Chicago Booth Review Podcast Who Has Time to Be a ‘Good’ Parent?

Ariel Kalil: The college educated mothers spend more time but they enjoy it less so there's no happiness boost even though they enjoy it more than other things they do.

Hal Weitzman: College educated mothers spend about 300 more hours a year in intensive childcare than mothers with only a high school diploma, yet they enjoy it less. So what's prompting them to spend so much time with their kids? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I'm Hal Weitzman. Today I'm talking with Ariel Kalil of the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy about her research on the parenting time gap. All parents say that childcare is emotionally rewarding so how can we reduce the gap in how they spend their time?

Ariel Kalil, welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Ariel Kalil: Thank you for inviting me.

Hal Weitzman: We're delighted to have you here to talk about the parenting time gap. Your research on this, which I know you've been doing a huge amount of work over many years and you run this parenting research center at U Chicago. College educated mothers spend nearly six more hours per week, 300 more hours a year in intensive childcare than mothers who only have a high school diploma. First of all, how do we know that? And second, how significant is that for the child for their long-term development?

Ariel Kalil: We know that from looking at time diary data. So I do a lot of work using the American Time Use Survey, which is a wonderful data set that the Bureau of Labor Statistics produces and it asks a representative sample of households to tell us by filling out a diary in 15 minute intervals, how did you spend the last 24 hours? And the-

Hal Weitzman: When you say in 15 minute intervals-

Ariel Kalil: I mean, for example-

Hal Weitzman: ... not every 15 minutes.

Ariel Kalil: No, no, no. I mean, what did you do between 4:00 and 4:15, 4:15 to 4:30 and so on, for 24 hours? A big share of that is obviously sleeping, so that part goes quickly. But I can see, for example, that you were reading to your kids from 7:00 to 7:15 at night, or you were playing puzzles with your kid from 8:30 to 8:45 on a Saturday morning. And this is the nature of the data that I use to see how different kinds of parents allocate the 24 hours in a day that they have.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So how do we know then that there's this gap? We just track the information there?

Ariel Kalil: Because I have all the data from everybody and I see how the time expenditure of mothers with, for example, varying levels of education looks. So I say, "Here's a sample of mothers who have a BA degree. How did they spend their 24 hours? Did they sleep less? Did they work more? And most importantly for me, did they spend more time in learning activities with their kids?"

Hal Weitzman: So what is the significance for the children?

Ariel Kalil: Ah, because we think that the most important input into kids' skill development is the time they spend with their parents in what developmental psychologists, also economists call developmentally stimulating activities. And we have a rubric for what counts as such an activity. And for kids in the preschool age, that includes things like reading, talking, playing puzzles, playing games, playing make-believe, probably the kinds of things you think-

Hal Weitzman: With their parents.

Ariel Kalil: ... children engaged in joint time with their parents. Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: Okay.

Ariel Kalil: So children-

Hal Weitzman: Does it have to be the parent?

Ariel Kalil: It has-

Hal Weitzman: I mean, if they're playing with siblings, is that-

Ariel Kalil: It is probably just as good. It has to be someone who interacts with them. So the idea is that children in the early years learn both cognitive skills and also a whole set of other skills that economists here at Chicago call non-cognitive skills, but developmentalists call social or emotional skills. Kids learn those skills by interacting with other people. It surely can be other kids, but other kids can't read a book. A three-year-old can't read a book to another three-year-old.

Hal Weitzman: Right. But maybe an eight-year-old.

Ariel Kalil: But an eight-year-old can surely do it. This time diary that I use are the time expenditure of an adult. So I see, again, what a parent is doing. What you're asking me is wouldn't I like a child time diary so that I could see what is the input that a child is getting from all the people in the child's world who might interact with her? And I've done that kind of work too.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Well, maybe we can ask you about that.

Ariel Kalil: Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: So I'm wondering, because I know you're very interested in inequality and how inequality maps onto these behaviors as well. So is this basically a proxy? I mean, if we talk about mothers with high school diploma versus college educated moms, is this a proxy for income?

Ariel Kalil: No. Education is correlated with income, but it's not 100% correlated. So there are a lot of super smart PhD students walking around campus who have kids and are highly educated and their income at the moment is relatively low. That's one example. So these two are positively correlated. Parental education is also positively correlated with being married, with having a more predictable or routine job, with having higher income, with coming from a family whose parents were highly educated themselves. So there is a whole constellation of things, but parental education in particular, having a college education is not just a substitute for any one of these other demographic factors.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So in this research, you're just looking at the education level of the parent.

