Trends in mothers’ parenting time by education and work from 2003 to 2017

Abstract

Scholars have been increasingly concerned about the rise in “intensive mothering” and its implications for the well-being of children and women and for inequality more broadly. These concerns, however, reflect a key assumption: that socioeconomic disparities in mothers’ parenting time observed in earlier eras have continued to grow. Using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) from 2003-2005 and 2015-2017 (n = 13, 755), we test this assumption by examining whether maternal education gaps in active time spent with children have persisted across the 2000s. We pay particular attention to the continued socioeconomic bifurcation in women’s access to full-time stable work, assessing whether changes in the education- related time gap are due to changes in who works and how much. We find that the gap in active childcare time between mothers with a college degree and those without has closed dramatically. Although some of this narrowing was driven by declines in time among collegeeducated mothers, most was driven by increases among mothers with less education. These trends, however, are observed only among mothers who were not employed full-time. Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analyses further reveal that although most of the increase in active care time among nonworking mothers with less education was attributable to behavioral change, 58% of the decline among nonworking, collegeeducated mothers was a result of sociodemographic compositional changes. These findings illuminate population- level trends in mothers’ active parenting time, provide insights into the driving factors, and help update theories, qualitative findings, and policy considerations related to mothers’ and children’s well-being.