networks around these institutions that provide extensive resources for children.

The interrelated notions of human capital development and social capital suggest that how children spend their time is important and that

parental (and community) resources may be critical in determining which children engage in activities that enhance intellectual growth, encourage responsibility, and generally steer children toward a productive adulthood. The human and social capital of childhood are built over time and through the activities in which children engage and the quality of the resources and social interactions that surround them.

However, we know relatively little about how children spend their time. To date, there have been only a handful of time-diary studies of children's time use, most of limited scope. Nor do we know how children's time in activities varies in different types of families, although families are presumed to provide varying degrees of access to the social capital needed for the successful development of human potential.

In this article, we conduct an exploratory analysis of the amount of daily time children spend in an array of activities that might be deemed rele- vant to their accumulation of skills during childhood. We review the literature on the interrelationship among family characteristics and parents' and children's time use. With 1989-1990 time diary data for children in California, we examine the time children spend in four important activities: reading or being read to, studying, doing housework, and watching TV. We address four questions about the interrelationship between family characteristics and time spent in these activities.

(a) Do children of mothers who are at home full-time spend more time in cognitive enhancing activities, such as reading, than children of mothers who are in the paid labor force? Are there differences in the amount of time children spend doing housework, watching TV, or studying by the labor force status of their mother?

(b) Do children in two-parent households spend more time reading, doing household chores, and studying, and less time watching TV than children in one- parent households?

(c) Do children in smaller families spend more time in these four activities than children in larger families?

(d) Finally, how does parental education relate to these activities? Do children of better educated parents spend more time studying and reading and less time watching TV than children of less well educated parents?

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Journal of Marriage and the Family

STUDIES OF CHILDREN'S TIME USE

Most previous time-use research on children's activities has focused on the time parents spend interacting with children (primarily preschool-age), rather than on how these children themselves spend their time. Although some studies of children's activity patterns have been undertaken (Beschen, 1972; Medrich, Roisen, Rubin, & Buckley, 1982; Wallace, 1987), very few of them have been conducted with large, representative samples that also provide full coverage of all daily activities. The one exception to this was a 1981 study of 229 children conducted as a follow- up of parents interviewed in the 1975 University of Michigan National Time Use Study (Juster & Stafford, 1985). However, these data are now over 15 years old, were obtained from a sample with less than a 30% response rate, and did not cover all activities.

Parental Education

In Timmer, Eccles, and O'Brien's (1985) analysis of the 1981 Michigan data, higher parental education was correlated with more studying, less TV watching, and more reading on the part of children. They highlighted the longstanding interest in children's cognitive development and acquisition of aggressive behaviors that characterized the developmental psychology literature on television viewing. Underlying the concerns about children's time in front of the TV is the assumption that, if children viewed less TV, they would engage in other, "more productive" activities like reading. The 1981 survey showed a large amount of television viewing on the part of children that peaked at ages 11 to 12, but it was not clear that less TV viewing resulted in children spending more time in activities like reading. Yet the more television that 9- to 17-year-old children watched, the lower their scores on a standardized reading comprehension test (Timmer et al., 1985, p. 370). Whether less able readers selected to watch more TV or whether large amounts of TV viewing limited reading comprehension was not clear, given the cross-sectional nature of the 1981 time-diary data for children.

The most extensive previous research related to how children spend time comes indirectly from educational differences in parental time with children. Early studies of parents of preschoolers suggested that college-educated mothers did devote more time to child care than less well-educated mothers. In addition, the quality of interaction was

also seen to be superior because more educated mothers spent more time teaching children, taking them on educational outings, and playing and interacting with children (Hill & Stafford, 1974; Leibowitz, 1974, 1977). Others (e.g., Lindert, 1977) questioned the strength of the relationship between education and parental time with children and suggested that the relationship was quite sen- sitive to model specification and data used.

Subsequent analysis of 1975-1976 nationally representative U.S. time diary data by Hill and Stafford (1985) confirmed earlier conclusions that college-educated mothers devoted significantly more time to children than mothers with only a high school education or less. In particular, Hill and Stafford (1985, p. 427) argued that not only did college-educated mothers commit more time to children, but they engaged children in a greater variety of activities at a higher level of (maternal) involvement and with more predictability. They concluded that:

while preschool differences in quantity of care time are substantial, the differences in predictability and variety of care are also large and that more educated parents interact more with their children throughout their youth than do less educated parents. Hence, it may also be consis- tency and variety of interaction over a long time period that create differences in child development. (p. 435)