Ariel Kalil: Exactly.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. All right. So in your research, you find that mothers say that childcare is the most emotionally rewarding thing that they do in a day. And is that true for all moms?

Ariel Kalil: Yes, and dads too. Now you're asking me about another important feature of these data, which is that ... So by the way, we have 20 years of repeated cross sections of the American Time Use Survey, which is super neat for a variety of reasons. In a couple of years, they not only asked parents to write down what they were doing in these minute by minute intervals, but how they felt while they were doing them from a forced choice, from a list. So every parent listed how happy, how's trust, how much pain are you and how tired do you feel, et cetera. Sort of seven or eight different emotions that they attached to the activity that they reported doing. And it is among adults who have children and who have children still at home, they far and away report the most positive feelings in the time they spend with their child relative to how they feel when they are spending doing other things.

Now, those other things generally are work, commuting, leisure, which is a small portion of the day. There's no surprise I think that people really ... Television watching is a big chunk of people's day, but all told, if I find out how you feel doing the things that you do, I will find you most positively satisfied during those minutes that you spend with your child.

Hal Weitzman: How does it compare with, for example, going out with friends?

Ariel Kalil: Socializing? Well, leisure and socializing, it still wins, now, again, among parents. So now I have people who have children at home. So I can't say that socialization doesn't bring happiness for everybody, but among parents, they really report that they enjoy the time that they do spend with their kids.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So I want to ask before you did this research, what were the kind of the common reasons that experts used to give to explain why these college educated mothers spend so much more time on childcare? What do people used to think?

Ariel Kalil: There's two things going on, or we have established two facts thus far. Number one, the college educated mothers spend more time than their less educated counterparts in childcare. Number two, everybody says that they have more positive affect during childcare time than doing other things, but there's a puzzle in this third thing I'm going to tell you, which is that the college educated mothers spend more time, but they enjoy it less. So there's no happiness boost. A happiness bonus or boost is not the thing that helps explain the-

Hal Weitzman: Extra time.

Ariel Kalil: ... extra time that they spent.

Hal Weitzman: So does that mean they enjoy it but only up to a point or does that mean they overall enjoy it less?

Ariel Kalil: They overall enjoy it less even though ... So these two things are true at the same time, even though they enjoy it more than other things they do. It turns out that college educated people have a steady state of enjoying things relatively little. That's what we thought.

Hal Weitzman: Oh, dear. What has college done to them?

Ariel Kalil: I don't know. But that is a little bit of a side fact, but I think that also surprises people because you often think that you should be ... I don't know, maybe your status in life, your education, your income would make you overall more satisfied. That turns out not to be true. But we wanted to understand what was driving this extra effort that college educated mothers are putting into childcare time. And I think economists had one likely explanation, which was just that they are investing in their child's future, that they have some better sense that more time will lead to a more elite college going opportunity. You might also, if you were maybe not an economist or if you were a psychologist or just a person on the street, you might say, "Well, they must like it more because typically we spend more time on things we enjoy. "

These are a couple of leading explanations. You might also say, "Well, they're more in tune with what their child wants for some reason." So children like to play, children like to have a companion. Maybe these parents are more focused on their children's needs and they say, "Well, I do this because my child asks me more." None of those reasons turns out in our data to explain this extra time they invest. So that's not super satisfying because just rejecting a bunch of explanations is not the same as-

Hal Weitzman: We know what they don't do.

Ariel Kalil: We know where they don't lie.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah. Right.

Ariel Kalil: But we're still fumbling around trying to find the one we can rule in. And I can't say we're there yet, but what I can say is there seems to be something about identity that is at play here, that there's more of the notion that what it means to be a good parent is to spend more time that is being activated among the more highly educated mothers than their peers.

Again, this is what we're working toward now. This is a work in progress, this research, but it could almost be something that is not even obvious to the mother herself, that there's something about the peer groups in which she is embedded, the cultural norms that are shaping her life and those of the families that that family knows that is below the surface of something you can even articulate.

Hal Weitzman: So you said that just... I want to get into that, but to go back to this idea about enjoyment.

Ariel Kalil: Yes.

Hal Weitzman: So the college educated moms are enjoying it on average less, but they're doing more of it.

Ariel Kalil: Exactly. So that right away rules out this enjoyment hypothesis.

