Notes on measuring child care time
This Economist article and chart have been making the rounds. Two claims are of particular interest: that parents are in general spending more time on child care and that millennial men are spending almost as much time as baby-boomer women on child care.
My first thoughts were: "hmm, that's interesting" and "I really hope someone has done a deep-dive explainer on the underlying data." I have not yet found such an explainer, so here are some preliminary notes on the data.
- The data come from the American Heritage Time Use Study, which aggregates seven time-use studies.
- Three of those seven studies come from before the 1990s: a 1965-66 study with approximately 2,000 diaries; a 1975-6 study with approximately 4,500 primary and 2,500 spousal diaries; and a 1985 study with approximately 2,700 primary and 400 youth diaries. In the 1965-1966 study, over 1/3 of the diaries come from the Jackson, Michigan area...
- ...and are extremely non-diverse in other ways.
- The child care categories do not include cooking, laundry, or other household work, even when one is (e.g.) cooking for children.1
- Lots of work has been done to try to coerce the raw data into a standard schema (a set of codes, a distinction between primary and secondary activites, and so on).
I am all in favor of trying to combine data into useful aggregates, even when that requires some judgment and transformation. And I am no expert on the (apparently large) literature around this data set specifically. But there are many standard sources of drift and uncertainty here:
- Small or small-ish sample sizes;
- Free-response text...
- ...in different formats;
- and narrow time windows.
For whatever it's worth, I don't doubt at all that American parents are spending more time on a certain kind of hands-on child care than they did thirty years ago. I do doubt that millennial men are doing as much child care, in any standard intuitive sense of "as much child care," as Boomer women did. And I very much doubt that these data justify a claim like that.
I think I remember other headline-grabbing surveys where these things count as child care, and therefore produce much higher numbers. But I can't find the references.↩