Maternal Employment

The study of the effect of maternal employment on child outcomes has been fraught with methodological problems. Some research suggests that, net of socioeconomic status, maternal employment negatively affects student achievement (Milne, Myers, Rosenthal, & Ginsburg, 1986), student discipline (Myers, Milne, Baker, & Gins- burg, 1987), and teachers' rating of the cognitive abilities of elementary school age children (Stafford, 1987). Other research has found maternal employment to be unrelated to child outcomes (Dawson, 1991; Leibowitz, 1977) or related only to outcomes for select subgroups. For example, the relation is negative for high income boys (Desai, Chase-Landsdale, & Michael, 1989), negative for boys (but not girls) in single-parent families (Krein & Beller, 1988), negative if employment is full-time and occurs in the first year or two of life (Belsky & Eggebeen, 1991), but positive if it occurs in subsequent preschool years (Blau & Grossberg, 1992). In sum, the research on maternal employment remains inconclusive,

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often showing effects that are neither strong nor consistent (Heyns & Catsambis, 1986; Parcel & Menaghan, 1994).

Nock and Kingston (1988) suggested four possible reasons for the failure to find strong negative effects of maternal employment on children. Employed mothers might substitute quality for quantity of time with children; fathers with employed wives might spend more time with children and thereby narrow differences in parental time between dual-earner families and mother- homemaker families; relatively small amounts of time may be spent with children in any type of household, hence minimizing the possibility of differences by labor force status of mother; and, finally, children may not require much parental time for good outcomes.

Using the 1975 time-diary data collected by Juster and Stafford and the follow-up data collected in 1981, Nock and Kingston (1988) found that much more time was spent with children in households with a mother at home full-time- even though relatively little of that time was spent directly interacting with children. That is, during much of the time mothers spend with children, they are primarily doing other tasks, like housework. The care of children is an auxiliary or sec- ondary activity. Nonetheless, employed mothers did not fully compensate for quantity with quality. Mothers who were not in the labor force also spent more time in quality activities, such as playing with and reading to children, although differences were concentrated among mothers of preschool rather than school-age children. In dual-earner families, fathers compensated somewhat for less maternal time but not sufficiently to erase differences between two-earner and one- earner families. With the data available to them, Nock and Kingston were not able to address the most interesting, and perhaps most important, question about maternal employment: How much parental time do children need? In general, questions about need are difficult to research and re- main largely unanswered (Presser, 1995). Howev- er, determining how children spend their time and how this varies across families is a reasonable, if only a first, step in assessing the question of how children should be spending their time.

A major theoretical concern in the social capital literature is whether the increase in maternal employment deprives children of the supervision they need and limits connections between the family and the larger community. Using time- diary data collected on various samples of rural and urban women in the 1920s through the late

1970s, Bryant and Zick (1992) reached the conclusion that the reduced time for children con- comitant with the rise in married mothers' participation in the labor force may be overstated. Larg- er families and the relatively heavy burden of domestic and unpaid agricultural work that was required of mothers in earlier decades limited the time mothers had to spend with children. Al- though the direct time spent with a given child probably has decreased somewhat for very young children, Bryant and Zick estimated that maternal time actually has increased for school-age children over the course of this century.

Robinson (1993) found that mothers in his 1985 national time-diary survey spent just as much time with children, on average, as mothers in a 1965 national survey. Moreover, if the higher maternal employment levels of 1985 are taken into account, it could be argued that mothers gave children slightly more of their available time at the later point.

Recent evidence by Bryant and Zick (1996) suggests that the activities parents do with children changes with a mother's employment. Ma- ternal employment may actually increase leisure time and housework time that is shared with children. On the other hand, it also decreases time spent in direct family care and supervision of children.

Single Parenting

The research on single parenting, as with maternal employment, often has been beset with methodological problems, particularly the failure to control for socioeconomic differences. Howev- er, recent research, which does adequately mea- sure differences in family income between one- and two-parent families, suggests that only half of the poorer outcomes of children who grow up with one parent can be attributed to economic factors (McLanahan & Sandefur, 1994).

McLanahan and Sandefur argue that much of the rest of the difference can be explained by differences in parental involvement. Maintaining a single-parent family curtails the time that mothers (and fathers) are able or willing to invest in monitoring children's activities, supervising homework, and developing relationships with teachers and parents of children's friends. This argument suggests there are important differences in children's activity patterns in one- and two-parent families. However, although Timmer et al. (1985) found that children of single parents in the 1981 time-diary study watched more TV on weekends

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and routinely got less sleep, other differences were minimal.