Hal Weitzman: But it sort of makes intuitive sense as well. You think, imagine we could measure grandparents' enjoyment and their grandparents only see the kids once a month or whatever.

Ariel Kalil: Exactly. And they get the best hour of the child's month.

Hal Weitzman: Best time.

Ariel Kalil: It's like always a birthday party.

Hal Weitzman: Correct. Right. So that's the time that you're really spending as quality time.

Ariel Kalil: Exactly. Exactly. And it could be, as I think you're implying, that there's diminishing returns and that the 20th minute you spend is super unpleasant and maybe that color is how you recollect the whole book reading episode.

Hal Weitzman: Right.

Ariel Kalil: I think that's possible. But what I'm going to also say is that no parent in any American Time Use Survey diary is spending so much time with their kids that you would think it would be super unpleasant. This is another fact that I think people aren't aware of. On average, parents spend about 15 or 20 minutes a day on average in these kind of developmentally stimulating activities. The difference is that college educated parents do that every day and their less educated peers do that on many fewer days. That's what gives rise to the time use gap and 20 minutes every day added up over five years of a child's life is not nothing, but the gap is not coming from you're a college educated parent, you're not spending four hours every evening reading to your kids, neither am I. So when you say, "Well, maybe it's so unpleasant that there are these diminishing returns," I just don't think that the absolute amount of time is so great that it would make you-

Hal Weitzman: There's something else going on.

Ariel Kalil: I think there's something else going on.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So I guess just to go back to the gap, this Gap between college educated and non-college educated, if there were enjoyment there, if there were more enjoyment, you would expect that gap to be even bigger?

Ariel Kalil: Exactly. Yeah. They invest more despite liking it so much less. If they actually liked it, they would probably do even more. I mean, I don't think that the direction of the selection is, let me find the thing that I'm really not enjoying and I'll do more of it. So you're exactly right. The gap is suppressed because they enjoy it less and it's exactly as you say. In the data, you can see that enjoyment is positively correlated with time expenditure. So it's exactly as you say. The gap arises because they're grinding their teeth and doing it anyway. And the interesting question for us is why? What's motivating that?

Hal Weitzman: If you're enjoying this podcast, there's another University of Chicago Podcast Network show that you should check out. It's called Not Another Politics Podcast. Not Another Politics Podcast provides a fresh perspective on the biggest political stories, not through opinions and anecdotes, but through rigorous scholarship, massive data sets, and a deep knowledge of theory. If you want to understand the political science behind the political headlines, then listen to Not Another Politics Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network.

Ariel Kalil, in the first half, we talked about your research about the parenting time gap, how college educated parents spend more time with their kids, even though they don't enjoy it as much as non-college educated parents in this kind of paradox that you talked about. You said that one of the reasons you're thinking about and you're continuing to do research on this might be to do with identity. Just unpack that a little bit more for us.

Ariel Kalil: So we did a survey where we measured parents' time expenditure. We asked them to self-report. This is now our own survey, no longer the ATUS, but our own original survey and we asked parents to self-report their time expenditure, self-report their affect and their emotions when they were spending time with kids and to tell us the reasons that they spent the time they did, what motivates you to spend this learning time with your child. And with these data, we were able to knock out again that it was the enjoyment because that was evident from the start because it can't possibly be that you do it because you enjoy it more as we saw you enjoyed it less. We wanted to find the driver that pushes college educated mothers to do more time. We rejected that it was more enjoyment for themselves. We rejected that it was because they believed more strongly that it was instrumental for their children's future.

We rejected that they were more in tune with their child and somehow thought that their child enjoyed it so they would do it. We did not as strongly reject that they responded more to a statement that I do this because it makes me feel like a good parent. So you'll notice I used a lot of double negatives as I could not strongly reject relative to the strong rejection of the other things. That we haven't quite finished with the data analysis, but we think there's a hint and it corresponds to other people's research, which is why I feel a bit more confident sort of hanging my hat on this, that when you invoke the notion of time use is what makes parents good parents, when you say that, that sparks something in a college educated mother that it doesn't in a less educated mother. So there's something going on with identity and that for college educated mothers, a stronger correlation between spending time and being a good parent.

Hal Weitzman: So it's almost like responsibility. I feel like this is what being a good parent is.

