TY - JOUR AU - Guryan,Jonathan AU - Hurst,Erik AU - Kearney,Melissa Schettini TI - Parental Education and Parental Time With Children JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 13993 PY - 2008 Y2 - May 2008 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13993 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13993.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Jonathan Guryan Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research 2040 Sheridan Road Evanston, IL 60208 Tel: 847/467-7144 E-Mail: j-guryan@northwestern.edu Erik Hurst Booth School of Business University of Chicago Harper Center Chicago, IL 60637 Tel: 773/834-4073 Fax: 773/702-0458 E-Mail: erik.hurst@chicagobooth.edu Melissa Schettini Kearney Department of Economics University of Maryland 3105 Tydings Hall College Park, MD 20742 Tel: 301/405-6202 E-Mail: kearney@econ.umd.edu AB - Parents invest both their material resources and their time into raising their children. Time investment in children is thought to be critical to the development of "quality" children who will become productive adults. This paper has three goals related to the examination of parental time allocated to the care of their children. First, using data from the recent American Time Use Surveys (ATUS), we highlight what we think are the most interesting, and perhaps surprising, cross sectional patterns in time spent with children by parents within the United States. Second, we interpret our results in a Beckerian framework of time allocation with a view toward establishing whether parental childcare appears to be more akin to leisure or home production. Third, we examine data from a sample of 14 countries to establish whether the patterns we observe in the United States hold across countries and within other countries. We show that both within countries and across countries there is a strong positive relationship between parental education, or earnings, and time spent with children. We then show that time spent with children does not follow patterns typical of leisure or home production, suggesting an important difference. We speculate that one reason for this positive education gradient relates to the investment aspect of time spent with children. ER -