Robinson (1993) found that, other factors equal, single mothers spent about 30% less time with their children, on average, than married mothers in 1985. Not only did children in single- parent families miss out on time spent with their father, but time with their mother was also lower.

Family Size and Birth Order

Number of siblings has consistently been found to have a small, negative correlation with educational and occupational attainment in adulthood in the status attainment literature (Mare, 1995). Using a number of data sets, Blake (1989a, 1989b) showed that children from small families do better on tests of verbal and math ability than children from larger families.

Social psychologists, most notably Zajonc and Markus (1975; Zajonc, 1976), found birth position to be inversely related to achievement. The argument is that additional children lower the intellectual stimulation in the family. Only children and first-born children interact primarily with adults and, hence, the cognitive stimulation is higher than when interactions include more children. A consistent effect of birth order is not well established in studies that adequately control for socioeconomic status, however. For example, Steelman and Mercy (1980) showed that, net of socioeconomic status, the effect of the number of siblings on intelligence held in the presence of a control for birth order but not vice versa. In a study of tests of vocabulary and block design ability of children 6-11 years old, the number of younger siblings had a consistent negative effect on test scores, and the number of older siblings tended to reduce verbal but not nonverbal achievement (Mercy & Steelman, 1982).

In sum, past research on family composition, children's and parents' use of time, and children's cognitive achievement suggests that children of college-educated parents can be expected to spend more time reading and studying and less time watching TV than children of less well- educated parents. Maternal employment and single parenting also may detract from time spent reading and studying and may encourage more TV watching, although here the support for such an expectation is far more limited.

Additionally, because of time constraints, we might expect children in families with either an employed mother or a single parent to spend more time on housework. Larger families might also

encourage and provide the opportunity for more time spent doing housework. And it remains at least a plausible hypothesis that the greater the number of children in the household, the more difficult it will be for parents to devote time to reading to children or effectively monitoring homework. Using the statewide California time- diary data described in the next section, we inves- tigate each of these expectations.

DATA AND METHODS

In order to provide basic information on the daily activities of young children in California, the Sur- vey Research Center at the University of Califor- nia, Berkeley, conducted a survey of the daily activities and locations of a representative sample of children aged 11 years or younger for the Califor- nia Air Resources Board between April 1989 and March 1990. The principal objectives of the survey were to determine the proportion of time spent in specific indoor and outdoor locations (e.g., living room, workplace) and in specific activities (e.g., active sports, hobbies) by Califor- nia's children in general and by their demographic and socioeconomic subgroups.

The California Children's Activity Pattern Sur- vey implemented a methodology of collecting time- diary information in the context of probability- based surveys that had been employed in several earlier representative surveys. (See Wiley et al., 1991, for background and further details.) Time- diary estimates from these studies thus far have produced rather reliable results at the aggregate level (Robinson, 1977, 1985). However, almost all of the methodological and substantive data on activity patterns have come from samples of adults.

Studies of children raise special issues, particularly because of the unknown abilities of children to report on their own behavior. Moreover, because children's activities tend to be different from those of the larger adult population, new data collection procedures and coding categories needed to be developed for them. To help identify potential sources of reporting bias and to develop efficient probing techniques to improve parent re- call, a small pilot study was conducted with 38 households containing children aged 11 or younger. The results of the pilot study suggested that interviewer attentiveness and probing were the most effective ways to enhance the quality of the diary information. Interviewers were instruct- ed to probe any activity that lasted more than 2 hours to determine whether the child had done

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anything else during the period. The results of the pilot study also led to the decision to obtain diary information directly from children aged 9-11 and to encourage parents to consult with children aged 6-8 about how they had spent their time during the diary day, i.e., the day preceding the interview. The pilot study did not indicate that the quality of the information was enhanced when respondents were contacted ahead of time and told that the researchers would call back the next day to obtain information on time use.

The target population for the California Chil- dren's Activity Survey consisted of children younger than 12 years old and living in English- speaking households with a telephone. The full sample was drawn using random-digit-dialing methods of Waksberg (1978) and was stratified to provide representative estimates for major regions of the state. Interviews were distributed over the four seasons (from April 1989 to March 1990) to take into account seasonal variations in activity and location patterns. The survey questionnaire included a complete inventory of children's activities and locations on the diary day and a brief se- ries of items pertaining to the characteristics of the selected child, the household, and an adult in the household who served as an informant about the child's activities. The questionnaire, including the diary component, was implemented using the computer-assisted telephone interviewing technology developed as part of the university's Com- puter Assisted Survey Execution System. A total of 1,200 eligible respondents were interviewed, with an overall response rate of 78%.