Ariel Kalil: This is what being a good parent is, but I might call that responsibility. I might just also call it identity that it's become a social norm that you're living in a group of other highly educated or privileged parents and people everywhere are segregated by income and education and live in homogeneous peer groups. And those parents look around and see all the other parents investing time and effort in their kids and there is a sort of peer level norm that that's just what you do because that's what being a good parent means. And so then you'd have to say, "Well, is that identity invoked more in the group of college educated parents? And is that what gives rise to the greater time investment?" I don't know the answer to the second question because that would require a different kind of research enterprise, but there's-

Hal Weitzman: I mean, is there anything wrong with that? It seems like you said at the beginning that children do get a lot out of this interaction.

Ariel Kalil: Exactly.

Hal Weitzman: So if we're giving them the interaction, that is what a good parent is, isn't it?

Ariel Kalil: It's great for the kid, then I return to the fact that these parents don't seem all that happy, which is the interesting puzzle.

Hal Weitzman: Right. But they were the ones who decided to have the kids in the first place.

Ariel Kalil: I mean, right. So it is good for the kids, but the implications for parents' wellbeing. So I think the question is, and this is part of more of this more public facing discussion about intensive parenting and are all these college educated parents just driving themselves crazy trying to outdo one another? I can't say that. My research doesn't speak to that, but I mean, people do lots of things that they don't like. People work hard even though they come home unhappy after a long day of working.

Hal Weitzman: Or refrain from drinking alcohol and eating sugary foods.

Ariel Kalil: Yeah. It would've been a lot more fun to have a donut and a glass of champagne. I'm not here to say what people should and shouldn't do, but I find it to be an interesting puzzle that parents are doing this thing because they think it's what good parents do. And yes, it's good for the kids, but also, they're unhappy and exhausted.

Hal Weitzman: So let's think about policy here because you're from the policy school, so I want to understand what that means. You say that policymakers should stop assuming that less educated moms need to be taught to enjoy time with the kids, but they're the ones who are enjoying the time with their kids.

Ariel Kalil: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. What do you mean by that? And what should they be doing instead, if not telling people to enjoy time with kids?

Yeah. It's probably a bit of a straw man for me to have said that policymakers are going around trying to boost the merit of time with children for one group versus another. I actually think that we should harness the fact that less educated parents are enjoying this time more to figure out how to solve the bottlenecks that would allow them to do the thing that they actually really love. And that's a slightly different conversation, but that's where I think policy needs to live. Put it this way, let me just walk back a little bit the idea of, well, about convincing people to like it, which is rather saying, "I don't think we should be trying to get people to change their beliefs about how they might feel when they do something about trying to convince them that were you to do this, you would feel great." I think it's more about finding out what are the behavioral bottlenecks to following through on good intentions.

Hal Weitzman: Got it. I mean, it's important to close this gap or to reduce the gap.

Ariel Kalil: Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: And reducing the gap mean that the people who are not spending as much time with the kids spend a bit more and those who are spending a lot of time with the kids spend a bit less. Is that what it means?

Ariel Kalil: That's one way of closing the gap.

Hal Weitzman: I mean, mathematically that we're closing. I'm just wondering if that's an optimal solution.

Ariel Kalil: I don't think so. I think it would be wrong for me to say that college educated mothers should stop spending. I think they shouldn't do so much that they're driving themselves crazy. I think they shouldn't... That doesn't seem obviously good to me. They're not actually spending, as I said, all that much time during any given day and we do know that time produces skill. So I would rather boost this time investment of the less educated, but let me tell you specifically what I mean and I alluded to this in the first half. No parent is spending more than let's just say 20 minutes a day. College educated parents do it most days so they get a lot of points. The real thing that gives rise to the gap that we've established is the fact that less educated mothers have many more days where zero minutes of developmentally stimulating time is happening.

So what I actually want to do is not worry so much about the intensive margin, bringing a low income parent from eight minutes to 12 minutes. If I had a limited amount of policy energy to spend, I would devote it to shifting the zero-minute parents into some group of some minute-

Hal Weitzman: Five minutes.

Ariel Kalil: Five minutes. Take five, take 12. Just make it something every day. If that happened, this gap would shrink dramatically.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Ariel Kalil's fascinating discussion. Thank you so much for spending your time. We've really enjoyed it. I don't know if you have.

Ariel Kalil: I've enjoyed it a lot-

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Good. You have to say that. Okay.

Ariel Kalil: ... much more than other things I do.

Hal Weitzman: Thank you so much for coming on the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Ariel Kalil: Thank you, Hal.

Hal Weitzman: That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. For more research, analysis and insights, visit our website, chicagobooth.edu/review. When you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research. This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening.