Estimating Parental Demand for Children’s Screen Time in a Model of Family Labor Supply

Abstract

In a novel approach to model the demand for the children's screen time as the result of a parent's optimal labor-leisure choice, the study used a simple model of parental utility maximization subject to the money and time budget constraints to derive Marshallian parental demand functions for two types of child upbringing activities: time-intensive (violin lesson) and time-saving (video games). After the Slutsky decomposition, parental demand for children's screen time was shown to be similar to a Giffen good. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development data, the wage equation was first estimated based on Heckman’s two-step correction procedure. Then, the total effect of an increase in wage rate on the parental demand for screen time was empirically decomposed into the substitution effect and the income effect. The study findings indicate that the substitution effect is positive, the income effect is negative, and the negative income effect dominates the substitution effect. We add to the existing literature by showing that the empirical findings in the public health and psychology literature can be reconciled with the theoretical predictions of the standard economic labor-leisure trade-off paradigm.