The questionnaire instrument for the survey was divided into three main parts: an adult section, a children's section, and a daily time diary. When the selected child was 9-11 years old, he or she was the preferred respondent for the children's and diary sections of the questionnaire. This occurred in about 85% (269 of a total of 316) of the cases. When the randomly selected child was 8 years old or younger, the preferred respondent for all sections of the questionnaire was the parent or guardian who spent the most time with the child on the diary day. Respondents for children aged 6-8 were encouraged to consult with the child when filling out the diary portion of the questionnaire. Approximately 92% of the adult respondents were the parent or guardian who spent the most time with the selected child on the diary day-most had spent at least 8 waking hours with the child on the diary day. (Less than 1% of the interviews were conducted with adults who had spent less than 1 waking hour

with the child on the diary day.) Nearly 98% of the adult respondents were either the father, mother, stepfather, or stepmother of the selected child. In fact, over 80% of the adult respondents were the children's mothers.

Concern about the validity of the diary responses arises quite naturally because of the nature of the task of reconstructing the full range of activities and locations of the diary day and because the diary information was collected from children or from proxy interviews with adults who may not have had full information. In order to make a subjective assessment of the validity of diary responses, the interviewers were asked to record their confidence in the diary responses after the diary section had been completed. In approximately 80% of the cases, interviewers said they had "complete confidence" in the diary responses. Eighteen percent of the diaries inspired a "somewhat confident" rating. Less than 2% re- ceived a rating of "not too confident."

One issue of validity that is of particular concern in this study is that it is likely that mothers with paid jobs will, on average, spend less time directly observing their children's activities than mothers at home full-time. Unfortunately, the data do not contain a question asking who was with the child when an activity occurred. This must be kept in mind when interpreting results, especially those for maternal employment. At the same time, because older children reported for themselves or assisted parents, the mother or father was the sole respondent for the diary only for children under the age of 6.

Diary Coding Procedures

In contrast to most surveys that examine people's activities in isolation from the natural temporal context in which they are embedded (e.g., by asking people to compress their actual behavioral experiences by saying whether they "often" or "usually" do something), time-diary accounts report activities as they naturally and sequentially occur in daily life. Studies of time use provide the opportunity, then, to examine human activities in real time-as individuals are actually involved in the stream of daily behavior.

In the retrospective diary used in the Califor- nia Children's Activity Survey, respondents reported each activity they engaged in on the diary day, beginning at midnight of the preceding day. They reported where they were at the time, if they were inside, outside, or equally inside and outside, and whether or not a tobacco smoker was

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present. The interviewers recorded the time the activity began and ended, entered a single-digit code (one of eight precoded categories) indicating the major category of the activity, and entered a brief description (up to 44 characters in length) of the activity. When the activity was related to school or to child care, the interviewer entered an additional code (one of seven precoded categories) that further specified the type of activity and its location.

If the randomly selected child was younger than 9 years old and if the diary contained un- specified "day care," "babysitting," or "school" activities, interviewers asked the adult respondents to estimate the time the child spent in a variety of activities typical of such settings: eating snacks or meals, napping or resting, watching TV, doing arts and crafts, actually playing outdoors, and going on field trips.

Considerable effort was invested in obtaining a very detailed account of activities during the day, including all the important changes that occur during the day. Through prompts and probing, the interviewers attempted to ensure that each respondent's report was complete and accurate. A detailed scheme for coding activities was developed as part of an extensive coding operation for the diary data after the interviews were completed. (See Wiley et al., 1991, Table 2.3 for the coding scheme and Table 4.15 for a comparison of the California survey with the 1981 University of Michigan national survey of children. In general, the California data are similar to the 1981 data but differ in predictable directions, e.g., children spend more time in outdoor activities in Califor- nia than they do in the rest of the nation.)

Comparison of Survey Estimates with Population Data

A comparison between estimates based on the California Children's Activity Pattern Survey and Current Population Survey data for 1988 provides a rough basis for evaluating the representative- ness of the California Children's Survey sample and suggests the possibility that groups of lower socioeconomic status may be underrepresented in the California sample (Wiley et al., 1991, Table 4). Both median household income and mean years of education for adult respondents are higher than the corresponding Current Population Sur- vey figures. Although these differences may be due, in part, to differences in the sampling frame between the Children's Survey and the Current Population Survey, they are consistent with pat-

terns of underrepresentation of groups with lower income and less education that have been ob- served in many telephone and personal interview surveys of adult respondents (Goyder, 1987). This should be kept in mind when attempting to gener- alize from the Children's Survey estimates.

Compared with statewide public school enrollment figures for children in grades kindergarten through six, the grade distribution for the Chil- dren's Survey is not significantly different from the enrollment figures, but the distribution of children by race and ethnicity is significantly different from the enrollment data (Wiley et al., 1991, Table 5). This suggests some underrepresentation of non-White and Hispanic children in the Cali- fornia Children's Survey sample, due, in part, to the exclusion of households that did not speak English. In addition, because race and ethnicity are correlated with socioeconomic status, underrepresentation of certain racial and ethnic groups also may be due to selection bias with respect to socioeconomic factors.

Despite its restriction to English-speaking Cal- ifornia households with children and its possible underrepresentation of households with lower socioeconomic status, the 1989-1990 California Children's Time Use Study stands as the most comprehensive recent addition to the study of children's activity patterns. In the next section, we report descriptive findings on the amount of time children in the study spent reading or being read to, watching TV, studying, and doing housework during the diary day. Given the nature of the activities we examine, we restrict the sample to the 887 children who were ages 3-11. That is, although we have diaries on infants and toddlers, we exclude children under the age of 3 from the analysis.

We use tobit regression models to assess whether family background, particularly parental education, maternal employment, single parenting, and family size are predictive of the number of minutes a child engages in these activities. A tobit estimator is used because it corrects for the censored distribution of children's time in each activity. That is, a sizable number of children spend no minutes in a given activity on the diary day, and the tobit estimation takes into account this censoring at zero minutes.

FINDINGS

Implicit in the literature on family background and child outcomes is the notion that children ex- perience a more varied, cognitively stimulating

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childhood in some family environments than in others. The child outcomes that result are, there- fore, better in some situations than in others. The challenge is to determine which activities and investments matter most and what environments foster achievement. We cannot, with the data here, address the question of what activities are best for children, but we can add to what is known about how children spend their time and how this varies by family composition.

In selecting the activities to focus on, we are drawn to activities that seem to generate strong sentiments on the part of parents, teachers, or researchers about how children should spend time. For example, we argue that many teachers (and parents) believe that the more children are read to in their preschool years, the more they read themselves as they get older, the better they do in school, the better they perform on standardized tests, and the more likely they are to attain higher levels of education. The presumption is also that good study habits improve academic performance. Too much TV viewing is often considered bad or at least of questionable value for children. House- work is more neutral, but at least one scholarly work (Goldscheider & Waite, 1991) argues that doing housework may be good for children because it prepares them for running their own households later in life and teaches responsibility. However, other research, more focused on paid employment than on household chores, suggests that work (of any kind) may detract from time children devote to study or to developing cognitive skills (Zill, Nord, & Loomis, 1995).

Table 1 shows the percentage of children (aged 3-11) in the 1989-1990 California time-use study who spent some amount of time during the diary day in each of four activities: reading or being read to, watching TV, doing housework, and studying. In addition, for those children who engaged in a particular activity, the average number of minutes spent doing that activity is shown.

About one quarter of the sampled children spent some time reading or being read to, whereas almost nine in ten watched TV. Those who engaged in reading spent about 3/4 of an hour per

day in this activity. TV watchers spent an average of 23/4 hours in front of the TV, 3 hours when we include watching TV and doing some other activity such as homework (data not shown). Only 22% spent any time studying, and those who reported studying spent an hour in this activity. It should be noted that studying is not an activity in which many preschool-aged children engage. Be- cause the sample combines preschoolers and school-aged children, this lowers the percentage who report studying. In addition, interviews are spread over the calendar year, with some children on summer vacation when the interview occurred, and this also lowers the percentage studying. The regression models include controls for summer and weekend interviews in order to improve the modeling of time spent studying.

About 40% of children reported doing some housework. Children who did this activity during the diary day averaged close to an hour in household chores. These estimates seem relatively high and may reflect the fact that time spent doing household chores is reported by children themselves at ages 9-11, rather than by parents. Among younger children, housework time may include time helping an adult who is engaged in housework such as dinner preparation.

In Table 2, we show means (percentages for categorical measures) and standard deviations for variables used in the multivariate analysis of children's time use. Control variables include whether a child is male, a member of a minority group, the child's age, whether the diary day was a weekend day, and whether the interview took place in the summer.

A family's socioeconomic status is measured by two variables: the educational attainment of the parent and family income. Parental education is the education of the adult identified as knowing most about the child's activities, usually the mother of the child. About one quarter of the children live with a parent who has a college education (or more), and an additional 29% have a parent who attended college but did not graduate. One third of the children have a parent who is a high school graduate with no further schooling,

TABLE 1. TIME THAT CHILDREN SPEND READING, WATCHING TV, STUDYING, AND DOING HOUSEHOLD CHORES

Doing Reading Watching TV Studying Housework

Percentage who did the activity on the previous day 27% 89% 22% 40% Average minutes per day in activity for those who did the activity 45 168 63 54 Average minutes per day for entire sample 12 150 14 22

Note: n = 887 California children, aged 3-11.

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TABLE 2. MEANS AND STANDARD DEVIATIONS FOR VARIABLES PREDICTING CHILDREN'S TIME USE

Mean/ Percentage SD

Control variables Child is male 51% 50% Child is minority 30% 46% Child's age (in years) 7.09 2.70 Weekend diary day 37% 48% Summer interview 30% 46%

Parental education 100% Less than high school 11% 32% High school graduate 33% 47% Some college 29% 46% College graduate 12% 33% (Postgraduate) 15% 35%

1988 family income (in $10,000) 3.44 8.54 One-parent family 20% 40% Mother's labor force status 100%

Employed full-time 42% 49% Employed part-time 19% 39% Student 5% 22% Other-looking, laid off, retired 7% 25% (Keeping house) 27% 44%

Number of children 2.16 1.04 Sibling position 100%

Only child 28% 45% Oldest child-1 (or more) siblings 21% 40% (Younger child-1 (or more) siblings) 51% 50%

Note: Omitted categories in multivariate analysis are in parentheses; n = 887.

and about 11% have a parent who dropped out before completing high school.

Family type is indicated by whether a child lives with only one parent. Almost 20% of the sample lives in one-parent families, almost al- ways a family headed by the mother. The maternal employment variable indicates whether a child's mother is employed full- or part-time, is a student, is unemployed, or is a full-time homemaker. About one quarter of the sample lives with a mother at home full-time, whereas 42% have a mother who holds a full-time job. "Maternal employment" actually measures the employment status of the father for the 16 (out of 887) children in the sample who do not live with a mother (or stepmother) but reside only with their father. The average number of children in the sample households is just over two children. About 28% of the children for whom the diary is collected are the only child in their household. The remaining 72% of the children in the sample live in households with two or more children. About 21% are the oldest child in the household, and 51% have at least one older sibling.

Table 3 displays estimates from the tobit equations predicting time spent reading, watching TV, studying, and doing housework. Before turning to the family composition indicators, a comment on the control variables is in order. The control for whether the diary charts activities for a weekend or a weekday shows that children watch more TV, study less, and do more housework on the weekends than during the week. Not surprisingly, the estimate of time spent studying is greatly reduced in summer interviews.

Three demographic characteristics of the child are included in the model, largely as control variables: the child's age, minority status, and gender. The most important is age. Not surprisingly, as age increases, the likelihood of studying, doing household chores, and TV viewing increases. Among 3- to 1 1-year-olds, the likelihood of reading (or being read to) does not differ significantly by age. There are no major differences between minority and nonminority children, except that White, non-Hispanic children (the omitted category in the regression) spend slightly more time doing household chores. Finally, there are two gender differences of note. Boys may spend slightly more time in front of the TV, and boys spend significantly less time doing household chores than girls. This finding of a significant gender difference in housework among young children parallels the findings for teenagers (and young adults living at home) reported by Gold- scheider and Waite (1991).

Our main research questions revolve around whether family environments-particularly the level of parental education, maternal employment, single parenting, and family size-influence the likelihood of a child participating in various activities. Our multivariate findings suggest the following.

Parental Education and Income

Children's time spent reading or being read to is significantly higher in households in which the parents are college educated. Minutes spent reading per day do not differ between children who live with a college graduate and children who live with a parent who has attended graduate school or completed postgraduate education (the omitted category). However, children of parents who have attended (but not completed) college, who are high school graduates, or who did not complete high school read fewer minutes per day than children of college graduates. In addition, the higher

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TABLE 3. PARAMETER ESTIMATES OF TOBIT EQUATIONS PREDICTING MINUTES PER DAY SPENT READING, WATCHING TV, STUDYING, AND DOING HOUSEWORK

Doing Reading Watching TV Studying Housework

Intercept -14.86 8.66 -104.28*** -94.65*** Control variables

Child is male -9.27 18.11* -11.84 -16.37** Child is minority -7.62 16.66 7.56 -15.43* Child's age -1.05 10.26*** 17.77*** 7.38*** Weekend diary day -13.58* 41.46*** -96.28*** 17.01** Summer interview 4.01 2.00 -86.50*** 5.94

Parental education Less than high school -30.98** 82.29*** -6.47 -21.29 High school graduate -37.27*** 42.76*** -25.78** -8.62 Some college -34.87*** 28.94** -34.03*** -12.24 College graduate -12.17 0.35 -17.47 -19.98

Family income (in $10,000) 0.98*** -0.85 -0.60 -0.20 One-parent family 4.64 0.47 0.71 -14.12 Mother's labor force status

Employed full-time -5.65 1.11 -16.02 5.42 Employed part-time 12.75 -30.62** 17.27 -3.84 Student 11.08 -40.62* 0.77 11.68 Other-looking, laid off, retired -1.41 0.27 -29.80 -23.38

Number of children 1.28 5.11 3.35 13.67*** Sibling position

Only child 9.47 5.39 11.94 14.25 Oldest child-i (or more) siblings 1.45 2.22 11.75 -11.59

Sigma 75.28** 132.27*** 85.63*** 92.1*** Log likelihood -1619 -5042 -1486 -2467

Note: n = 887 California children, aged 3-11. *p


mother who is a full-time homemaker. It appears that latch-key children do not take advantage of parental absence to increase their TV viewing.

Perhaps more surprisingly, there were no differences in the likelihood of children doing household chores by mother's labor force status. We expected mothers employed full-time might require more help with household chores, but there was no evidence of this in the data.

It is possible that reporting on children's activities is less accurate for employed mothers, who may not spend as much time with their children as mothers who are not employed. For example, an alternative interpretation of the finding of no difference in TV viewing on the part of children with mothers employed full-time and those whose mothers are homemakers is that children of mothers employed full-time watch more TV than other children, but employed mothers do not realize this and underestimate the time their children spend in this activity. Mothers who are at home full-time may more accurately report how long their children are engaged in this activity. Although we cannot rule out such an interpretation of the findings, the use of older children's self-reports of activity (regardless of maternal employment status) helps mitigate against potential bias. Also the finding of significant differences between mothers employed part-time (who, it might be conjec- tured, know more about their children's activities than mothers who work full-time do) and homemakers makes it harder to dismiss findings for maternal employment as merely an artifact of data quality.

Family Size

Although we expected that family size might detract from study time and the likelihood of reading or being read to, we find no evidence of this. The one activity that seems to occupy more of a child's time in a large family is housework. As the number of children in the household increases, the average number of minutes a child spends in housework also increases significantly. Birth order (i.e., being an only child or a first-born child) is not predictive of differences in the amount of time spent in any of the activities we examine.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

Most research on the interrelationship of family environments and child outcomes assumes that

the opportunities and activities of childhood differ across family settings. Although the most accurate way to assess how children spend time is to collect time-diary data from children or their parents, there has been only limited information about children's activities gathered in this format. We examine recently collected time-diary information from a relatively large statewide sample of preschool and elementary school-aged children to explore whether children's activity patterns vary in predictable ways by family characteristics. These diary figures provide striking docu- mentation of the dominance of TV watching as an activity among preschool and elementary school- aged children. Almost 90% of children watch TV in any given day, whereas only about 25% read a book or have someone read to them. The amount of time spent viewing TV far exceeds the amount of time spent reading. Although it is possible that a sizable share of TV watching among preschoolers is of educational programs like Sesame Street, the extensive amount of viewing time reinforces concerns about TV's influence on children's physical fitness, cognitive functioning, and aggressive behavior.

Of the four family characteristics we examine, the largest differences are found for parental educational attainment. College-educated parents appear to limit their children's time in front of the TV more than less-educated parents do. Highly educated parents also appear to encourage their children to read and study more than do less educated parents.

Recent empirical and theoretical work has raised new questions about the negative effect of single parenting and maternal employment on children, but our findings suggest rather minimal differences on our four time-use outcomes (time reading, studying, watching TV, and doing housework) between children in two-parent families and those who live only with their mother. Fur- thermore, our findings on maternal employment do not support the popular hypothesis that young children fare best when they have a mother at home full-time. Children of mothers who are employed part-time (and mothers who are students) watch less TV than children with mothers who are at home full-time. Our findings suggest that it may be mothers who achieve a balance between working outside the home and spending time with their children who are most successful at steering their children toward productive use of their time.

Finally, we find relatively little difference in children's activities by family size. In larger fami-

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lies, children do more housework, perhaps because there is more housework to do. However, oldest (or only) children's time in activities such as reading or studying or housework do not appear to be much different than that of younger siblings in households.

Although the diary data used in this research do not directly assess the relative value of various activities, they do provide estimates of how much time children are spending in activities that may be related to cognitive and behavioral outcomes. With diary data, we begin to illuminate the connections between parental inputs and child outcomes. Well-educated parents appear to structure their children's time differently than less educated parents, and this may provide the children of better-educated parents with the social capital necessary for cognitive enhancement. At the same time, our results do not support the assumption that full-time mothering is critical to good child outcomes. And until we can show systematic differences between how children (and parents) spend time in single-parent families and how they spend time in two-parent families, caution is war- ranted in attributing negative outcomes for children in single-parent families to a dearth of social capital or inadequate supervision.

In his seminal work on social capital, Coleman argued that a child's access to adults in the family (as well as the attention given by adults to children) was crucial to their acquisition of human capital. In this analysis, we have related differences in children's time use to several factors that Cole- man argued were key to the development of social capital in the family-the number of parents present in the household, materal employment, family size, and parental education. Although the diary measures provide a provocative first look at family variation in children's activities, to be true to Cole- man's notion of social capital, we must move be- yond measures of simple access and the availabili- ty of parents to measures that also capture the de- gree to which parents are involved with children. For example, how much of a child's time in various activities is time that is shared with other family members? How much affect and positive rein- forcement is transmitted? How much and what types of time that children allocate to reading or television viewing actually affect their cognitive development? California represents more than 10% of the country, but the present results need to be replicated and extended at the national level to assess more fully the role that families play in determining positive child outcomes.

NOTE We would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of Melissa Milkie, Harriet Presser, and three anonymous reviewers. We also benefited from the research assis- tance of Lekha Subaiya and Rongjun Sun, thanks to a training grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to the Center on Population, Gender, and Social Inequality, Department of Sociology, University of Maryland.

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Article Contentsp. 332p. 333p. 334p. 335p. 336p. 337p. 338p. 339p. 340p. 341p. 342p. 343p. 344

Issue Table of ContentsJournal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 59, No. 2 (May, 1997), pp. 243-498Front Matter [pp. 243 - 280]Mothers and MotherhoodConsequences of Young Mothers' Marital Histories for Children's Cognitive Development [pp. 245 - 261]Early Motherhood in an Intergenerational Perspective: The Experiences of a British Cohort [pp. 263 - 279]Their Mother's Daughters? The Intergenerational Transmission of Gender Attitudes in a World of Changing Roles [pp. 281 - 293]Significant Life Experiences and Depression among Single and Married Mothers [pp. 294 - 308]Risk, Conflict, Mothers' Parenting, and Children's Adjustment in Low-Income, Mexican Immigrant, and Mexican American Families [pp. 309 - 323]The Relation of Divorced Mothers' Perceptions of Family Cohesion and Adaptability to Behavior Problems in Children [pp. 324 - 331]

Children and FamiliesWhat Did You Do Today? Children's Use of Time, Family Composition, and the Acquisition of Social Capital [pp. 332 - 344]Child, Parent, and Contextual Influences on Perceived Parenting Competence among Parents of Adolescents [pp. 345 - 362]Gender of Siblings, Cognitive Achievement, and Academic Performance: Familial and Nonfamilial Influences on Children [pp. 363 - 374]Divorce-Related Transitions, Adolescent Development, and the Role of the Parent-Child Relationship: A Review of the Literature [pp. 375 - 388]Familial Factors Associated with the Characteristics of Nonmaternal Care for Infants [pp. 389 - 408]

Of General InterestTesting the Theoretical Models Underlying the Ways of Coping Questionnaire with Couples [pp. 409 - 418]Effects of Family Structure on the Earnings Attainment Process: Differences by Gender [pp. 419 - 433]Gender and the Timing of Marriage: Rural-Urban Differences in Java [pp. 434 - 450]Perceptions of Family Differentiation, Individuation, and Self-Esteem among Korean Adolescents [pp. 451 - 462]Healthy and Unhealthy Friendship and Hostility between Ex-Spouses [pp. 463 - 475]The Contribution of Intermediary Factors to Marital Status Differences in Self-Reported Health [pp. 476 - 490]

Book Reviewsuntitled [pp. 491 - 492]untitled [pp. 492 - 493]untitled [pp. 493 - 494]untitled [pp. 494 - 495]untitled [p. 495]untitled [pp. 495 - 496]untitled [pp. 496 - 497]untitled [pp. 497 - 498]

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